Radio Club "Medjimurje" organized expedition to JN82 square in the period from 16th to 19th November 2002, during Leonid shower. Our main goal was to give people chance to work new square SSB (there was HSCW activity from JN82 few times in the past), but also to run away from terrible QRM in JN86 (our home QTH) to more quiet place. Here are the results:
Results (16th - 19th of November) Tropo QSO: 41 HSCW QSO: 0 WSJT QSO: 60 MS-SSB QSO: 164 Total QSO: 265
Number of QSO is not to bad, but special sorry for HSCW! We spent lot of hours calling CQJ on 144.100 (16th, 17th and 18th at evening), but no single ping response. At the same time there was lot of bursts at WSJT QRG. It seems there is nobody listening HSCW random QRG any more. Also, we were expecting higher number of tropo contacts, but TR CONDX were extremely bad. We reached up to OK1 and SP9 in the north, I1 in the west, IT9 in the south and SV8 in the east. Most of DX contacts were done in the short opening intervals with big QSB. All other QSO's are below 500 km (no any DL or F wkd, on better conds it is no problem to reach south DL from that location).
Equipment Transceiver: Yaesu FT736 QRO: 4CX1500B (made by 9A4RJ, power was 400W output only because of power generator limitations) Antenna: 5WL LY 2M18XXX by M2 + preamp. (Note: 16th of Nov. antenna was 7 element yagi because of storm!)
We started to work 16th of November at 15 GMT. Because of strong wind we were able to erect small 7-element yagi only. Wind speed was approx. 120 km/h, even that was risky action! Next day we took advantage of short moment when the wind speed was "only" 100 km/h and put 5WL LY on small mast. Unfortunately wind increased in few next hours (hits up to 150 km/h) and continue to blow next 2 days, so our antenna rotator was disabled most of time during our work (however, wind suddenly stopped when we were packing equipment to go home). It is really amazing how our antenna survived (congratulations to M-square!). Although we were trying very hard to connect some dx-cluster, we did not succeed. Local PR node was offline and cut of from the rest of PR net, and our 5W PR TX was to weak to reach Italian packet nodes. Another disappointment came when we started with SSB MS work. There was wide and strong QRM from unknown source on the QRG we announced as our calling frequency (144.255, it is not necessary to say that the rest of the band was clear! Murphy's law.). At the QRG few kHz +- QRM there was no reply, so we were forced to QSY closer to MS SSB random QRG. We were checking 144.255 many times during work, but QRM there was permanent and QRG absolutely unusable. We started to work MS SSB 19th of November, somewhere around 00.40 GMT immediately after we observe first long Leonid burst during WSJT QSO. Bursts stopped around 10.20 GMT. We continued to call next hour, but there was no answer with exception of one nice burst at 11.20 GMT. It was last one we heard, after that burst were very short and weak even for WSJT work. Show was over. Here is the number of stations wkd MS SSB (total 164) by countries: DL 49, F 34, G 19, PA 16, I 9, ON 7, EA 5, SM 4, SP 4, GW 3, OZ 3, EI 2, OK 2, HA 2, GI 1, HB9 1, LZ 1, SV 1, S5 1 All QSO's are random. Most of QSO's were single-burst QSO. There was lot of nice BS from I, S5, SV, and LZ stns. We did not succeed to complete 11 QSO's (NC). Number of countries worked is not very high, reason for that is we were unable to rotate antenna. Most of the time our antenna was fixed beaming north-west. Pity we did not work any Ukrainian or Russian station, we probably missed some nice DX over 2000 km from that direction. Anyway, assuming all problems we had, total result is not so bad. Although shower ZHR was far from predicted, it was good shower for hams. Not as good as in the year 1998, but somewhere at last year level. This shower was specific by lot of short bursts what is not typical for Leonids as well as big gaps between long bursts. Astronomers will probably determine much higher ZHR as most of hams are expecting, because of very high number of this short burst unusable for SSB MS QSO.
	This chart is showing number of our QSO's in 10 minutes time intervals. However, ZHR cannot be seen from chart, but number of QSO's is sure in relationship with frequency of long-duration bursts. In fact, it is efficiency of shower for 2m QSO in time scale (Click at chart to enlarge).
Finally, some critic notes about our work. We are sorry we did few duplicate QSO's, but it is hard to avoid that when several operators are working, and there is no computer logging (there were 6 operators in the team). Also, some of our OP's were not strictly respecting rules of MS SSB QSO in some moments (probably high adrenalin level, hi). But, we are all learning, isn't it? Sure it will be better in the next Leo storm, in the year 2033. CUL!
	For 9A1CAL/P team: Zvonko, 9A6WW