6 meters DX-ing from the Holly Land

My main interest in the last couple of years was 6 meters DX-ing. Right now I have 114 countries worked and I hope in the near future to be able to apply for my DXXC award, I'm still missing a couple of QSL's.

The rig I'm using is an ICOM 706 and a 4 element Yagi model 64DX made by Hy-Gain. I have just finished a new antenna wich will be installed to it's final position on the tower, it's a 5 element Yagi on a 7 meters long boom optimized for the best gain / pattern with an estimated gain of 12 dBi. I will post some pictures of my small antenna farm as soon as I will finish the instalation.

Update: july 24-th, 2000

History repeats itself, BIG time!

The day was july 23-ed, year 2000...

Got at work in the morning quite tired after a long night of monitoring the band for a possible Es link to NA, looking especially for any VE station for a new one. I knew Mike VE9AA was also looking for me spending countless hours digging through the europeans who were lucky enough to get conditions.  

Like usually fired up the computer, checked my mail and browsed to the packet cluster page, I was surprised to see the americans already working into Eu so early, oh well, couldn't be in two places at the same time. After a while I saw the spot who made me decided that I should try to do something about it: VE9AA was having fun working a SV station and OD was beeing reported into southeastern Europe, Middle East was Es linked to NA!

Asked for an early break from my boss and went home. Mixed feelings on the way, will this be The Day? also some traffic jam but not serious, tried to be calm and to pay attention to the road. I was on the band 20 minutes later. A CQ on 50.092, another one and there was VE9AA answering my call! He peaked 5x59, unbelivable! Thanks for the new one Mike!

What a joy! Carried on with my CQ's alternating with quick tuning the band, lots of europeans, mostly italians and 9H stations working NA, terrible QRM from inband video but couldn't hear any other stateside stations. Back to CQ and wait for propagation to get better for my QTH. Had some troubles with some EU's answering my CQ DX NA calls but nothing serious, I'm used with this.

Some 30 minutes later finally there was K1SIX coming through in SSB with an incredible signal, he was peaking 5x7, gave him a call and had a short QSO. Congratulations Bob, your antenna and QTH really plays well, I'm sure. No other NA stations were heared, conditions started to fade and decided to make a recording of Bob's signal knewing I could loose some valuable time.

Here is a small piece of K1SIX working Eu encoded for RealAudio: http://www.qsl.net/4x1rf/k1six.ram

One hour later I had to close down the station, I did my best to find other stations to work with, maybe next time...

Thanks Mike, Thanks Bob! What a day!

Update: july 10-th, 2000

Working North America via Es is finally history: My first NA QSO was on july 9-th, 2000 at 21.25z with K1SIX who was just there with 5x5 SSB signal working G's, a quick call in CW brought him back: Radio Fox...again?? Couldn't believe it would be so easy to break the pile-up but it was true. Ethernal thanks Bob for this, good ears! There were also some other NA stations heard but all of them were using SSB (wondering why?) and couldn't get the calls.

Update: march 15-th, 2000

The Big JA opening

On March 13-th and 14-th we had a very good opening into JA / JR3 and VK6 / VK8 area. The antenna was pointed to western Australia all the time wich indicates that the path to Japan is a skewed one as observed by others amateurs in the prevoius solar cycle.

The JA pileup was tremendous and to avoid any double QSO's I have decided to post here the list of all those who made it into my log so far. Please be advised that I have to cope here with S9 QRM from spread spectrum communications used in my area by the primary users of this frequency allocation wich makes it impossible at times to copy the faint amateur signals.

Please check this link to see if you are in my log: JA stations worked so far