Diary March 15th

We arrived at the site www.migueldeluque.com around 1200 h local time and began setting up the station before doing anything else. Sadly, we hat to realise we would need a minimum elevation of some 15 degrees due to a hill and trees in moon rise direction.

The place where we had planned to put antenna – at a corner of the paved street in the complex – had a scooter and a car standing there. Not perfect but somehow we managed to erect the antennas. Setting up was completed within two hours without problems – with DF2ZC doing the indoor and DH7FB the outdoor work, as always. Only, we were surprised to see we had very little return flow when tx. Usually there are some 7 watts coming back but this time it was just 100 mW. And there was much noise...sometimes peaking at s7 in bursts. So no prefect circumstances at all, we feared this would not be an activity with much fun but hard boring work only.

It took quite some time until we completed the first QSO with IK4WLV at 1519Z. Most times we saw just 3 or 4 weak syncs due to the noise degrading our rx performance. Somehow we managed to complete with at least 25 stations before going to dinner at a local restaurant. When we returned we saw a car had parked so close to our antennas that we could not move them to work the rest of the moon pass so we decided to QRT and hope for better luck then. Strongest stations copied were RX1AS and UA3PTW both peaking -17 in ahort low noise period.

We will investigate into noise sources the next day and should be QRV again on 16^th around 1500Z when our moon reaches 15 deg elevation.

Please do not forget to call us with Lance W7GJ procedure to speed up the process of making QSOs.