OJ0V team photos

Our team from left to right :

ON5JT Jean-Pierre
ON4LEM Philippe
OT1A Koen
ON8VP Peter
ON6QO Michel

Ready to give our national monument to the Finnish team...

First photos OJ0V

One of the verticals on the rocky surface.

Weekly Lighthouse Volunteer team change : A new team arrives, an old team leaves...

We are currently with 10 persons on the island : 5 lighthouse volunteers + 5 radio amateurs

Our little vessel...

OJ0V on the air

We are on the air !  With 3 occupied stations we can play at full strength.

Biggest problem at this moment is the internet connection. 

For that reason we give total priority to upload our logs to clublog so everybody can check their contact.
An upload will be executed every morning with the file of the day before.

We can work from 40m to 6 m with 6m fixed to the south.  The wind is too strong to change the direction of the 50Mhz yagi antenna.

The is not enough bandwidth available to upload some photos at this moment.

We run now barefoot at 100W on each station.  The coming hours we will add our amplifiers and increase power.   The stations are running on wind and solar energy so power consumption is a point of attention.

to be continued...

OJ0V day -1

Yesterday we started our trip to Market Reef, and now, almost 24 hours later and 1850 km further we are at Kappelskär (Sweden) where we're waiting the ship that will bring us to Aland Islands this evening.

Tomorrow morning a private vessel will do he trip from Aland to Market Reef.

Everything seems fine at this moment and the weather (wind !) seems ok for tomorrow.

Around 10h UTC we'll try to put the first station in the air, probably on 14Mhz in morse.
Later in the afternoon, the well-asked operations on 50Mhz will start with a 3 element yagi antenna.
  

Sunset somewhere between Sweden and the Aland islands

First top score in a big contest

ARRL DX CW contest : 8 th place world wide 15M single operator.  (3rd place Europe).

It's the first time I can achieve such a place, and I'm very happy with it.

TF3Y is not comparable geographically, S50K has a much more efficient station with stacked yagis. 

I've only a 3 element Steppir...  
Nevertheless, even with moderate antenna's on a good location, it's possible to achieve a topscore.

Ready for Market Reef

I've been out of this blog for 3 months. 
The reason is simple : no new expeditions, no contests played, no fieldday and hundreds of km's of running.
I planned to perform half a marathon and this plan takes the exercice-time to get fit to it. 
Two weeks ago - after 8 years of no long distance running - I ran my first 21.1 km...
I'm now a full member of a local athletic club, so ham-time was limited.

Anyway, last week we did our final field test in my garden to check all material to go to Market Reef and activate OJ0V for a week.

From left to right ON8VP, ON6QO, ON4LEM, ON5JT

We placed 3 transceivers near to each other to check our little M/M setup.  No problems were detected except some warnings on the full automatic 1KW amplifier on station 1 (IC7600).

We only have 2 KW of power consumption, so it took some measurement to run 3 stations (2 powered by a ampli) at the same time.

The antennas are the two Ultrabeam verticals, one Inverted L and a 3 element yagi for 50Mhz.

Departure on Juni, 27th and the first activation on Market Reef will be probably on Saturday 29th PM.