ARLA/CLUSTER: NEWS UPDATES of PT0S - Three Stations Working

[João Gonçalves Costa]

NEWS UPDATES
Three Stations Working (11-13-2012 from AA7JV)
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Nov 13, 2012, SPSP

We now have three stations up and working. We are active from 160 to 6 meters. The weather is nice but hot and huge swells continue hammering the rocks, preventing us from getting to Cabral. One wave has completely swamped the base of our main antenna and its antenna coupler during high tide. The point to keep in mind that the antenna stands on a rock about 12 meters above the water. Working on the rocks, erecting antennas or pulling cables, is extremely difficult. We are all exhausted: sleeping 3 or 4 hours per night and working all day in the heat. Once we are done with the major construction items, we hope to get some rest (and perhaps operate a bit more sharply).

At this point we have very limited Internet access and can not post pictures yet. We hope to have something better later.

Yesterday we spent hunting for noise sources and building more RX antennas. We have found several noise sources, which we have been able to filter with some success. A big thanks goes to Jim, K9YC, who, with great foresight, has donated a big number of large ferrite cores (Fairite #31). We have now only 4 cores left, but the noise is down by 25 dB on 160 meters.

6 meters: We had a number of good contacts with South America and Southern Europe, but no major openings so far. We continue monitoring 50.110 and call CQ regularly.

Low Bands: Finally we can hear on 160! Now that we can hear, we can hear the noise! Noise on the TX antenna is around S6. We have two receive antennas: a vertical Flag of about 4 m x 4 m and a horizontal Flag of 4m x 4m. We use a pre-selector and a ultra low noise pre-amp that makes these small loop antennas usable. All three antennas are being used on receive, sometimes one, sometimes the other one is better. We have found that around SR and SS the horizontal Flag is the best, but often, the best reception is on the vertical Flag. The horizontal Flag is now only 2 meters about ground, but it is on the edge of a 25 meter cliff facing north. Today we will try to raise to 10 m, which should improve its performance. Unfortunately, overall conditions last night were poor on 160, with a lot of QSB and hollow sounding signals. 80 m was poor in the evening but has recovered by the 2300 Z. 40 meters was excellent all night.

AA7JV

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