XRØY XR0Y Rapa Nui 2009

Weather at Rapa Nui finally stabilizes. It’s much warmer and there are less showers. Winds also start to calm down. We managed to install our spiderbeam at last. It was a very tough operation as we couldn’t take any telescopic mast with us. So we had to put the spider on top of a water pipe mast while standing at the top of a roof of our cabin. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. But after 3 hours the antenna has been risen up and working. Today we made first RTTY contacts on it and it confirmed it works very well. We must only re-check 12 & 10m elements as SWR isn’t good there yet.
Somebody in our neighborhood turns a device that produces massive QRM on top bands. It makes working on those bands extremely difficult but we get along with it. This is the reason we must ask for repeating calls several times. We hope it will be gone asap!

Easter Island is not on the top 100 most wanted list but pileups seem they don’t end at all. It’s a distant place from here and we used to assume it wouldn’t be that easy to get into the log. We are surprised with signals from Europe and interest we receive. Some important notes have been passed by our pilots. Once our operating became more regular we can pay more attention to ie. QRPs or difficult paths from here. We also adjusted our bandplan frequencies so that people with basic class licenses in the US would be able to work us. Please keep in mind our vertical for 160m is the one for 80m band as well. This is why we cannot operate on 160/80 simultaneously. We will swap these 2 bands each other day. Important: in 2 or 3 days we will announce a special window for the most difficult, antipode location in the world to work us – Central Asia. This will probably take a place on 80 meters. We also want to dedicate the same day for non NA, EU, JA areas. Stay tuned for further announcement.
An important notice regarding digital modes: please spread out when calling us in RTTY. Pileups are HUGE and it’s easier for us to pick up takers if you don’t keep on calling just 1 up. We will try some PSK one day, too.

We finally had a chance to see something of cultural heritage of the island. Yesterday we visited to unique sites related to Moai’s cult: Rano Raraku and probably the most famous Moai site – Tongariki. It’s been a really, really jaw-dropping experience. You can always see some of pics in advance before coming here, so one could expect how things look like here. But seeing those huge stone statues in person is something totally behind seeing them. You really feel a presence of something more here. Something hidden, unveiled and hard to express… Now we understand why native Rapa Nui people say that the island has its force. And landscapes are outstanding and can be hardly compared to any other place in the world. See some pictures with post along thins text!

Since we lost like 5 days of sightseeing because of very bad wx conditions, we decided we will take one day off next week to rent a car and to tour the island. It will be reserved for daylight hours only. So please understand we will disappear for like 12 hours some time in the second week of the DXpedition – we really want to see the island as the team as well. Thanks for understanding!
The following decision regarding QSL cards has been taken by Stan SQ8X. – We first expected the expedition at such a place as Rapa Nui would be quite easy to organize. When some totally unexpected issues stroke, we received a huge feedback with so positive words from the ham radio community – says XR0Y team leader Stan SQ8X. – This is why I decided our premium card will be something more than a regular, folded, multipage card. The card will be printed in 3D technology and it’s gonna be really something special. This is a way I really want to come back with after this avalanche of good vibrations sent to us from all over the world – adds Stan. Apart from the premium 3D card, even regular, bureau cards will be something more than just a card. We are also going to pick up random persons that will receive some volcanic sand or small rockies from the island. They will be collected out of nature reservations, of course – adds Stan.

On Saturday 7th Marco CE6TBN left for mainland Chile. Seems like he´s the lucky one to work us on bands, too :-)

12►

November 4, 2009

Hi,
Some more news. Since we couldn´t put the Spiderbeam up yet, we decided to make a temp vertical for 20m that replaces the 40m one during daytime hours here. It works great – I already managed to log a couple of EU stations on 20 cw.

Looks like weather starts to calm down but I can´t say anything abt its reliability…

Looks like our operating becomes more stable (no blackouts since yesterday, crossing fingers!) and thus we start to make proper planning when/where we may appear. If wx improves by Friday our time, we will give try to spider installation.

Marco CE6TBN changed his ticket reservation. He was supposed to leave today (Thursday) for Santiago. But he will leave on this Saturday Nov 7 so he will be able to operate with us a bit longer. When he comes back home he will have a great opportunity to work XR0Y :-) We heard our host Edgar (Vai Moana Hotel) saying to somebody that we are one of the best guests he´s been hosting recently ever: quoting: “they are polite, smiling and full of positive vibrations” :-)

I´m currently trying to upload a very first blog episode recorded at the island. It is a bit longer than prev. ones as I´m not sure when I´ll have another chance to upload some more It will come at much lower quality due to upload bandwidth limit at the island (29mb = 2h of uploading = very expensive…). Fortunately guys from Chilid posted it this morning and you can watch it now.

Col, you can announce following: XR0Y premium QSL card will come in 3D technology. It´s gonna be a very very attractive cards for QSL collectors – worth of waiting for! Our OQRS will be functional in a few days and it will be possible to order the special card as one of options to chose from. We will respond to card sent by buro or direct as well, of course.

I also try to record as much on video as possible. We managed to recorded a very first QSO e made on the video! Unfortunately our cams lenses get often covered with moisture due to extremely high humidity here and I must be extremely careful abt them.

SQ8X

This is a very first video recorded at Easter Island: First days of our expedition, First QSO’s and First problems.

XR0Y – part 6 – we are at Rapa Nui! from SQ8X on Vimeo.

November 3, 2009

Finally back on the air!a

Our first days at Easter Island could be compared to a series of disastrous events to make us feeling depressed and exhausted. We all never experienced such amount of bad luck issues in one take. Fortunately the 4th day of our stay finally brought some light into gloomy, rainy days at Rapa Nui. Although it is still extremely windy and rainy, our electricity network has been repaired. The reason we had such huge AC spikes at rooms was simple. There were many trees that fell down at the island in last 3 days (people living here can hardly recall similar wx conditions in the past) and broken branches fell on electricity lines leading to short circuits and interruptions. Our host called electricity service. They cut all trees that were threating AC lines. Spikes were extremely fast and strong starting from 59 Volts up to 484 Volts! There’s no power supply that could resist it. Even our host lost TV set, fridge, oven and such…

The news #1 for today is that Stan’s suitcase is back!!! All gear is in a good shape and nothing is lost. We were told that a stripe with a bar code of our flight had got sticked off the suitcase so Santiago’s stuff didn’t know where to send it to. Fortunately Stan’s report of missing goods that he left at Hanga Roa’s airport and a precise description of the suitcase helped to identify it. It was brought by LAN stuff directly to our place – fantastic! So there was a really good reason to have a glass of champaign to celebrate IC-756 PRO III, digimode interfaces and such are ready to operate So this means WE WILL operate RTTY or PSK from the island.

Once electricity has appeared in our shacks we started to assemble our Spiderbeam. Unfortunately the storm got stronger and stronger with constant heavy rainfalls. In order to install spiderbeam we must climb to the top of our bungalows. The roof is extremely slippery in such conditions making installing the spiderbeam today just impossible. If WX improves we will continue on working on it on Wednesday our local time. Fortunately all other antennas survived. They fell down 1-2x but there was no sign of damage. We also fixed 160 matching box which got flooded 1 day ago.

Conditions are in a very good shape on lower bands. EUs, JAs up to 59+20. Pileups are just amazing. Easter Island if out of the top 100 most wanted DXCC list so we didn’t expect such a hit of takers.
Unfortunately those strong storms cause lots of static noise on all lower bands and we really have to fight with QRN reaching up to +30db sometimes. That’s life…

November 4, 2009

Ahhhgggrrr! There is nothing more confusing for a ham operator than a total power blackout in a middle of a QSO. This happened abt. 2 o’clock A.M. while we were operating 160 and 40m. There was another tree falling down which fell on electricity lines. Fortunately we had sufficient time to save PC sessions to protect our logs. We were told today morning that people are working to get electricity network functional again. We just wonder for how long? WX is really, really nasty. Last night wind speed surely exceeded 100km/h. We even saw some of roof parts being destroyed by wind gusts. The lack of electricity lasts for 8 hours now…
With all those long interruptions we managed to log almost 3500 QSOs. We assume we worked this out in 24 hours in total or so.

Another good news: CE3FG Oscar decided to send us his IC-718 so we will have a 3rd station operational for SSB – but w/o PA. Well we’ve been trying to arrange it but none of PA companies replied positively to our inquires…

BP filters work just great, we don’t have any interferences between 2 stations even though they are separated just by 4 meters behind a wall. We must really thank NCDXF for loaning us those filters!

160m coil has been repaired by Leszek NI1L in very rough conditions because AC current is too weak to get the soldering iron hot enough sometimes. Fortunately it has been repaired so we can fulfill our 160 goals.

We were told that WX should improve by Friday here. Well, we’ll see.

SQ8X

Every adventure has its own beginning. Every journey has its own reasons and goals…Our expedition to Easter Island has everything: the beginning, the reasons and goals. What reasons and goals you’ll find out watching this short trailer. To watch in full screen click here.

TEASER: Journey To The Center Of The World from SQ8X on Vimeo.

We must share very difficult news about things bothering our team. At a very first moment we landed at Easter Island, Murphy has been with us and following each and every step we make. Although the island seems to be an extremely friendly place – full of people keen on helping each other, the beginning of bad luck started at the Hanga Roa’s airport when Stan’s suitcase did not make it to the island. It contained IC-756 PRO III, MicroKEYER II, CW and DIGI interfaces, paddle and ACC coax for IC-756/7000 – crucial ones to key down PA’s. It’s been actually entire Stan’s ham radio equipment which is gone now. This means we will probably not operate RTTY at all as we just can´t w/o tools. Hoping the suitcase will be found. But I personally don´t count on it AT ALL.

The team started to assemble 40m vertical at the very first hours of stay at the island. This was one of those few things that went pretty smoothly. Weather in Easter Island is very changeable and we were told we may expect tropical showers that last very short. Well, it seems we weren’t told everything about Rapa Nui’s WX. On the second day of XR0Y it started to rain. To be exact, to flood our QTH at Puna Pau settlement – 3km out of the town of Hanga Roa. It made assembling antennas impossible for many hours. In addition, it became extremely windy with wind gusts that knocked down 40m vertical already 2 times. When it stopped to rain, we had to be very quick to set up and rise 160/80 vertical asap. We made it and we are making first top band contacts as this report is written.

The loss of the equipment make the team depressed and it immediately cancelled some of important goals we wanted to achieve – being on RTTY and to have 3 stations running. We were also very tired after our long trip from Europe. Although these are things that are very disturbing to us, we managed to make almost 1200 QSOs of 6 hours of operating. Besides of severe WX conditions we continue attempts to put up the Spiderbeam antenna and additional vertical for WARC bands. We’re also experiencing issues related to low amperage of electricity network at the island. Our second IC-756 PRO III switches from time to time without any warning making us very stressed because of unexpected QRX and QSO loss. Is that a Rapa Nui’s poltergeist that bothers DXpeditioners around the world?…

All those disturbing moments are the only reason no one of the team had any chance to see anything except some of main streets in the town so far. We really hope this will change and no more issues will occur during our stay here.

OK, it’s a time to mention some positive things about our stay at Easter Island. We try to perceive all those issues as a something that happen to force us to learn and to get more and more experience for other DX-trips in the future. People of Rapa Nui really help us, even though they don’t entirely understand what our purpose of being there is. There was one surprising exception – one of the lovely ladies working in the LAN Cargo warehouse replied to us “CQ DX CQ DX” and mentioned that she met a team of ham radio dxpedition a few years ago (3G0Y). She still remembers some of ham radio slang! Today we asked our neighbors if we could loan some wooden poles for the Spiderbeam. They answered “sure” at once, and… invited us for a meal.

Hanga Roa really feels Polynesian. Most people living here are descendents of original Polynesian settlers. All flowers, trees, even grass is very exotic to us. Marco CE6TBN admits that even though he comes from Chile – and Rapa Nui is a Chilean island – he feels like visiting another country full of exotic attractions that inspire and give you that unforgettable feeling of experiencing a real adventure.

Unfortunately we don’t have any Internet access in rooms so our updates will be quite rare and with very few pictures as the only place we can access the web (3km from our QTH) has a very, very slow WIFI access (200kb of log update takes up to 5 minutes…).

Unfortunately weather still takes over our dxpedition. It is flooding us with rain constantly. Wind gusts like 80km/h. We are vy concerned abt verticals which already fell down 2-3 times. We cannot install beverage in such wx conditions unfortunately. We must wait for wx improvement, however we must be prepared weather will not improve until this weekend…

OK, time to have some fresh grilled tuna from the Pacific Ocean… :-) Just saw 2 guys riding a horse in the street drawing a smile on our faces for a while. It´s nice we don´t lose moods totally :-)

Stan SQ8X

Stan SQ8X and Zbig SP7HOV arrived to Santiago de Chile. Went out from 6° C Warsaw. 14 hours of flight. Now in +33° C and crushing sunshine! Gear is untouched and safe.

We also received information that Leszek NI1L missed the plane. But fortunately he will make to get Santiago before departure to the Island.

Pete, SQ9DIE.

UPDATE: Got MMS from Stan – “View from the Hotel 30° C and snow in peaks”.

The XROY trip begins! Watch very last entry by SQ8X Stan at his house.

XR0Y Videoblog – Part 5 from SQ8X on Vimeo.

…”coming soon! stay tuned!” promotional teaser of the expedition and the few takes about positively twist…

TEASER: Journey To The Center Of The World from SQ8X on Vimeo.