On the bench:

2015-Mar-5 - 3G0ZC Robinson Crusoe Island

This DXpedition has proved to be very difficult for me to work. When I first saw the location I thought it would be easy. The bands have not really cooperated though and conditions on 40m have been very poor, with a solar disturbance making the trip on 40m difficult. The team also focused on CW, which I struggle with

I still don't really have a 20m station on the air. I have an Elecraft K2, which means I am QRV with 12 watts, but the amplifier does not have the needed low pass filter. So I pulled the amplifier apart to build the new filter (and one for 15/10 while I am at it) and I realized I was missing two silver mica capacitors. No problem, I ordered them from Mouser.

In the meantime I tried to work 3G0ZC on 20m CW. My first challenge is navigating a CW pileup. I'm reasonablly good at SSB pileups and can reliably find the stations that respond on split so that my TX frequency is somewhere that the DX station is actually listening. The theory is exactly the same for CW of course, but it all goes by me so fast..

I can copy CW fairly reliabily at 12wpm, but numbers and a few troublesome letters trip me up, especially as the speed increases. At 20wpm I copy sections and then lose sections when I hit a problem letter. It is as though my brain tunes out as it tries to decode a character and I miss the next 5. 3G0ZC was working at about 25-30wpm. Uh oh.

I could not reliably find his TX frequency, but I did ocasionaly find a station responding about 3kHz up. I think he was tuning higher after each call, but then kept coming back to this region. So I sat there listening to who responded whenever he would finish with a station, typically saying 3G0ZC EU UP or just TU EU UP.

I did that for over an hour, waiting for him to work the US and for 10 mins he did. Somehow, right at the start of that narrow window AC2CZ came back through the headphones, or did it? Did I imagine that. His CW is just too fast for me to copy. I froze for a second and he sent the callsign again? And I realized I'm that guy slowing down the pile up and who probablly should not be here. But hey, you have to learn somewhere, so I sent R R TU, not even managing to get out a report and he sent TU 3G0ZC UP.

My imeadiate reactions were, that didn't happen. That was terrible. Why didn't I send a proper exchange? DE AC2CZ 5NN TU would have been sufficient. I bet he was responding to someone else. There is no way my 12 watts got through. But by that stage it was getting late, so I went QRT and figured I would check the log the next day. But the internet connection to the Island is spotty and the logs were not updated by the next evening. And to make matters more interesting, now they were on 40m CW. With my amplifier in pieces of course. What to do, what to do?

I started tuning through the 40m CW pileup, trying to understand the pattern. He was sending 3G0ZC EU EU UP after each exchange, so for now I had no chance to work him while he handed out contacts to the Europeans. I spent a couple of hours listing to QRM, trying to find the station that responded to his call when it seemed like no one else would stop transmitting, even though a call was in progress. It was getting late, with early meetings for work in the morning and still not a single opening for US calls. So I went QRT and in the morning 3G0ZC went QRT too.

Two days later the logs were online and of course AC2CZ is not logged on any band. So I was correct in my assumption that he had not heard me and was coming back to another station. Just one more frustration that makes DXing such a challenge.

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