Third Time's the Charm!

The uninhabited island of Bouvet in the far south Atlantic Ocean holds a special place in my heart.  As I've blogged over the past few years, Bouvet (like Burundi), has been a bit of a frustration.  One of only a handful of DXCC entities that I still need for my DXCC Honor Roll award, the remote Norwegian territory of Bouvetøya is extremely remote, difficult to access, and almost exactly on the other side of the world from me.  An attempt to mount a large DXpedition with a ship and helicopters in 2018 was a bust when the ship had engine problems and had to leave before the team was able to land on the island.  The fact that I would have missed it anyway due to my winter vacation was actually some comfort but the end result was the same: no 3Y0/B in the log.

This place is far, far away from anywhere, especially me!!

5 years later, in 2023, another group had a go.  This time they were going to get ashore on a tiny beach with rubber boats.  That one was also a flop as the beach was too rough to land all the heavy equipment.  They did manage to string up some marginal antennas and make a few contacts but despite my best efforts I never heard them at all from up here.

Undeterred, the same team (led by Ken LA7GIA and Adrian KO8SCA) regrouped for another attempt planned for February 2026.  Costing an eye-watering $1.675 million USD  (all raised by donations from the operators, ham radio clubs and institutions, and individual hams like me), this time they brought a helicopter to get onto the island. 

The 3Y0K expedition was planned to travel from South Africa by ship, land on the island by helicopter, and establish two camps at Cape Fie on the southeastern edge of the island (in the end they only set up one large camp). With generators, high-power amplifiers, and gain antennas, they would run multiple stations around the clock to offer this top ten most wanted DXCC entity to all the deserving DXers around the world, hopefully including me!

Famed DXpeditioners Ken LA7GIA and Adrian KO8SCA feature prominently in most of my recent DXCC All-Time-New-Ones

Like most years, I had a vacation planned for the whole month of February. Eager to avoid another near-miss like in 2018, I tracked their preparations carefully and made plans to repair my (again) broken antenna rotator and install whatever automation was required to operate my station remotely if necessary. Remote operation over the internet would have only required some screen sharing software and a couple of relays to switch the main DC and the 240V AC for the amplifier.  Repairing the rotator turned out to be the difficult part.  To fix the rotator would require getting practically up to the top of the tower to repair what I hoped was just a broken wire. Worst case I would just loosen the mast clamps and manually turn the antenna towards Bouvet!  January was a very busy month this year and much colder than average. When we had a short "warm spell" (a couple of days around -12C) I decided that I had to do it. I've only ever climbed my 80-foot tower twice before. Halfway up in 2017 to disconnect the crane when it was first erected and almost to the top in 2022 to fix the same problem as now, an issue with the remote rotator capacitor. Despite my previous career in the early 00's which involved lots of rigging and tower work, the older I got the less I cared to be dangling in the air off of a radio tower.  I've never had a fear of falling off, only of the tower deciding to fall down while I was attached to it!

Nevertheless, I brought my fall arrest gear home from work one afternoon, gathered my parts and wrenches, and started up the "big stick". Halfway up I stopped to catch my breath. Looking down, 40 feet is a long way to the ground. I looked up at the rotator, still 30 feet away. Big mistake! My resolve evaporated in an instant and I reversed course and climbed back down. In that moment it just was not happening. I don't like asking for favours but I knew someone with a Genie lift big enough to get me up to where I needed to be. A couple of days after my tower climbing fail I went to see my former (20 years ago!) employer. Once the small talk was out of the way I gently inquired about his lift. Turns out it had eaten a pump and was firmly out of commission with metal filings all through the hydraulics. Now what?

With life still going full throttle prior to our February trip, I was keeping tabs on the 3Y0K team.  I reached out to one of the team members I knew and, while there were no guarantees, he estimated they would be finishing the operation a day or two before I got home.  Then I found out about their ship.  By this time (last week of January) they were supposed to be on the island in only two weeks.  Their ship, however, had just completed some major repair work and was still dockside in the Canary Islands.  Some quick math told me their original schedule was rubbish and, barring some kind of calamity, I was almost certain to catch at least the tail end of the operation when I returned home at the beginning of March.  I tried to push the thoughts of Bouvet out of my mind and headed off for some sun and fun in the tropics.

I didn't have much luck with not thinking about Bouvet and I followed the operation from poolside and airport lounges as I tracked the ship slowly making its way to Cape Town to pick up the team and then heading off into the south Atlantic. By the time I got back home they had only just arrived at the island and set up the camp. I was lucky with the timing but I still had to fix my antenna rotator. With the signals from 3Y0K already filling the airwaves, I summoned the necessary gumption and headed up the tower. I resolved not to look up or down this time and just counted the 24 steps up to the rotator. Fortunately, the repair was easy and the entire operation from bottom to top and back only took about 30 minutes. With at least a full week remaining in the 3Y0K operation I was ready to go!

What makes a DXer 'Deserving'?  THIS kind of foolishness! 
It was minus 23C (about 10 below F) that day.

I really wasn't too sure what to expect for propagation.  Long haul paths like Inuvik to Bouvet Island are always sketchy at this point in the solar cycle with strong geomagnetic activity affecting HF signals at high latitudes like ours.  To make matters worse, the 3Y0K camp had a somewhat poor shot towards North America with a large mountain in the way.  Interestingly though, my signal path to Bouvet skirted along the Arctic coast for the first 4500km and the remaining 3/4 of the way was all open ocean.  I felt I had a good chance of making at least one contact on 20m, always the best band from up here, but I needn't have worried.  On the same day I fixed the rotator they were very workable that evening on 40m FT8 and I easily put them in my log for country #328!  Once the first contact was made I had hoped to get them at least on CW mode and maybe a couple of other bands.  I listened every morning and every evening for the rest of the week but despite excellent conditions on 20m they were never operating there while I was on.  I took an extended lunch hour one afternoon and came home to check the bands.  They were quite strong on 17m FT8 and I quickly worked them for my second band.  As soon as I headed back to work they finally came up on 20m.  I had left my radio on and watched the 20m spots from home being reported so after an hour I decided to bail and just come home early.  As luck would have it, they switched bands as soon as I left my office and when I got back they were already gone.  That night I floundered around in a huge pileup on 20m CW for a few hours but never got through and the day after that the bands tanked and they were gone.  Camp and antenna teardown began shortly afterwards and soon it was all over.
 

I certainly can't complain about only two contacts, I was thrilled to finally be able to work Bouvet.   Only 16% of their over 100,000 contacts were with North American stations and I know there were plenty of hams that weren't able to work them at all.  

The same team of operators is planning to go to Peter I Island next year (2027) which would be another new one for me.  Like Bouvet it is also a Norwegian remote territory in the far, far south but Peter I is almost straight south of me which is always a good thing for radio propagation.  Fingers crossed for that one!

73 and Good DX! 
John VE8EV

DX Year(s) in Review

Still not much going on with ham radio here.  I get on every once in a while when there's an opportunity to work a new one and fortunately, that still seems to happen every now and then.

Right after my last post about working FT8WW on Crozet Island I finally had another opportunity to work Burundi, my last needed country in Africa.  This has been a surprisingly long quest!  I first worked Burundi back in the nineties but the station I worked ended up having some paperwork issues and the DXCC credit was removed.  An expedition in 2017 coincided with terrible radio conditions and I just wasn't able to hear them.  Fortunately, in early 2023, another expedition went to Burundi and this time (Long live FT8 mode!) I had no trouble putting the 9U5R/9U4WX team in the log for #324.

I guess I'm starting to get used to missing Bouvet Island.  I wrote about the aborted 2018 Bouvet operation.  Big ships and helicopters (mostly fuel for big ships) requires a lot of money and that failed operation cost the operators, sponsors, and contributors (like me!) a cool half a million dollars.  Another operation to Bouvet in 2023 had a different approach.  They figured instead of helicopters they could land on a tiny beach to get ashore with all their equipment but it was not to be.  The beach ended up being too rough for landings.  In desperation, a few team members were able to swim ashore in survival suits and float some equipment in but all the big generators, amplifiers, and antennas they brought had to stay on the ship.  Suffice to say, the puny signals from their barefoot radios and wire antennas never made it this far north and I missed Bouvet AGAIN!  However, the same team is going to have another crack at it in 2026 (this time with a helicopter) and Peter I Island in 2027 which is also on my 'needed' list.  Fingers crossed third time will be the charm!

A relative newcomer to the DXCC list, Swains Island was first on the air in 2007 and then activated by a larger group of operators in 2012.  I was right in the middle of moving at that time and I missed it completely.  After a two-year delay due to the pandemic, in October 2023 another team activated Swains again and I was able to work them for #325.  Conditions were excellent at the time and I got them on every band from 160m to 10m and all three modes too!

 

I don't usually work SSB anymore but I did for this one and my QSO just happened to make it into this video of them working the 10m band. You can hear me get through at the 16:23 mark.

Last year, Marek FH4VVK was able to secure permission to operate from Glorioso Island. The previous expedition to Glorioso was FT5GA in 2009.  I recall being somewhat annoyed at the huge volume of DX spots generated for that operation and presumed at the time (almost certainly incorrectly!) that there was not a chance I'd be able to hear them so I never even tried. This time, FT4GL was on the air at the end of May/early June.  Conditions weren't great but I was able to catch them on 17m for a quick "one-and-done" to get my #326.

This past January saw a "pop-up" (not previously announced) dxpedition to Mount Athos!  The very last European entity I needed, it was only put on the air infrequently by a couple of resident monks at the Mount Athos monastery in Greece.  For hams in western North America it was high on the "Top 10" list of most-wanted entities.  It had been added to the DXCC list due to a rules quirk in the early 1970's and has since been "grandfathered" in.  Permission to operate for hams other than the resident monks was almost always refused and rivalries between the local Greek hams and the various monasteries on the mountain made sure the situation stayed that way.  Nevertheless, in January this year, a small group (including famed dxpeditioner Martii OH2BH) was able to get authority to operate and immediately went on the air.  Astonishingly, those previously mentioned rivalries managed to get the operation shut down after only a couple of days and all the operators arrested!  The team was able to demonstrate to the authorities that their authorization was valid under Greek law and they were released but were not able to continue the operation.  For a couple of months afterwards there was a lot of rumours and innuendo but surprisingly, in April the DXCC Advisory Committee approved SV1GA/A for DXCC!  It was a very short operation but luckily I had been able to catch them on two bands for my #327

Dxpeditions to three of the four more I need for DXCC Honor Roll (out of only 13 total remaining) have already been announced for the next couple of years so I'm not going anywhere yet.  Who knows what the future holds but I'm only a year and a half away from retirement.  I'll have a lot more time to play radio then!

Auroral Zone Case Study

I haven't had much time for radio these days.  At this latitude, the return of the sunspots put the kibosh on my 160m dxing and with 322 (mixed, current) DXCC entities confirmed there haven't been any workable new ones available for me.  My Station 2021 project has been languishing and even my existing station has fallen into disrepair.  My rotator quit working in 2021 and this spring I accidentally overdrove my amp and blew something.  Life was busy but sooner or later something would come along that motivated me to get back on the air.  I still followed the DX news and was keeping an eye out for any new ones coming along.  I followed (and donated to) the 3Y0J expedition to Bouvet Island, still on track for the end of January 2023, and also took note of the one-man operation heading for Crozet Island.  When Thierry F6CUK arrived on Crozet and began operating as FT8WW over the Christmas holidays I knew that it was time to get it together.

When swapping out a couple of boards in the amplifier didn't solve the problem I determined it had to be an issue with my homebrew T/R switch and attenuator.  After removing it and putting it on the bench I found that a 50 ohm resistor in the attenuator had failed.  Stands to reason that accidentally pumping 100 watts into a 30 watt resistor too often would eventually lead to problems!  I was already planning to replace one resistor in there to adjust for my new 10-watt IC-705 but I didn't have any spare non-inductive 50 ohm resistors.  Nothing in the junk box either but I did find an old splitter/combiner set that each had a 25 ohm resistor so I put them in series and voila- problem solved.  Fortunately, the antenna with the broken rotator is pointed North over the pole so I didn't have to climb the tower in the dark and 40 below, at least not until the Bouvet activation later this month. 

Once all that and all the other minor repairs and software upgrades were done it was time make a contact!  Well, that part was not going to be so easy.  FT8WW was so far only using a low wire antenna .  The active solar conditions would make signals very weak as the path between here (at 68 degrees North) and Crozet (nearly antipodal from here) travels straight over the North pole (which means passing through the aurora TWICE) and then all the way down the other side of the world.  At least we marginally shared a grey line between midnight zulu and 0200z.  That would be the best time to try.

The entire eastern hemisphere is straight over the pole from here and Crozet is no exception.

Conditions were lousy all week.  The elevated X-ray Flux attenuates signals like crazy up here!

I was in the shack every evening watching for him.  He was operating mostly FT8 digital mode and alternating between the 30m band and the 20m band.  FT8 is great for making contact with weak signals but it is strongly affected by the multipathing and phase shifting from the aurora.  The sun was spitting out B and C-class solar flares every few hours.  The aurora was blazing overhead and the absorption was extremely high.  Most of the time I could only decode a few of the hundreds of other stations calling FT8WW.  You could even see on the waterfall display how the geomagnetic activity messed with the signals.  Instead of straight lines on the scope they would often "bend" in the middle like digital macaroni.  Occasionally I would see a weak trace on the scope that I assumed was FT8WW but the horrible conditions prevented successful decoding.  I could see the KL7 stations in Alaska calling and giving him good signal reports but even stations only a few hundred miles south of here have a path to Crozet that manages to skirt the edge of the auroral oval and follows the grey line perfectly.

Nevertheless, I persevered. Finally, on New Year's Eve, FT8WW was on 30m around 0100z and as I watched the signals all started to get a bit stronger.  Then I finally got ONE decode of FT8WW, only -18dB.  Three minutes later I got another decode, this time -15dB.  I started calling him.  4 periods (2 minutes) later he decoded again, this time I got both of his streams (he was using MSHV and running two carriers).  Then nothing again for another 5 minutes.  I could SEE his transmissions on the display but they just weren't decoding.  Finally, I got another decode and it was the one I wanted to see. He was answering me!  I acknowledged my report (sent RR73) and right away received an RR73 from him.  Done and done.  And that was it!  I didn't get any more decodes after that.  I only received a total of 7 transmissions from him and between calling and answering I transmitted 13 times over six minutes.  

So what actually happened in that very short time span?  Here is what I think was going on.  The first thing was the auroral oval.  Here is the NOAA Ovation forecast for that period around 0100z:

You can see that there is a gap in the oval around solar noon.  I was just inside the gap which probably helped to get his signal down to me.  The path between us (marked in red) also crossed a slightly narrower auroral band on the other side of the pole.

Shooting through the gap helped but the real answer was the solar wind.  Like earthly wind, it "blows" fast or slow depending on the level of solar activity.  The stronger the solar wind the worse the space weather is for HF radio in the polar regions.  And again like the earthly wind, it also has "gusts" but these variations aren't changes in the speed.  They are changes in the magnetic polarity.  In the Northern auroral zone, the more negative the magnetic polarity the stronger the geomagnetic badness is.  Here is the NOAA real-time solar wind plot for the time of my contact:

You can see right at the time I started getting a few decodes from FT8WW, the magnetic polarity (Bz) of the solar wind peaked in the positive direction which momentarily eased the distortion from the electromagnetism.  This effect is especially pronounced on the lower HF bands.  Our contact was on the 30m band which tends to share characteristics of both the lower and higher bands.

#323 finally in the log!

As an aside, for those radio Luddites out there, CW transmissions are also affected by the geomagnetic field here in the same way.  For anything faster than about 15 words-per-minute, the multipath distortion makes CW sound like a weak RTTY signal.  The differences between dots and dashes is virtually indistinguishable.  Think about that the next time you're in the ARRL CW Sweepstakes looking for that NT multiplier but blasting away with the keyer set at 30wpm!

Next up at the end of January is a two-fer: Bouvet Island and Burundi, both of which I have been waiting for a chance at for a long time!  The last attempt at both of those did not end well but I have a feeling that 2023 is going to be the year they finally make it into the log.  Fingers crossed!

Station 2021

Looking only at the content of this blog you might think there was not much going on here recently.  That is true to a degree.  I was working 160m pretty regularly late last year and recently I've managed to get on the 17m and 30m bands enough to confirm DXCC on both.  That just leaves 12m and 160m to complete 9-Band DXCC.  I still need 9 more all-time-new-ones on any band to make DXCC Honor Roll but that's just a waiting game.  Only the much-cursed Burundi is not at the top of the most-wanted list but still not confirmed in my log.  It will likely be years before the rest of the rarest-of-the-rare are ever on the air at all.  The time has come, however, to make some big changes.

Somewhat by design and some by coincidence, I have always changed things up along with the progress of the 11-year solar cycle.  I built my first high-performance HF station for contesting and DXing back in 2013 at the beginning of Cycle 24.  As the cycle began to wane in 2017 I optimized the station for working the lower HF bands and I cruised through the sunspot minimum over the past few years without skipping a beat, earning the 5-Band DXCC award and DXCC Challenge.  Now that the sun is starting to awaken again it is time to make changes.

I've been dreaming of building a 2m EME station for 25 years now.  I've built huge imaginary antenna arrays in my head and even started building a tube-type VHF kilowatt amplifier once (it was a fail).  Back in 2015 I started to get more serious about the whole idea.  I completed the hardware and software for the azimuth/elevation tracking equipment.  I found W6PQL's web page and started planning for a solid-state LDMOS amplifier.  Most importantly, I started collecting all the little bits and pieces that I would need to put everything together.  I found a 2000W 50V power supply on eBay for $30.  I scavenged coaxial relays, hardline cable and connectors, aluminum tubing and rod for antennas, and a huge assortment of other odds-and-ends that will all have their place in the final product.  I'm even planning to repurpose the 50W UHF amplifier module that I build a few years ago.

For HF I had wanted to put up my DMX tower and the TH6DXX again but concluded that a more sensible option would be a smaller tower with a 10/12m duoband yagi (built from old TH3JRS parts) and a re-worked 6m yagi.  I really hadn't given too much thought to six meters but then I had a good idea for a small linear amplifier to use on that band and with the optimized yagi it should be good for making EME contacts on the horizon (at least with the "big guns") and working the infrequent band openings, possibly even over the north pole.

In the past my plans had always included my venerable Kenwood TS-2000.  It was the only radio I owned with VHF/UHF capabilities but it had long ago succumbed to the endemic TS-2000 filters failure, ostensibly caused by overheating the ceramic filters when production first changed to lead-free solder.  A couple of years ago however, I was considering a new radio to put in my boat and came across the first information about the then-unreleased Icom IC-705.  It was only a 10 watt QRP radio but I thought that maybe with some outboard amplifiers it might be okay for marine use.  The more I thought about that the more I realized that I'd rather have the IC-705 in the shack and just fix the old Kenwood to use in the boat.  I already had an HF amplifier that only required 50mW drive power and a VHF LDMOS amplifier would likewise require only a few watts of drive.  The 705 also boasted an astonishing array of features like a direct-sampling DSP receiver, touch screen, bluetooth, GPS, DStar, and on and on and on.  The only thing it lacked was full-duplex cross-band receive which I required for working satellites.  That was easily fixed by including a dedicated SDR receiver in my plans.  The FunCube Dongle Pro+ that I already had would work perfectly for this.

Over the past few months I got more serious about getting this all done THIS YEAR.  I relentlessly completed all the detailed design drawings for the controls, feedlines, and antennas.  The concept is a simplified design that will make everything happen with the flexibility to work HF and 6m, satellite, and 2m EME, provide high performance and low-loss, while also protecting the expensive amplifier components.  After innumerable iterations and revisions, all the details have now been finalized and I have almost completed obtaining all the remaining parts required to make everything happen.  Only the IC-705 is waiting to join the party.

This is how it will all go together.  Blue is RF and red is control lines.  I'm very excited to finally get on with the new build and look forward to blogging about all the individual elements as they come together.  Stay tuned!

DX Year in Review

Shortly after I wrote my last annual 'DX Year' post in early 2020, things changed pretty fast once all the travel restrictions came into effect from the global pandemic.  Nevertheless, despite the lack of DXpeditions, in November I finally managed to break my two year dry spell and worked JX2US on Jan Mayen Island for an all-time new one #322.

Despite its relative proximity to me, there has not been much activity from Jan Mayen in the last 10 years and I somehow managed to miss every dxpedition and the occasional operator at the Norwegian weather station there.  Ken LA7GIA put in a brief appearance (only a couple of hours) from there in 2019 but was planning a much larger operation for 2021.  Then Eric, LA2US, was posted to the island around the same time the dxpedition was announced, and eventually it was cancelled when Eric announced his intention to make an effort to fulfill the needs of DXers such as myself (which he did admirably!).  I never did catch him on 160m as I had hoped but I did manage a few contacts on 40m and 60m during his time there.

In early February I started to notice that I had amassed almost 1000 DXCC Challenge points and a little push was all it took to confirm enough on LoTW to qualify for the award.  A couple of years ago I had passed on the new plastic 5-Band DXCC Plaque (I ended up just getting the certificate and making my own 'old-school' plaque) but the new plastic DXCC Challenge plaque looks pretty nice hanging on the wall of the shack here.

 

I spent a lot of time on 160m this season (September through December) and picked up a dozen new ones there to bring my total up to 70 confirmed on that band.  Those four months are really the only productive ones for DXing on 160m from here.  I'm not sure why but long-distance 160m propagation always tanks right after the new year even though we still have lots of dark hours left.  It will be interesting to see what happens next season with the increasing solar activity.  I'm not expecting conditions to be very good on Top Band from under a mostly disturbed auroral oval. 

That said, in keeping with the start of the new solar cycle I'm already making plans for higher bands and some other interesting activities.  Stay tuned!

73

Here It Comes!

On November 16th, 2020 the reported sunspot number was zero.  Since then it has rocketed up to an astonishing 83 as of November 29th.  The sunspot number wasn't forecast to hit that level until 2023 but, ready or not, here it comes: solar cycle 25.  The starting date of a solar cycle is actually determined retroactively and a few months ago it was determined that cycle 25 really began a year ago in December 2019.  For hams, though, the real beginning of a new cycle is when the solar flux starts getting high enough for the upper HF bands to open up and starts generating stronger signals than we are used to on the middle bands.  I had noticed quite a few times recently that the 12m band was open, mostly to the US west coast and Asia.  Last Friday, however, even 10m was open and I made my first new contacts on that band since 2015.  Just for fun, I even made a series of QSOs that started on 10m and progressed through each band all the way down to 160m (I didn't have any luck on 60m, even though I was hearing a few weak European stations).  A couple of days before that I had worked a guy in Washington state on 40m FT8, off the back of my beam, only running driver power (15 watts) and I got a report from him of +23dB.  I was seeing him at +31!!  I can see how the effectiveness of the FT8 mode may soon become somewhat degraded as more and more powerful signals are crammed into such a tiny sliver of spectrum on each band.  Some expansion of the FT8 sub bands seems very likely in the coming years.

Ol' Sol has unexpectedly become quite active!

Its not all fun and games, though.  The more active the sun becomes, the more it tends to disrupt propagation for high-latitude stations like mine.  The more active part of the cycle is marked with lots of minor disturbances that stir up the aurora and generally degrade propagation.  Now the increased solar flux is making for stronger signals that can more easily break through the disturbed conditions.  On days when the absorption is low and the flux is high (like last Friday) radio conditions here can be outstanding.  There is also an increase in major disturbances like the little M-class solar flare that we saw this past weekend. I saw icons and colors on my propagation monitoring software that I haven't seen for years as the D-layer absorption spiked here and both the x-ray flux and proton flux climbed off the bottom of the scales where they've generally been sitting for the past few years.  I blogged about how this tends to degrade the signals here back at the beginning of the last cycle and the details haven't changed at all.  See here and here.  An active sun makes for some very interesting effects up here in the polar region.

Colorful, isn't it?  :(

When the last solar cycle was winding down in 2015 I put a lot of effort into getting my station ready for the sunspot minimum and it was well worth it. I received my 5-Band DXCC award by finally working the necessary number on 80m and I'm even up to 72 countries worked to date on the 160m band.  Now, with the changing of the radio seasons upon us, I'm thinking about putting up antennas for the high bands again.  I don't know yet how the coming of the new maximum will change my operating habits but it always has before.  I don't expect that this time will be any different...