Knollehof Dxpedition Site, Veurne - Belgium - (by GuidoS): February 2022

Monday, February 14, 2022

KNL09 - Knollehof DXped 4-7 February 2022

On February 4^th our alarm clocks were again set very early to leave home for that wonderful DX-location in Flanders Fields. 8 participants had signed up but unfortunately once again, one of our active participants had to cancel his trip because he felt feverish.

Leen van Oeveren, Jan Feenstra, Frank Huyghe, Marc van Leemputten, Aart Rouw, Dave Onley and yours truly Guido Schotmans were present.

The weather forecast didn’t look good for the weekend, but we had a lot of luck while putting up the Beverage antennas. It went smoothly even though we missed one of our “workhorses”. It’s becoming more routine now and we managed to put them up with only 2 guys. Propagation conditions didn’t look very promising for paths over the poles, so no Alaska antenna was erected. We did however point our noses towards the South and rolled one out towards

Argentina

. We finished that just in time before the rain started pouring down heavily.

The other guys were busy putting up the shortwave antennas which didn’t seem to be an easy task under the windy conditions.

Sunday was the worst day with winds reaching 100 km/h. One of the masts of the longwire antenna did not survive. As you can see by the pictures, one section of the mast was very badly bent. A lot of racing around was done trying to save the other mast and checking damage. Dave walked the fields in the Flanders mud that afternoon. What an effort. All was good for now but the heavy winds persisted. But later that afternoon, rain water dripped from the ceiling on Frank Huyge’s head. The rain apparently found its way through the little cracks in the ceiling.

For food we went as usual to the local take away Chinese at Veurne. When we asked for the bill, she said I’ll print you one in Dutch while this is in Chinese. I wanted to reply with one of those Chinese station ID’s from the Medium wave but just kept it to a Ni Hao.

We had also something to celebrate. Aart got permission from home for a few days off to celebrate his birthday, in a DXing environment. However, this resulted in frequent interruptions in his activities due to phone calls with birthday wishes.

The first night of the trip seemed to be the better one. For some strange reason, Brazilians on Medium Wave are as difficult as they were easy on the Tropical Bands in the old days, but we managed to catch several Firsts that could be stored in our logbooks. It looked like we had to rename the Argentina antenna into the Brazil antenna. So maybe that antenna is a keeper for the next editions of the DX-pedition, especially while solar flux and other propagation parameters are now rising.

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Frank Huyghe had a nice homebuilt Twin Dual frequency Navtex Receiver project monitoring 518 and 490 kHz simultaneously. It worked well but some tweaking is still necessary.