[HCARC] St Peter & St Paul DXpedition News

[W4wj at aol.com]

Battling Noise and Weather (11-12-2012 from AA7JV)

Nov 12, 2012,  SPSP

We continue battling noise. The rocks are covered with  scientific
instruments that are powered through a number of inverters  connected
through a network encompassing the entire rock Belmonte. We  were
planning to install remote RX antennas on a distant rock (Cabral)  but
large swells have so far prevented us from being able to do so.  Winds
are down today and we hope the swells will moderate soon. As it is,  we
got some light injuries, when installing the main TX antenna on the  top
of a high section of Belmont. One moment we were looking down at  the
water from the top of a 25 foot cliff, the next moment a huge wave  was
washing over us. Scary!

The pile ups are large (and somewhat  unruly). We will try to do a better
job of maintaining them tighter, but we  do need cooperation from the
callers for that to work. Also, when we are  asking for specific regions,
we are doing that to make the pile-ups more  manageable and put more
stations into the log. Please cooperate for your own  sake. TKS.

Low Bands: We are hugely challenged on 160 m by noise that is  often 20
dB over 9. Anybody who has made us on 160 during the past two  nights,
has surely got a strong signal! The noise is not continuous, there  are
some gaps, where it is only S9 +10 dB. That is why we are requesting  up
4 sometimes, or some other split number; we are trying to catch  a
rapidly moving gap in the noise. Yesterday we installed a flag  RX
antenna on the north facing rock wall. Unfortunately, it had more  noise
than the TX antenna! That, however, is giving us some hope that we  may
be able to locate the source of the noise somewhere near the flag.  Noise
hunting will be the main program today! 80 meters was fair in  the
morning towards Europe, NA and even Japan. We will be paying  special
attention to Japan again tomorrow morning (around 0700 UTC). 40 m  was
excellent this morning, especially towards Japan. Signals were  very
strong.

We hope that our efforts at noise reduction will be  successful and soon
we will be more effective on 160m.

30 Meter  Frequencies: We will be transmitting on 10,138.5 and listening
down. This is  to due to local noise.
===

Dear All,

The first PT0S log has  arrived and I have now enabled the online
logsearch. Currently there are 533  QSOs in the database, the last one
dated 0927 UT 10 November 2012. The data  has also been uploaded to LoTW
by Tomi, HA5PT.

We hope we will get  regular log updates from now on despite the very
limited internet bandwidth  on the rocks.

73,
Chris HA5X / HA5XA /  WW1WWW