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Info
PA2CHR o DX-pedici Guatemala:
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 13:50:07 +0100 Hello all, Few days ago we arrived safe home again after the very exiting trip to Guatemala. First (nice) surprize was when we checked in at Amsterdam airport; we became the 2 last seats in business class of the KLM airplane and had a very comfortable flight to Mexico city! The next flight was from Mexico to Guatemala and unfortunately one of our suitcases was missing when arriving at Guatemala airport.. the one with: preamp box, lots of coax, tools and other essentials parts.We soon found out it was left in Amsterdam and they promised to send it with the next flight, one day later, as 'urgent and rush' material. Luckily all antenna parts and the tripod, packed in 2 golfbags, did arrive and we were able to build up the complete antenna system for 2 mtr. on Friday 23 Febr. In the afternoon the people from Guatemala airport called us with the good news: suitcase has arrived and it was on the way to us by taxi.We only needed to mount the cables and do a final check of the system now; all was OK and the first 2mtr. QSO was made with I2FAK just after midnight, Febr. 24 at 00:35 UTC. At the same time we found out there was QRM... we had lines every 100Hz all over the screen which were moving slowly up and down in frequency, so a good trace of a calling station in one period was gone the next period. Some 'fox-hunting' with a small receiver gave no results and QRM produced 4 to 12 dB. noise in most antenna directions. Fortunately the QRM disappeared sometimes and usually it was less after 22 hour local time. But we are happy with the results, a surprising amount of USA stations was worked this time, very nice! Febr. 25 was our 23cm. moonpass; we mounted the 67el. antenna in-between the 2mtr. yagi's on the same horizontal boom, added an extra preamp-box and made 27 QSO's in this moonpass.Our antennas on the flat roof were very close to 'the shack' just below in the room. This made it possible with the use of the spare lengths of coax we had to operate on 2 mtr. and 23cm. at the same time, so we did this the next days. The last weekend we took down the 2mtr. antennas and mounted the new 30el. 70cm. antenna on the boom. It can be easy controlled manually between horizontal and vertical polarization by turning the boom into the mast clamp. On Sunday 4 March we had some problems with the local internet connection and during the night we had no internet at all. Because of this some stations missed us unfortunately.Final results: - 144 MHz: 261 QSO's, with 2 x 20el. X-pol. homemade (DK7ZB design) antennas, this is about what you can expect with the local QRM we had.- 432 MHz: 42 QSO's, with a 30el. homemade (DG7YBN design) antenna, like expected, but more might have possible with better internet to announce our activity- 1296 MHz: 47 QSO's, twice the amount we expected ! with just the 67el. yagi.We are very happy nothing was broken at all and we did not forget anything, it was a real challenge for 2 people to become QRV on 3 bands. Thanks to our very good host: Hostel Las Marias in Taxisco; a perfect place to be and very cooperative. And many thanks to all our sponsors, without some help it is not possible to organize this kind of DXpeditions (we paid over 800 euro only for transport of antennas etc, hi ) All QSL's, for both calls, will be handled by Jos, but this can take up to May because of another planned trip. The logs, list of sponsors and some pictures are uploaded to QRZ, see: PA3FYC. All sponsors will receive a direct QSL.Hope to CU from another nice location/DXCC in the future, best 73's, Jos, PA3FYC - TD9FYC Chris, PA2CHR - TD9CHR Source: moon-net@mailman.pe1itr.com more: http://pa2chr.nl/News.html |