News Update from the VK9CI Team
The team is now fully established on the island although their Internet communications are very limited. When you do hear us please spot us as we cant easily let people know when and where we are on otherwise.
Lee and Adrian have managed to send the following photos and notes today to give you an idea of the arrangements and the station out on Cocos Keeling Island.
Arrival
We landed on Cocos Keeling Island on Tuesday having flown from Christmas Island that afternoon. The first thing we have noticed is that its windy…a constant 20-30 knot wind from the south east – 25 hours a day so far….
On the ground we were met by Peter Robinson who was keen to sit for his amateur radio licence. After dinner the first night, Lee VK3GK set off with him to his home where he conducted a remote assessment with Ron VK2DQ via Skype. After a few internet issues, we now have a new resident ham on Cocos Keeling Island. Keep a look out for Peter VK9FCKI in the near future!
VK9CI Takes Shape
This is our residence on Cocos Keeling Island. You can see the 2 x Yagi for 20/15/10 and 17/12/30 plus the 160M vertical (inverted L on a 18M long fiber glass pole) and 10 to 80M vertical in the yard. The house is locally known as “pizza house” but the official name is “My Island Home”.
Getting the 200kg of baggage to the house was an exercise itself! Once there we managed to initially erect the 80-10m vertical using a convenient “Hills Hoist” clothesline (very familiar to many in VK at least).
To get the beam antennas in the air, we then needed a couple of suitable lengths of pipe. The locals on the island suggested we take a trip to the local “transfer station” which they said should have everything we needed – a bit like the local “Bunnings” hardware store island style! (Australian’s will be familiar with those stores – equivalents would be Lowes or Home Depot in the USA).
With the necessary pipe in hand, the team set about completing the antenna systems. You can see below Tony and Adrian assembling the 2 element Rippletech Yagi for 20/15/10m.
On the Air
We are very happy with the results, with a lower noise floor than when on Christmas Island and pileups such as this one on 17m up to 5kHz wide, as seen on our Icom IC7300 radios kindly loaned to us by Icom America.
We are now looking forward to Chris VK3FY and Peter VK3FN joining us this weekend for the Oceania DX CW Contest! Still plenty of time to get VK9CI in the log so hope to see you on the air, and again please spot us if you hear us as our other communication avenues off the island are limited.
First round of Logs Uploaded to ClubLog and M0OXO Log Search
Charles M0OXO also reports that the first round of logs have arrived from the team on OC-003. They are now being uploaded to Clublog plus M0OXO OQRS and Logsearch.
https://secure.clublog.org/logsearch/VK9CI
73 from the team on Cocos (Keeling) Island de VK9CI QRV 160-10m!
The team has arrived safely on Cocos (Keeling) Island yesterday and we had the 40-10m vertical running within a couple of hours. Today we have got the 160m inverted L erected and expect to be on 160m tonight (CKI time).
The Christmas Island VK9XI Log is now being uploaded to Clublog and will soon appear on their Logsearch and on the Expedition page in due course.
Just pick VK9XI from the callsign drop down list.
We just got the AS-SAL30-MK2 RX array tuned and performing well. As the video shows, from an S9 to S0-S1 signal flipping the arrays direction 180 degrees. We could hear many W’s calling on our Sunrise this morning but just too deep in the noise to get them, hopefully this will make the difference. Listen around 22:30z….. But the opening is very short to East coast USA….. Maybe just only several minutes….
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