I looked out the shack window and witnessed an awesome sight.
A massive rain squall was coming towards the station and it turned the sky partly pitch black – incredibly dramatic and a rare moment of excitement for me.
By the time I had changed the lens and got the camera ready the drama was gone and the squall was right over the farm…..
I snapped one photo into the darkness for good measure and this is the result – I was not able to remove the sleet drops on the lens in processing.
Skuggi the Giant Arctic Labrador and Birta the Giant Arctic Vizsla keeping watch.
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This is my artistic attempt to describe a recent near death experience. Unlike previous incidents, this was quite peaceful. :-)
These are the Panorama photos I used to make the Virtual Tour.
Today´s photos…
Today the postman brought me the QSL of DU1/JJ5MJ.
This confirms the first ever and only contact made between the Philippines and Iceland on 160 Meters.
Long live the Arctic King !
PJ4C – Bonaire 2012 by F6KOP´s Team was extremely weak on 160 Meters due to Auroral conditions when I first heard them, and when I managed to get his attention he got my call wrong as TF3M and I was unable to correct him because signals were so weak. It turns out that both TF3M and TF4M were logged as can be seen from their online log.
I continued calling and on the next QSB peak we had a solid QSO.
The first recording runs about 15 minutes and demonstrates the extremely deep QSB and has our QSO at the end – even with 30 dB of amplificaton from the Beverage antenna, PJ4C almost disappeared completely due to the deep fading – the station was mostly inaudible on my transmit antenna – the Arctic King which fires straight into a mountain in this direction :
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The second recording is edited to have only the QSO between PJ4C and TF4M.
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Even when PJ4C was the strongest, this is really only a RST 519 signal – but due to my quiet location, I can cascade two 15dB amplifiers when needed to bring signals up to readable strength.
Bonaire was a part of the Netherlands Antilles until their dissolution on 10-10-10.
The political change resulted in four new DXCC entities (Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire and Saba/Sint Eustatius)
This is entity #177 worked on Top Band.
The operator at PJ4C was Kenneth, OZIKY – I worked him the following day on SSB on17m and he mentioned the contact.
The Arctic King continues to amaze.
I have made a few additional contacts with as shown in their online logs which are updated very quickly – apparently in real-time.
PJ4C continue to churn out the contacts and I have now worked them on all bands more or less…
This is a recording of our 80m QSO:
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This is a recording of our 40m QSO:
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