G0RUZ Weak-signal DX on 50,144,432 and 1296 Mhz for the Radio Amateur

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Below are the results for GJ0RUZ, our locator was IN89VE.

Equipment list

TX/RX                                IC746, MGF1801 cavity preamp, 4 pole B.P.F.

PA                                      GS31B VHF Discovery by sponsors    

Ant                                     2 X IOJXX 16JXX2 yagis 4.6wl

Complete Sked List for GJ0RUZ IN89VE

The expedition did not go smoothly at first! 

Martin G4XUM and I arrived at the Jersey Radio Club GJ3DVC shack as scheduled and unloaded the equipment. Friday night was club night and so we met a few of the local amateurs and members of the radio club who were very helpful and welcoming. The shack is located at La Moye IN89VE in an old WW2 German signal station and is a fantastic site but very exposed to bad weather.  Thankfully, the weather was perfect during our stay, I even managed to get a little suntan.

We checked out the third story flat roof at night and found a plethora of antennas, including a GSM cell! Immediately we knew that the only way we could operate would be to use the short lattice tower that the radio club antennas were on. The tower had an HF Tribander and a 5 ele for 6m on it. The Island had recently suffered some very high winds and the GJ3DVC rotator and antennas were in need of repair. Fortunately for us the club agreed to let us use their small tower.

We got an early start next morning and began the difficult task of installing the system after removing 3 antenna systems. It was difficult and quite dangerous work and took us a total of 12 hours. Fortunately we cleared the GSM mast by about 30cm, this was at an AZ of 300 degrees approximately. Our first QSO was on tropo with G4ERP at 20:39 UTC.  We spent a very short time on tropo as we had some other preparations to make.

We could not get on eme until 22:00 UTC as the moon elevation was too high, it was limited to 50-55 degrees depending on AZ, we improved this to 60 degrees on Sunday. The first signal we copied on eme was KJ9I who was a good signal, I thought that the QSO was fine but David called us again on Sunday so he must not have been 100 % happy. I found the band a little noisy on Saturday and we only really worked big guns. It was really nice to see W5UN back on but I confess that at this point I was very worried about the system. The noise was coming from a computer that we did not know was switched on in the shack, things were much better on Sunday when it was switched off. I estimate that it was degrading the noise floor by 6-12db depending on AZ. 

We started Sunday morning on HSCWMS and this went very well as you can see from the logs further down the page.  The eme at moonrise was once again very disappointing, so we had almost no success with the Russian stations in skeds. At around 17:40 UTC we started to hear our own echoes which was a huge relief, LZ1DP was an easy QSO and from then on conditions were much better and we were able to complete on random with many stations who we had missed on skeds. We had to stop at 20:10 due to the elevation limits and so spent one hour on tropo and worked plenty of stations.

Here are the summaries of the QSO's mode by mode starting with eme

QSOs worked by GJØRUZ (IN89VE) on 2 m  EME From 23/03/2002 to 25/03/2002