DX sunday

 Terrible autumn weather today gives an opportunity to stay behind the radio the whole day. Or at least most of the time. I already noticed that there are a lot of DXpeditions on air lately. Several from DXCC I never worked before. A good test for my 4 band square halo again. But whatever the antenna is, we are all depending on good propagation of course.

First of all, several days ago I tried to work P29RO from Papua New Guinea on 40m FT8. I received him reasonable well. The miracle happened and P29RO came back on my first call with a -04dB report. But then it happened, some digital signal wiped out everything and I was not able to see anything at all. Next day I checked the online log and it seems they did receive my report, I am in the log of for 40m. Not really satisfied about this contact I decided to chase them again today. It resulted in working P29RO on 10m and 17m both in.....CW. Did you know that Papua New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. There are 839 known languages in this country.

Something else occured to me today, just a few minutes before I worked P29RO I worked 5V7RU from Togo. Just another African country I thought I had already worked. It was a pretty easy contact. But this was actually a new DXCC for me. I was not satisfied with this as well. It would be nice to work them on SSB or CW. Unfortunately I never heard them or see them spotted on the DX cluster. Worked them today on 10m and 12m with FT8.

This morning I noticed a new DXCC active on 10m FT8. It was T88WA from Palau. 10m normally should be no problem for me, their signal was strong. But no matter hw I tried I didn't get my signal through. I must have been trying for over 2 hours till their signal vanished into the noise. It puzzled me since I saw many Dutch stations made it into the log. After lunch I checked everything again and noticed my antenna switch has been into the wrong direction. I was transmitting on my inverted-V instead of the 4 element LFA. How stupid. Luckely I could just see them on 15m FT8 and after about 15 minutes I was in the log. T88WA has an realtime log search, how convenient!

The 12m band was in great shape today. I worked 3C3CA Equariotal Guinea, J28MD Djibouti and FJ/SP9FUY Saint Barthelemy Is.. Not shure if the square halo is that good, but it seems to radiate well. My signal is certainly getting there.

Finally I decided to do some SSB calling on 10m into the direction of the USA. It's what I really like. And within about 25 minutes I worked 6 stations from USA and Trinidad&Tobago.

Certainly a good DX sunday...