DX-World

4 Responses to “Update from Rapanui Team”

1. Stan SQ8X says:

   November 4, 2009 at 16:46

   November 3, 2009

   Finally back on the air!

   Our first days at Easter Island could be compared to a series of disastrous events to make us feeling depressed and exhausted. We all never experienced such amount of bad luck issues in one take. Fortunately the 4th day of our stay finally brought some light into gloomy, rainy days at Rapa Nui. Although it is still extremely windy and rainy, our electricity network has been repaired. The reason we had such huge AC spikes at rooms was simple. There were many trees that fell down at the island in last 3 days (people living here can hardly recall similar wx conditions in the past) and broken branches fell on electricity lines leading to short circuits and interruptions. Our host called electricity service. They cut all trees that were threating AC lines. Spikes were extremely fast and strong starting from 59 Volts up to 484 Volts! There’s no power supply that could resist it. Even our host lost TV set, fridge, oven and such…

   The news #1 for today is that Stan’s suitcase is back!!! All gear is in a good shape and nothing is lost. We were told that a stripe with a bar code of our flight had got sticked off the suitcase so Santiago’s stuff didn’t know where to send it to. Fortunately Stan’s report of missing goods that he left at Hanga Roa’s airport and a precise description of the suitcase helped to identify it. It was brought by LAN stuff directly to our place – fantastic! So there was a really good reason to have a glass of champaign to celebrate IC-756 PRO III, digimode interfaces and such are ready to operate :-) So this means WE WILL operate RTTY or PSK from the island.

   Once electricity has appeared in our shacks we started to assemble our Spiderbeam. Unfortunately the storm got stronger and stronger with constant heavy rainfalls. In order to install spiderbeam we must climb to the top of our bungalows. The roof is extremely slippery in such conditions making installing the spiderbeam today just impossible. If WX improves we will continue on working on it on Wednesday our local time. Fortunately all other antennas survived. They fell down 1-2x but there was no sign of damage. We also fixed 160 matching box which got flooded 1 day ago.

   Conditions are in a very good shape on lower bands. EUs, JAs up to 59+20. Pileups are just amazing. Easter Island if out of the top 100 most wanted DXCC list so we didn’t expect such a hit of takers.
   Unfortunately those strong storms cause lots of static noise on all lower bands and we really have to fight with QRN reaching up to +30db sometimes. That’s life…

   November 4, 2009

   Ahhhgggrrr! There is nothing more confusing for a ham operator than a total power blackout in a middle of a QSO. This happened abt. 2 o’clock A.M. while we were operating 160 and 40m. There was another tree falling down which fell on electricity lines. Fortunately we had sufficient time to save PC sessions to protect our logs. We were told today morning that people are working to get electricity network functional again. We just wonder for how long? WX is really, really nasty. Last night wind speed surely exceeded 100km/h. We even saw some of roof parts being destroyed by wind gusts. The lack of electricity lasts for 8 hours now…
   With all those long interruptions we managed to log almost 3500 QSOs. We assume we worked this out in 24 hours in total or so.

   Another good news: CE3FG Oscar decided to send us his IC-718 so we will have a 3rd station operational for SSB – but w/o PA. Well we’ve been trying to arrange it but none of PA companies replied positively to our inquires…

   BP filters work just great, we don’t have any interferences between 2 stations even though they are separated just by 4 meters behind a wall. We must really thank NCDXF for loaning us those filters!

   160m coil has been repaired by Leszek NI1L in very rough conditions because AC current is too weak to get the soldering iron hot enough sometimes. Fortunately it has been repaired so we can fulfill our 160 goals.

   We were told that WX should improve by Friday here. Well, we’ll see.

   SQ8X
2. Pedro says:

   November 5, 2009 at 16:55

   Estimados colegas:
   Una pena que al programar semejante activación, se hayan olvidado incluir un GE entre los elementos a llevar para poner operativa las distintas estaciones.
   ’73s.
3. Stan SQ8X @ XR0Y says:

   November 5, 2009 at 20:54

   Hi

   Some more news.

   Since we couldn´t put the Spiderbeam up yet, we decided to make a temp vertical for 20m that replaces the 40m one during daytime hours here. It works great – I already managed to log a couple of EU stations on 20 cw.

   Looks like weather starts to calm down but I can´t say anything abt its realibitity… Looks like our operating becomes more stable (no blackouts since yesterday, crossing fingers!) and thus we start to make proper planning when/where we may appear. If wx improves by Friday our time, we will give try to spider installation.

   Marco CE6TBN changed his ticket reservation. He was supposed to leave today (Thursday) for Santiago. But he will leave on this Saturday Nov 7 so he will be able to operate with us a bit longer. When he comes back home he will have a great opportunity to work XR0Y :-)

   Stan SQ8X @ XR0Y
4. Stan SQ8X @ XR0Y says:

   November 6, 2009 at 15:54

   WX finally improves, we start to see some volcanos hovering above Hanga Roa again, they were all in clouds for last 3 days. It stopped to rain and it becomes warmer and warmer.

   We will try to install our Spiderbeam today, all is ready and we just need to cfm it will not start to be vy windy as before. 160 has been repaired and it works fine. The only touble is extremely high qrn level on 160. We are forced to receive calls 3-4 times to be sure there are no mistakes. So we hope takers understand the situation and forgive us slow speed on 160.

   We had finally entire day of being on the air yesterday and we made much more contacts. Since we couldn’t install spider before, we built a temporary 20m vertical. Surprisingly it works not bad. We managed to work a bunch of Eu with it. Now we will focus on being more stable on bands roasters. We also collect notes send by our pilots. If you have anything like expressions, ideas, suggestions regarding our operation, DO NOT send them to our addresses but to our pilots. We just don’t have time to read all mail coming now and we need important notes to be filtered out from an avalanche of emails asking ie. “I’m calling you on 20m, can you copy me?” :).

   There are some log corrections needed but they will be done/replied AFTER the DXpedition – thanks for understanding. We also confirm we DO NOT have any cluster access at shacks and looks like we won’t have it at all.

   Apart from running huge pileups we start to visit some places in spare time. The place is extremely exotic. We really enjoy speaking to native Rapa Nui people. They are very kind to us and they offer their help if needed. Their life is easy going here: no need to rush, less stress – it’s an islanders’ way of life :) And they really try to enjoy their lives here. Recently we could not understand why we often see people coming to a local disco backhorse riding. Today our host unvealed the mistery: it’s because horses know their way back home after the party ;D

   Hope to hear you in the pileups!

   Stan SQ8X @ XR0Y