Here
finally is our report about the WAL22 DXpedition that took place from 10 to 12 October 2014.
Putting up
the antennas was done very quickly and everything worked immediately without
any issues. Besides that, the weather was fine, so we didn’t have to compete
with the mud on the fields as last year. This time we had our usual 400 metres
long 60° beverage antenna to the Far East and the 300° antenna to North America which 350 metres long. As extras we had a beverage at 100° pointing
to India/Pakistan and one to South America at
240°. And for sneaking into the higher frequencies, we had an ALA-1530. The
gigantic beam antennas at the listening site were left alone once again as they
don’t bring much for our kind of listening habit which is mainly scanning the
lower bands and in particular the Medium Wave broadcast band.
Conditions
were at first sight not superb but when going through the recordings, it became
clear that they delivered a lot of First heard stations. Stations on the medium
wave band where fading away often and others where popping up for a short time.
That is where SDR receivers with recording capabilities become handy. In such
circumstances, it would have been hectic in the old days of analogue radio and
would cause a lot of stress because you didn’t know were to listen first. And
now we are recording continuously while disk space is becoming cheaper.
Furthermore, if we had recorded only ToH and BoH, the number of catches would
be way down.
In the mean
time, most Perseus SDR users became convinced that the Jaguar specialised
Medium Wave Monitoring software is the way to go to analyse the recordings. It
happens often the that you hear f.e. an English or Spanish speaking station
fading away and another station in the same language becomes audible. But it is
often thought that this is just the same station coming in again. Jaguar is in
most cases the solution to distinguish both. The following picture makes this
clear. If you are interested in Jaguar visit the now a bit outdated
website here.
Jaguar offers now much more than mentioned there. But you have to keep in mind that
there is a learning curve and you have to keep close track on the changes,
sometimes even weekly.
Although the signals of Rebelde and R Bayamo are only separated by 8.8 Hz, Jaguar makes it clear when their signal is better. Listen here for Rebelde ande here for Bayamo.
The results
from the Far East were once again not as
outstanding as a few years ago. Still not a single Japanese station was heard.
On the other hand there were a few quite nice logs from less further away locations
that were never heard before, like Radio Birinchi from Kyrgyzstan on 612 kHz and Qazaq Radio on 1341
kHz from Kazakhstan.
Radio Pakistan,
a station that was already heard previously on a few frequencies was now also
discovered on 585, 1152 and 1260 kHz, most of them with good strength. And All
India Radio was for the first time heard on 819 and 1044 kHz. Amongst the US
and Canadian first timers where the French language CJMS Saint-Constant QC on
1040, 570 CFCB Corner Brook NL and 570 WSYR Syracuse NY, 1230 WCMC Wildwood NJ ,
1270 WTSN Dover NH , 1290 WRNI Providence RI , 1290 KIVY Crockett TX , 1320 WLQY
Hollywood FL , 1380 WKJV Asheville NC, 1600 WAOS Austell GA. So we are quite
happy with the result of this DX-pedition.
Especially while we learned afterwards that propagation was totally
collapsing for almost the all of the remaining part of the year.
The
complete log can be downloaded here.
