Last Sunday my nephew and I put up the K9AY loop. A temporary setup for testing purposes only. Apart from a light sunburn, all went well. Except I discovered the PVC sticks I bought in a garden supplies store are in fact metal sticks covered with a layer of PVC. I use these as corner supports for the wires. I did some initial testing at about 15.00 utc on all HF bands between 7 MHz and 28 MHz. Not really the targeted bands for such a loop nor the right time. The plan was to test at night when the Low Bands would show some life. But around 19.30 the sky began to darken and roar. So I took the wires down and disconnected all coaxes. Glad I did: half an hour later we had a severe T-storm with nearby lightning strikes.

So further testing is in order when I find a more permanent place to put it down. I must say that the loop seems to hear as well as any TX antenna here on the higher bands. But I only heard signals in a 1000 km radius. Directivity wasn't great but that might be due to the proximity of the signals or to the corner supports that turn out to be conductive after all. I should look for strong bamboo sticks and find a way to jam them into the ground without breaking them. The setup works so I only need to tweak it and do some serious nighttime testing.

Speaking of antennas: I found a REALLY interesting article on 4SQ antennas on the RRDXA website (link here). It's written by DF6QV who designed the 4 square arrays used on TS7N, 5A7A and more recently VP6DX. Reading the article makes me (and you?) dream of big 80m arrays. My garden is a tidbit too small for that. And it would only be blown over by the storm on every contest weekend. As a coincidence I received my VP6DX QSL card in the mail today. In fact it is not quite a card - it's a real 16 page booklet the size of a QSL card. It's full with descriptions of the setup and the expedition in general with a lot of nice color pictures. Great signals, great expedition, great QSL!

Normal life here is on a break. My niece and nephew are here for their annual holiday visit which means there is time for some radio. Not too late or too early though because the shack is also a sleeping room for the moment. With an extra pair of hands available eager to turn the winch we tilted the tower over this week. Time to realign the WARC dipole over the tribander's boom. They got shifted in one of the storms earlier this year. I took the opportunity to do a visual check of all elements of the antenna system. It's been 15 months since I last checked everything up there. All nuts and bolts still tight, weatherproofing seemed OK, lubricated the tower's moving elements. I found a loose nut on the bolt of one of the 'roller thingies' that makes the inner section of the tower glide smoothly. In fact it was a nut / counternut combination. The nut combo was tight alright but it wasn't screwed against the plate so the 'roller thingy' could slide over the bolt that serves as a shaft. Gee this is hard to describe. Should have taken a picture.

When the tower was vertical again my tower-intern insisted on cranking it up. And so he did. I let it there from Tuesday to Friday. In the mean time I checked daytime propagation with about 300 QSO. Oh solar spots, where art thou? I really like casual DXing in between contests but -and I keep coming back to this- this is very boring. I guess most people feel the same and don't bother to get on the air awaiting cycle 24 solar spots. Of course the W's and JA's suffer the same disease: not getting out of their own continent. Hang in there friends. I hope we'll soon meet again above 18 MHz.

WX forecast mentions heavy T-storms the coming days, so on Friday I had the winching intern slide the tower down and I disconnected all cables before they enter the house. While I am typing this the sky is roaring. This weekend is IOTA contest. Last time I checked I wasn't attributed an IOTA reference so why bother? A real IOTA activation is still unchecked on my 'try at least once'-list though.

I've said it before (read it here) and I'll say it again: contesting without UA from here would be very boring especially with the current propagation. Russia hosts the next WRTC in 2010 and put up a dry run contest yesterday to test the operation's sites (near Moscow) and log checking system. When I read the announcement on Radio-Sport.net I decided to give it a go. Only four bands (10 > 40) and only lasting 8 hours. Like usual 'CW only' was my preferred category. I took an extended lunch break and put in about 6 hours ending up with almost 550 QSO. I had a couple of fast hours on 20m (120-130 rates), one 120 hr on 15m and the average rate got very low by trying 10m. I didn't try 40m since it was broad daylight and the wind was 5 Bft so going outside to put up an antenna wasn't quite appealing. Everyone could work everyone and there was plenty of activity. Especially when you consider this was a special contest outside of the regular schedule and there hasn't been made a lot of promotion.

You could tell that by the reports (ITU zone). Some sent their CQ zone, others sent a serial. A German op sent '5NN 061' and I asked for his ITU zone. OK no problem: '5NN 14'. Nonono, 'ITU ITU ZONE - DL IS 28 28 BK'. 'ITU ZONE?'. So what do you do in this case? Change his serial to his ITU zone? Apparently the guy made over 60 QSOs giving a serial number. The bozos on the CQ Contest reflector always state that 'you log what is sent'. So let's say I log '061' (which I did). Scenario 1: he doesn't submit his log. Log checkers say: DL = ITU 28 so my QSO is wrong. Or then the guy realizes he needs to change his serial numbers to a fixed zone report. I'm screwed again!

It was a lot of fun and I'm sure the UA guys with their R33-prefixes will have knocked themselves out. At least the top scorers (see results). They averaged 150 QSO / hour over the 8 hour stretch. I hope we'll get some feedback soon about the site construction (tower / antennas) and the observations. I had a great time and it was nice to play with the K3 in a contest. That rig really is great!

The summer here continues to disappoint us but nevertheless I managed to prepare a 7m high support for the K9AY RX loop. The support is made of the remains of 3 fiber glass poles that cracked under the ON5ZO workload. I also collected all mounting hardware including a ground rod. I started constructing the relay box somewhere in 2002 only to realize the TS-850 does not have a RX input and I wanted to avoid yet another relay box for RX/TX switching. So the K9AY box was put on hold. Last year I bought a second hand commercial switching / termination unit because I knew the unfinished project would remain in the drawer. Earlier this week I opened the box and saw at least 3 poor soldering points. I hope the thing works better than it's soldered!

Yesterday I did some woodwork. It can't always be drilling aluminum or solder copper. I put my band decoder on top of my rigs. That's cool with the TS-850 which is flat but I use the K3's bail so the backside of the rig slopes down. This causes the band decoder to slide down to the back of the rig where it covers the amp module's ventilation holes. So I made a small wooden shelf to put over the rig where the band decoder now resides in a flat position. By the way: the current economical lull shows in the DYI stores. In the past you could ask and get scrap pieces of wood for free. Leftovers from sawing big panels. Since I only needed a small piece the size of my K3 that matches the desk's design, I wanted to go the free leftover route. Those times are gone. The policy now is to buy the whole panel and since you paid for it, you take the leftovers with you. As a result beggars like me are forced to buy a whole panel since there are no more scrap pieces. I refused to buy a panel only to use 5% of the surface. So I made my little shelf with a simple smooth wooden plank. It does not match the desk's surface color 100% but it's close enough.

Contest results, anyone? Results are out for the 2007 CW Oceania DX Contest. OQ5M is country leader! Yours truly is also the only Belgian log submitted. The sweet thing for me is that I made 5 QSO with ZL on 80m and some VK/ZL on 40m. 5 ZL's on 80 in a short time span...

The ARRL managed to publish the ARRL DX CW 2008 results in less than 5 months. I only did this one very casual (see blog entry). I finished #11 world so I missed seeing my call in QST. That's still good for #8 in EU for SOAB Assisted. With a serious effort Top 5 should be possible. So if in 2009 the WX cooperates, my K9AY loop is up and running and I'll have the time to play... I do not mention the propagation factor. Better SFI makes for better competitor's scores too.

About conditions: still no luck. This is what K7RA wrote recently in the ARRL Propagation Bulletin: "The weeks seem to drag on with no sunspots in sight... [snip]... I have no idea when this will turn around. Cycle 23 seems to be unusually long.". Yes indeed! But then again NASA tells us to stay calm and keep the faith (see link). Only time will tell.

This evolves into a blog about a contester that does not seem to contest... After RDXC and WPX CW and some smaller contests I also let IARU go by. And while I made a few hundred QSO in the other two, I didn't even touch a button in the shack this weekend. We put new fencing around the garden last week and that took longer than anticipated due to unforeseen circumstances. The weather to name but one. We had to take shelter quite a few times. The current season is called summer but the WX doesn't show. Not at all! Strong winds and heavy showers. The job got done Thursday so I could set up the station on Friday but that was yet another windy day with lots of rain and I really didn't want to get wet again. I was tired and not motivated. WX cleared a bit late Friday night but then there was a local T-storm which prevented me from setting up and the forecast predicted more of the same on Saturday morning. So I decided NOT to participate in the IARU contest and the XYL agreed to go on a trip to the North Sea coast on Saturday. WX was said to be better there and it would clear up from west to east.

Saturday morning it was more of the same: rain and wind. While waiting for the train on the platform, I received a TXT message on my cell phone from OT1A. He actually was setting up for the contest and got all wet. Yes indeed: another shower accompanied by strong gusts was upon us. I think I made the right decision. On the beach it was quite sunny yet cold and a very strong wind. We arrived back in our home town and got out of the train at 9PM local and it was a blue sky with absolutely NO wind. That was a painful moment. Should I have set up Saturday morning? Probably not as experience tells me that setting up a few hours before the contest starts makes Murphy show up. So you end up in the chair 5 minutes before the start all stressed out and tired before making the first QSO.

When I got home I looked at the DX cluster and saw mostly EU-EU spots. Crappy conditions were confirmed by ON4BHQ / OQ4B by MSN. Wim was working the bands but did not report sudden magical propagation. I looked up spots for OT1A but they were few and not really DX. No loss then and I sent a mail to ON4WW to see if he was home on Sunday. He kindly brought me some stuff from the Friedrichshafen ham fair that I still had to pick up. So on Sunday I headed over to Mark's place and we had a nice long chat about ham radio in all his aspects. I really enjoyed the ham talk and seeing his low band antennas again gave some ideas.

Then I decided to make a detour and make a surprise visit to OT1A and see how well he did. My ETA there was about when the contest ended. I entered his shack with less than 15 minutes to go. My presence ruled out a post contest nap and once again I had an enjoyable ham radio chat. On my way home I called local ham ON4AFU who still has my UBA contest awards he brought from a UBA meeting. Bummer, he wasn't home so ham talk #3 got delayed until Monday (tomorrow). That gives me the time to find two nails to put my trophies on the wall...

It's been two weeks since my last posting. Not a lot happened on the ham front.

I sold one of my TS-850 transceivers. I got a fair price and the buyer bought a bargain I think. I made a small test setup and he was happy. He said he owns 10 HF rigs and mine will be #11 and his second TS-850. If I decide to replace the other TS-850, I hope it'll be as easy to get a correct price for it and sell it as fast as this one.

I found a buyer for the microHAM cable that got replaced by a K3 cable. I sold it through the RRDXA mailing list. No market for that stuff in Belgium. Another deal that pleases buyer as well as seller.

Last week (Tuesday June 24) I got home and cranked up the tower one level. With the 6m hentenna (no typo) about 15m high I was able to work a few stations in CW. First QSO was OY. Then an ON. Some EA, F, DL, G etc with modest signals. So either the hentenna is not a miraculous antenna or the 6m opening that evening was only so-so. I guess some of both. I need to get used to sending the grid square. I remember that from my VHF DX days. Before passing the CW test I only had access to VHF so exchanging locators was daily business. I must admit I don't care about grids but of course on VHF... I don't think I'll get hooked on 6m soon. Magic band? I'd like to call it a tragic band to quote KH2D.

So I ended up on 30m again. A band that never lets you down. A dozen W's and a VK. No JA though and lots of EU. The next day I woke up and found 30m empty as well as 20m. Looking outside it was clear the WX was tilting over to bad. I thought it was going to rain with T-storms. So I lowered the tower again. I didn't make a QSO since. What I managed to do was a little bookkeeping in my logs and upload to eQSL and LotW. I really need to get that box of incoming QSL cards that has been waiting for me for almost 6 months now. I am not looking forward to sorting and processing those. It'll be a whole lot.

Next week is IARU. WX forecast doesn't promise nice weather to set up all the antennas on Friday. Last year was excellent WX the days before and after so I could crank up the tower and install all antennas in a relax summer pace and enjoy some DX as well. Regrets, I had a few, but then again... I'm starting to regret I blew up the PJ2 deal...