CY9C II – Day 3

So what a busy day it’s been.

Murray, WA4DAN got the monster of a mono-bander 20m beam built today, and it’s placed in such a way that it hits EU and OC perfectly, so we’ve dedicated a station to it. Already worked plenty of VK, ZL and JA.

With the 20m beam, we didn’t need the 20m dipole, so we replaced it with a 30m dipole, and have a dedicated 30m station now as well.

That leaves us with 2 other stations that share a multi-band OCF, and the 160m monster wire vertical from the lighthouse.

Lee, WW2DX was able to spend the day on 2m EME and 6m terrestrial. When he gave me his logs for integration, he’d made 76 contacts. He’ll be back at it tomorrow. If the winds die down a bit, he may be able to give 6 EME a go.

I worked with Pat, N2IEN to get his AMSAT station going today. We deployed a portable Az/El rotor on a tripod and hooked up his Arrow 2m/70cm beam to his FT-847 and he’s good to go. He was QRV on XW-A2 earlier. Look for him to be riding passes as they come up. Our grid is FN97.

Pat made a supply run to the mainland earlier in the day, and Connor went with him. When they got back, Connor was ecstatic because Pat gave him the stick and let him control the craft. And now I have to pay for flying lessons. Thanks Pat. Thanks 🙂 On the plus side, he did come back with beer.

Now onto the pain-in-the-ass that we’re dealing with. WSJT-X in Fox and Hound mode is dropping approximately 20% of the QSOs we send RR73 to. This is a function of the software that we have absolutely no control over. We’ve even taken to running in plain-jane FT8 mode, one contact at a time, which is what I’m doing on 60m as I type (because I’m able to write and do FT8 at the same time). Bill, K5DHY has posted to the WSJT-X FT8 group on groups.io asking for help. Added to that some FT8 QSOs are getting dropped by ClubPi on their way to the log, it’s a bit frustrating. I will dump the main logs twice a day to the ClubLog DXPeditions site, and all updates pertaining to this situation will be posted there, with notifications going out on my Twitter feed and the CY9C Facebook Page. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the problem ASAP.

I’m going to bed. Now that all the setup work is done, I wanna work some SSB tomorrow so I need my beauty sleep. Of course, I’ve always been told I have a great face for radio.

vy 73 de VA3QR/CY9