M0CQZ: DX Expedition to St. Mary's, Isles of Scilly, IN69UW, EU011

Crew Members

Overview

We stayed there from September 16th to 23rd, 2000. Our main activities were on 144Mhz but we were also QRV on shortwave (20m,15m,10m) and on VHF/UHF (6m,70cm,23cm,3cm). In the evening of September 14th we started from Dresden and went via Jena and Frankfurt, where we picked up the rest of the crew, to Cherbourg (Normandy). After 1400km of driving we caught the ferry to Pool on the evening of the 15th. In England we had to travel another night through to catch the ferry Scillonian III from Penzance to the Isles of Scilly in the morning of September 16th. We were lucky to have brought our own petrol with us because in the UK we had no chance to get any at those times. In France it had been no problem. There is no car transport possible to the Scillies so we had to check in our luggage and the huge anount of our equipment. On the island it was taken to our cottage by lorry which was very comfortable.

Well, after two days of traveling we had to put up our mast that same evening because we were having skeds during the night and we wanted to do some random MS. At 26 degrees and sunshine our tiredness nearly vanished and we managed to put up three masts with shortwave, 6m, 2m and 70cm and prepare the mast for 23cm and 3cm for Sunday's 3cm-contest.Finally we got QRV around 19UTC.

We started with meteorscatter skeds at 00UTC. After 03UTC we went to our random QRG and started CQing as we had announced but there was no reply. At about 0720UTC we decided to look for some tropo contacts. It didn't take long till we caught Dave G7RAU who spotted us for MS-random in the cluster and now we had activity! After 0930UTC there were more and more calls on our random qrg via tropo telling us to qsy for 3cm talkback for the contest which had just started, so no MS was possible any more. We did qsy but conditions on 10GHz were terrible, no clouds and so no rainscatter. We tried lots of times with different stations but we could only complete with two French stations in IN88 via tropo. In the evening we did MS skeds again and on Monday morning after 03UTC it was random with the second station but also this time there was no reply for a long time! After 06UTC we could at least complete one random contact this morning. The next morning it was the same. Later on tropo we had some contacts into ON, PA and DL1EJA at JO31-square.

All the time we tried very hard to get access to the Cluster system. It was possible but very instable till we found the best digi. Imagine we were in the extreme southwest of the UK and the next digi was some 170km away. Our 2m packet station consisted of a TR-751 with a 150W amplifier and a fixed 4 element vertical yagi. Without that, the digi could not have heard us. Doing packet or any other 2m activity was not possible because of qrming. In the end we found a digi running quite well with a connection to GB7PDX cluster.

On Wednesday at 00UTC we had a 220V AC power failure till 06UTC. We are very sorry for those who had a sked at that time. We tried to forward the info to Germany by telephone and the clusternetwork. After that there was also very low activity on random. We managed, after some tries, to complete the QSO with I8MPO in JN70 in SSB over 1900km!! In the afternoon we caught very nice conditions and did more than 10 stations on random! This was because we were announced at the cluster this time. Because of low activity in the mornings we decided to do some random only after the skeds. So only one of us had to stay up the whole night. Altogether we could complete 59 contacts via meteorscatter.

Besides, we made some nice contacts also on 70cm up to 790km and on 23cm upto 630km. The activity was very low on that bands. On 6m there was nothing but noise at the beginning. We were very surprised what you can work via tropo on 6m!!! Only during the last day we had a short opening to Africa. On the other hand we made contacts on 20m,15m and 10m with a very lowly mounted antenna. We used a groundplane (Fritzel GPA 30) only 2m above the ground but we always got nice reports! So some were pleased to get EU-011 (IOTA) and SV-91 (Worked All Britain Award) into their log. The way back on September 23^rd was as exhausting as our first trip but we managed everything nicely with only smaller problems.

The QSLing for M0CQZ is handled by Fred DH5FS. It's OK via bureau or directly.