XRØY XR0Y Rapa Nui 2009

The 4th & 5th Day on the Island

Wednesday, 04.11.2009 · 23:47 UTC

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