[GCARC] Tristan Da Cunha & Gough Island? Wow!

[Jim n2gxj]

This HF radio stuff offers quite the geography lesson!
Another place I'd never heard of until callsign ZD9W showed up on the HF
spotting networks!

It might be hard to make a contact, though.  I saw something today I'd
never seen before.
I went to 12M, 24.915 Mhz with WSJT set to FT8, as this is where ZD9W had
been spotted.
To my amazement, the number of stations I was decoding from all over the
world calling just this one station, ZD9W, was so many that my screen kept
scrolling well into the next cycle. Wondering how many decodes WSJT had
just presented me with, I halted the monitor and manually scrolled back to
count how many I had just decoded in that one interval.  To my amazement,
it was 57!  57 decodes of different stations, all in the same 2.8 Khz
bandwidth, trying to call just this one station.  And that's just how many
I could decode here in NJ. There were probably more!  Amazing!  But it gets
better.....

The qrz page (https://www.qrz.com/db/zd9w) led me to the expedition web
page (https://www.lral.lv/zd9w/index.html) where I read that this is a one
man operation.  One guy, Yuris YL2GM, can you imagine?  Just getting there
reads like it has been quite the adventure. Airplanes, ships, storms, and
carrying 93 Kg worth of radio equipment? (I didn't know how much that was
either - google says that is over 200 Lbs).

Crazy ham! Amazing what he is trying to do for the sake of a DX expedition!

Hope he holds up, and we get a chance to get through when things calm down
after a few days.
Have fun, and congratulations in advance to anyone who can get through
with a confirmed contact!

73,
Jim