A few pictures from Walsoorden

The surrounding : on the far left you see the DXing house

The South-American beverage. In the background you see some participants working on the antennas. And in the far background machines are working on a now dike.

Overview of several beverage antennas

The ALA 1530 used for SW frequencies

Dave connecting his SDR-receiver to the antenna splitters

Leo needs a bit of fitness practice before hitting the bands

The splitters once again

Marc's Antenna Switch for the Beverages

The Beverages

Guido checking the performance of the antennas

Leo is multitasking. Navtex and SW DXing

Walsoorden mosquitoes to make the Nordic and Finnish DX feeling complete.

Our DX-location

Our spiritual leader and masquot John Plimmer was also once again present.

Day 4 - the final one

Monday was the last day of our DX trip and we decided to leave early to avoid the Antwerp traffic jam. Everything was packed by 11:30 local time.

During sunrise we noticed stations were fluctuating up and down at the lower end op the band. 570 didn't know to decide if it would R Reloj let through or an English speaking one. 580 gave good CFRA reception and on 590 VOCM was almost not present. That might be a channel to watch for other stations.

It was once again nice to have a stay at Erik's DX house were we can put up such long beverage antennas that almost nobody in our region is able to do. And sitting together with other right minded DXers is always fun.

Thanks to everybody that did take part and also thanks to our followers.  

In the next few weeks more about our tinned catches will become available here.

Our spiritual inspirer John Plimmer was there to encourage us.

Day 3

Conditions on Sat-Sun night were slightly better.  Yesterday there was almost no 590 VOCM, but this time they were strong now and than giving signals like a local. Also 930 CJYQ (not CFBC), 1130, 1510 were on. A bit later 1290 Pueto Cabello popped up. 1540 kHz gave strong signals with English talk and kind of Hindi songs in the background (CHIN?)

Morning condition opened a window to Central America. XEAI 1470 Radio Fórmula, Mexico with full ID at 0712UTC and 0730 and R 2000 on 1500 kHz at 0715.

The afternoon was once again very disappointing. Noise levels were high and a lot of channels were just empty. Even RTL 1440 was suffering from severe fading. But we had a short 2 minutes opening to VOA Thailand 1575 kHz at 1448 UTC.

Christoph Ratzer from Austria informed us that he had at least some readable reception from Solomon Islands Bc Corp on 5020 kHz. We were only able to see a spike on our SDR screens. That inspired us to put up an extra beverage of only 120 meters pointing to the Solomons. Hmm, it started to rain and snow at that moment but we nobody could stop us from doing that. Unfortunately, all this was to no avail. Both antenna's, the 400 and the 60 m beverage gave just a spike. But at least Dave heard a few nice Spanish MW stations on it. :-)

Early evening conditions turned up to be good again for a while until everything faded down again.
We heard some bits and pieces of Chinese on 1350 kHz coming over the Italian "I am Radio" pirate. 
On the North America antenna we had Noti Uno on 1280 and later VSB2 Hamilton, Bermuda.

These are all not the most exciting catches but we are glad to have them while we were afraid conditions would be worse and of course there is still a lot of work to do in analysing the recorded files.

Day 2

Unfortunately conditions where quite dull during last night. It took some time before trans-Atlantic propagation finally took up a bit. Nothing was heard between 20:00 and 21:30 while usually we can hear the Newfoundland stations in that time slot.  Afterwards the regular ones like CBI 1140, WMEX 1510 and CFBC 930 delivered nice signals for a while. Also WDEA 1370, CBG 1400. Furthermore a few X-band stations were heard too, but afterwards, everything deteriorated again and we went to bed. Jaguar software shows a max J index of 17 around 0220 but listening at that time delivered not really anything special. During sunset, conditions stayed on the dull side. 

Today we have some of the regular Asians like RTI ILoveMusic 1557, AIR Rajkot 1071, AIR Magra 1134. We hoped to squeeze out something new on the frequencies that were vacated by NDR, Germany earlier this week but until now without success.
Where are the times we heard several Japanese stations in the afternoon...

Jaguar's Yas log screen showing activity on trans Atlantic channels

WAL23 kick off

We are up and running. We have beverage antennas to the Far East 60°, India 90°, South America 240° and North America 290°. We expected a very muddy field but the owner had put winter wheat on it and was kind enough to make no objections to trespass the field. Furthermore the weather was fine. Unfortunately we had an issue finding a bad connection in the extremely long coax for the south American beverage and our PMR devices didn't reach far enough to stay in contact. But after all it works now. The only thing we need now is better conditions.

And off course, after running on and off a lot of times along the beverages, we need some food. A terrific Chinese meal brought by Marc.

Dave, Marc and Guido

Marc, Guido and Leo

One day to go for WAL23

One day to go. In the mean time the rain is pooring down a lot. Let's hope we don't need this one ot put up the beverage antennas.

WAL23

WAL23 coming up in a week from now ! Let's hope the propagation finally changes for the better. We will be there on 16-17-18 and 19 January.