It's a long time since there was some activity on this web page while most reports are now put on our Facebook group page. But we have some news that the DX-whole world might concern.
It's probably the last time we are guests at the PI1DX house. The owner wants to renovate the house and live there himself. A bit sad for us but we are very thankful for all those wonderful years we could DX several days from his cottage.
During the first weeks of this year we had again 2 groups of 6 guys ready to dig out the airwaves.
Here's the story of the first group that was present from 13 to 16th of January. Dave Onley arrived already the night before to avoid traffic jam in snowy weather. The rest of the group, Leo Fissers, Marc Vissers, Leen van Oeveren, Frank Thijs and me (Guido Schotmans) arrived in the early hours on Friday. We had a lot of luck with the weather while snow and heavy windy conditions were forecasted. But these didn't occur, at least not while erecting the long beverage antenna's. Besides the regular 60° Beverage antenna towards the Far East, we planned a reversible beverage antenna, 400 meters long to North-America (295°) and to the Read Sea area (115°). That reversible Beverage was really a nice experiment while on other occasions we always rolled out 400m of coax cable and going back more or less the same route with the antenna wire. This time we only needed 2 x 50m of coax. We've chosen to keep the wires separated by 13 cm. The boxes were build as per the instruction on the RemoteQTH.com website. Besides a lot of pictures, you can find schematics and a calculate Excel there. Putting up the antenna was going really quick (although some guys got stuck in the mud) compared with setting up 2 separate antennas. The 60° Beverage was put up a bit further away from the street to avoid QRM from the utility lines in the street. But we didn't realise that the far end was coming closer to the pumps next to the new dike. In the early hours of the afternoon they were really audible. But in fact it was the so called cork skrew QRM caused by static discharges in the snow and rain that were most annoying.
Look here for the antennas in Google Maps.
Note that there is also a "Erik's Bev" there, put up by the owner. Coax for that was going through te sewer under the road. At first we didn't know it was there. When comparing this antenna to out own, the latter won with a nose length. Overall performance of our RevBev was good. It might be, that a regular Beverage antenna you are able to suppress signals from the back a little bit better when taking the time to tune the terminating resistor carefully, but most of the time, you don't have time for this during a DX-pedition of just a few days especially when the weather is not cooperating.
Going through all these recorded logs is taking a lot of time. We will publish them later here. We are also actively searching for a new DXped location. We will keep you updated about our progress.
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| Marc and Leo at the terminator end of the revesible Beverage. You can see the PI1DX location in the background |
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| The feeding point box of the RevBev |
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| General RevBev view |
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| Spacer detail view |
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| Beverage to the Far East |
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| After work you deserve another beverage |
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| A fantastic record distance on medium wave 15993 Km ! Really amazing for our latitude ! |
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| The 5AN ABC Adelaid eQSL was already received the next day |
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| Marc did an effort in logging every IRIB station that popped up. |
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| The whole gang Dave, Leen, Guido, Frank and Marc |
73,
Guido Schotmans
