Copied from http://www.qsl.net/oh2br/
changed byPA0ABM
Sunday January 23, 2000
It is now Sunday the 23th of January at 2125 local Pitcairn and ship time. We are coming closer to
Pitcairn, and in the morning at 0400 there will be a wakeup call for all passengers as the ship will arrive
at Pitcairn at 0500 local time on the 24th.
I was just recently asked by the Chief Officer to take the antennas (15 and 10 m dipoles) down as it was
still light outside and the stopping at Pitcairn will be a very short one just unloading the goods and
passengers to the two Pitcairn longboats coming to meet us. So I am without any radio communication
at the moment.
The week in Auckland was very well spent in shopping with the help of Martin ZL1ANJ who spent all his
week with me. This was a very generous act from him without which my DXpedition would have suffered
enormously as I had to leave 14 kg of radio gear in Helsinki because of overweight problem. I bought
again those things left behind plus many more new ones and took a new big suitcase full of stuff on the
ship.
I did some Dxing at Martin's QTH in Auckland during the week and more during the weekend at his
country house 1 hours drive fm Auckland in a SUPER location. Elevation 270 m asl and overlooking the
Pacific in three directions! We tested the station there and did some cable connections. Martin gave me
four dipoles - for 10, 15, 40 and 80 m.
First two of these have been used on the container ship
Queensland Star fed by single RG-58 feedline. I have
received good signal reports with only 100W output from
FT-1000MP. The reception has been my weak point as the
noise level has been S7/8 on 15 m and S3/4 on 10 m. The
reason for this is the ship's radar and other systems. Many
motors run day and night in the reefer containers carrying
fruits and vegetables to keep them in cold temperature.
The dipoles for 40 and 80 will be used oin Pitcairn to see if they are efficient enough for DX work.
Perhaps they are if my operating position will be up on the hill.
I have worked 697 QSOs from ZL1 and 1647 QSOs as VP6BR/MM. Conditions have been changing
from very good (even worked OH1XX on 10 m at 2230Z with 59 reports!) to poor especially during the
daytime when bands have sometimes been very quiet.
Yesterday and the day before I had QSOs with Dave VP6DB
at VP6PAC and Tom VP6TC on 15 m. Reports were 59 both
ways. The pitcairners onboard enjoyed chatting to their
relatives waiting them on the island. Good PR for Ham Radio!
I hope to successfully land on Pitcairn and get all my
equipment safely to the shore. Tomorrow evening there will be
a celebration to greet the passengers most of whom are
relatives of the islanders. On the ship there is also the new
teacher and his wife and their 9-year daughter from Auckland
coming for a 2-year term.
The 8 day voyage on Queensland Star has been very most
enjoyable because the weather has been good, the sea calm and the crew and passenger very
amicable people. Only three days in the middle part of the voyage were overcast, rainy and misty.
Otherwise it has been sunny and pleasantly warm.
All is OK and I am in a very good mood. I have had a nice rest on the ship and some training with the
pileups. The real adventure is just about to begin tomorrow!
Onboard M/S Melbourne Star on May 1, 2000
II feel very relaxed and happy as I soon arrive in Auckland ZL1. I left Pitcairn eight days ago on Sunday
morning on April 23. During the first night the sea was
rolling the big container ship Melbourne Star from port
to starboard and back so vigorously that I had to stand
up in the middle of the night to remove my FT-1000MP
off the desk of the radio room and place it on the floor.
Otherwise it could have dropped and been damaged. I
could not sleep that night as I was holding the sides of
my bed to stop my body from rolling.
The second night was better and the voyage was
improving day by day. It is getting still better as in one
hour I shall meet my XYL Loretta who undertook the
long flight from Helsinki to Auckland just to meet me as
soon as the VP6BR Pitcairn DXpedition may be considered accomplished.
By the way, the ship's radio room was already occupied by a ham operator. Ben W1VEH from the state
of Maine embarked the Melbourne Star in Philadelphia, PA, and is on a roundtrip with his XYL and TS-
140S. We soon found a common language and Ben allowed me to use his 20 m dipole. He kept his
skeds with friends back home very early in the morning and late afternoon wheras I used the late
evening hours to meet my friends and pass some home traffic through. Ben and I watched the Team
Finlandia PJ9W 1990 CQWW Contest video and ZL9CI video which I had taken with me. Ham radio
was present even during this eight-day voyage.
But what about VP6BR Pitcairn DXpedition? Did I meet my goals and was everything as good as I had
hoped for? It is now proper time, indeed, to look back and evaluate the DXpedition as the memories are
still very fresh.
After the three-month long VP6BR DXpedition one could ask the
question: what is the optimum duration for a DXpedition to a rare
location? Is it two weeks or two months? Well, the pileups were
there when I left so probably I should have not left at all.
Consequently, at least in my case, the longer the duration the
better. But frankly, I was morally and physically ready to move on.
There was, in fact, some concern among the local hams about their
attraction after my operation but after visiting the bands they soon
realized that there still is quite a demand for VP6 even after my
56,000 QSOs so they became more relaxed. On the contrary, they
will be more active on the bands to keep up the profile of the
resident hams. As a benefit from my DXpedition, the Pitcairn ARC
now has 2 new HF yagis, the A3S and A3WS with all accessories,
so signals from VP6PAC should be great on 20 and 17m through
10m.
You probably never can work down the pileups from any location
but you simply move to another layer of hams in terms of power,
antennas and interest to DXing. Last days of my operation were
spent in giving out contacts to many stations with only a few watts
output power and simple whip or dipole antennas. Astonishingly
many of them did not know anything of the VP6BR DXpedition - well, frequently they did not know
anything of Pitcairn Island at all. Was it the fourth or fifth layer already?
My goal was to give every DXer a fair chance to work me at least once and the top DXers a real chance
to make it on all bands and modes from 6 to 160 or at least on 10 to 160 m. Only few people reached
this but everybody I talked to seemed to be equally happy for his contacts with VP6BR nothwithstanding
the number of the QSOs. Perhaps some were encouraged to put up a new antenna for one of the many
bands just to reach out to Pitcairn once more. If so, I am very happy to be the reason for such a station
improvement.
Of course, I knew that the sunspot maximum was expected to be present during my DXpedition so the
excellent propagation should not have come as a surprise to me. Nevertheless, it did surprise me how
well the bands were open to all continents with good signal strengths. The only bands to suffer from my
location near the Equator and the sunspot maximum should have been the Top Band (160) and eighty
metre bands.
What I did not expect was ten and twelve metres to open practically every morning to Europe for many
hours with good signals. Also I did not expect to work any serious EU pileups on 160 and 80 but, to my
great surprise, the signals appeared at the respective sunrise times from the noise and climbed to a
respectable S9 on the S meter, sometimes 20 dB over S9, thus enabling us to exchange reports on
SSB. The window was not large, only from five to ten minutes, but as the grayline sweeped across
Europe I enjoyed low band DXing at its best for two whole hours.
To evaluate how succesful I was
in trying not to favour any
specific band or mode please
study the following rundown of
total QSO, zone and country
counts (dupes have been
excluded from these figures):
Dupes were only 3.4% of the
total QSO count but without
active rejecting of dupe QSOs
they would have been estimated
at 15%.
The dupe percentace is really
low considering the fact that I
participated in four major
contests during my DXpedition
(CQ 160 m, ARRL DX Contest
SSB/CW and CQ WPX SSB
Contest).
Some of the best moments recollected:
The Top Band produced strong emotional moments during the DXpedition even at sunspot maximum.
Who could have predicted that Europe would have been so strong on Pitcairn?! Certainly, if somebody
had told me that I could work VP6 from Israel and Sweden on 160 m with S9 signals would have seen
me smiling - do not fool me, please! But it happened many times and each time it was a miracle.
4X4DK and 4X4NJ made the longest distance QSOs on 160 m and, curiously enough, even in faraway
Finland VP6BR was heard once (by OH1XX). But, unfortunately there was no two-way OH-VP6 QSO
made this time. The Italians were the winners with S9+10…20 dB signals and armchair copy on SSB.
One of these days I plan to visit their stations to see how they do the trick.
After my sunset eighty meters sounded like twenty meters back home. The openings were just shorter
and you had to carefully follow the grayline moving across Europe to make a successful call. But it was
good to overcome the usual static crushes which sometimes were not bad at all. I just had to be there
every day to hit the jackpot, I guess.
Forty and thirty metres were always ready to serve as dependable work horses. During sunset and
sunrise times these bands produced huge signals and nice pileups. The only negative thing was that
those times were in great demand for 80 and 160, too, so I had to make a difficult choice every time as
to where to go next. 30 m signals had often a hollow sound and echo on them due to multi-path
propagation. A beam antenna would have helped a lot.
The most reliable DX bands were, of course, 20 and 17 m with BIG SIGNALS to all continents around
Pitcairn midnight. 15 m was sometimes great fun as well. All these bands were capable of producing DX
signals with polar flutter and fading indicating their path over the North Pole. As 15 m is my favorite band
it is too bad that there was so much competition on operating time allotment among these three bands
that 15 was often the looser. It did not deserve that fate, I believe.
The real miracle bands, if six metres is not counted, were the ten and twelve metre bands. Consistent
openings to Europe during practically every Pitcairn morning were soon to play an important part in my
operating routines. The 10 m band was the only open band for most of the daylight hours which explains
its high QSO count. It also seemed to be an endless source for USA contacts.
The Magic Band, six metres, was really pure magic this time.
After a hasty conclusion one morning that the band was "stone
dead" it suddenly opened up to produce big signals over the
whole North American continent for the next two hours! The very
same afternoon I enjoyed two straight hours of JA pileup.
Another day, it was extremely exciting to copy the weak but
readable signals coming almost from the antipode, Jordan,
following calls from Israel, Cyprus, Malta and Spain. My signals
were even heard in Germany and Switzerland! The Trans-
Equatorial Propagation (TEP) produced stable signals from
Central America almost every afternoon and from Hawaii every
evening. And almost every afternoon the Beacon of the Canary
Islands, Avelino EH8BPX, would give me a call from his mountain QTH.
If I had had a six-metre addict as a companion DXpeditioner listening carefully on the 6 m band and
making skeds with distant DXers, what would have been the results?! Even now, I managed to make
over 700 contacts on six on the side of my HF DXpedition with modest 100W and a 5-element yagi @ 5
m.
I have written a full VP6BR Pitcairn DXpedition story for The DX Magazine, with Carl N4AA doing a
great job as the Publisher and Chief Editor. Please visit the website at www.dxpub.com for subscription
details. Learn more about the VP6BR Pitcairn DXpedition!
Good news: Pitcairn Island will continue to be available on Six Metres as the PA1ZX five element yagi
donated by the UKSMG was left on the island. The Pitcairn Amateur Radio Club VP6PAC purchased
one half of my ICOM IC-706MkII transceiver, the other half being donated by SMIRK. The necessary
funds were raised in a few days, near the end of the DXpedition. The first users of this station are Tom
VP6TC and Betty VP6YL who already have made their first ever QSOs on six metres. The QTH is their
home in Adamstown approx. 100 m asl. They keep the radio on during the whole day and plan to
regularly check in the 6 m monitoring frequency 28 885 kHz. You can find VP6BR Six Metre Story on
UKSMG web page.
Epilogue
When one operates from a good location
during good propagation an average station
is all you need. A small linear amplifier with
400-600W output, dipoles for the low bands
and trap beams for the higher bands is quite
enough. This will guarantee nice contacts to
all continents on all bands and lots of
compliments for a good signal.
The most important thing at site is to choose a position without any obstacles between your antennas
and the horizon as well as one without any sources of local QRM. Just tune your antennas to resonance
and fire a CQ call - the pileup is waiting for you!!
Final thought
I was sometimes so tired that I had to excuse the pileup to go QRT for some hours of sleep. But I had
great fun all the time. I only hope that you in the other end of the pileup had as much fun as I had. I
hope to see you soon on the band again from another location, and if we are lucky, at your local
hamvention, too!
Jukka OH2BR/VP6BR
VP6BR reports of Jukka