The team has established their first station on 20m and are currently running CW. They are being heard in VK as well as the USA.
The following is a sample from N0UN’s DX Blog again who made contact with VK9CI this morning.
They were also worked by a number of VK and ZLs. The word from the team was that the remaining stations were under construction so stay tuned as more bands are opened.
The team is now packing up on Christmas Island and is preparing to move to Cocos Island later today according to Luke VK3HJ. The team has put well over 7500 contacts into the logs as VK9XI and has tried their hardest to make contact with all who called. Sometimes, however, sleep just managed to get in the way – at least for Lee VK3GK (photo courtesy Luke VK3HJ).
Update: Finally completed teardown and repack for Cocos at 11am local time. Expecting to arrive in cocos around 5.30pm local so we hope to have at least 1 station operating tonight. Keep a look out for VK9CI tonight from about 1100z.
The team didn’t fly all the way to Christmas Island not to have a brief look around either. Here are some snaps from Luke VK3HJ.
Here is a video of the typical tropical noise experienced at Christmas Island on 160 m over night. The receiving antenna is a beverage. Noise received on the inverted L transmitting antenna is far worse.
The SPE 1.3kfa linear amplifiers are doing sterling service at VK9XI according to Luke VK3HJ
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.
https://secure.clublog.org/logsearch/VK9XI
(For anyone seeking the log for the previous VK9XI Expedition in 1995, they can now find the Log here;
QSL Card Requests can be submitted via the M0OXO OQRS Service
Just pick VK9XI from the callsign drop down list.
The following photos are from Adrian KO8SCA via Twitter of the area the 160m antenna was installed and of the general setup on the island.
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….
We finally got the 160m vertical up last night. Managed ti work several JA’s and west coast USA last night. On our sunrise this morning, managed to work N1DG East coast USA and a few EU inc England snd France. Also got an EU pileup but in the noise…. So this morning will be installing the SAL30 RC array.
VK9XI is now fully underway with operation on 160/80/40/30/20/17/15/10m observed already on SSB, FT8 or on CW.
N0UN in Colorado reports a booming signal on 20m SSB on his (blog).
Good luck team!
It”s Hot and very humid with a relentless sun pounding down while we set up antennas today. We completed the 40-10m vertical and its been performing very well on 15m so far. Adrian KO8SCA has been active on CW whilst the rest of the team has worked on the remaining antennas.
It seems that Adrian however has committed the cardinal DXpedition sin of bringing along an untested piece of kit. In this case a very “dashing looking” red foot switch. Fortunately the folks at DXEngineering had a premonition this might happen and sent along some Heil foot switches just in case!
Outside, the 80-10m doublet is being installed between a couple of coconut palm trees.
The 2el 20/15/10m yagi is also up and running at about 10m. A VK3TZ design and working extremely well on 10m at the moment. This is a very Lightweight antenna and also very broadband covering from the CW through to top of the SSB band segments. Operation has commenced on 10m using the antenna and so far reports are excellent.
Finally work has commenced on putting up the 160m antenna as well. Keep watching the clusters for details of what frequencies are operational! 73’s from the team at VK9XI!
You must be logged in to post a comment.