Moon conditions during the early months of 2009 promised to
be excellent with perigee, quiet sky, and northern declination
largely coinciding ... so in Dec '08 I made plans to do some
EME dx-peditions during 2009 while the going was so good!

During the next few weeks I built and tested two EME antenna
systems, and repaired my portable 8877 amp before leaving for
'Otuhaka Beach Resort on Tongatapu Island in the Kingdom of
Tonga at 5am on 05 January for the first of several planned trips!

By 4pm that same day we had reached 'Otuhaka Beach Resort,
erected the antenna array, and set up the EME station equipment!

Inspired by a recent dx-pedition, I decided to try a small stacked
array rather than a very long yagi. This proved to be a wise choice
as the available space to erect the antenna array was very limited
by shrubs and coconut trees planted throughout the tropical garden.

The little array comprised 4 x 5 element DK7ZB "50ohm" yagis on
1.5M long booms, stacked at 2M x 2M wide/high. Excellent ground
gain out over the Pacific Ocean at moon set added several dB to
my signal ... and this coincided with moon rise in Europe for
even more gain, leading to some spectacular signals off the moon!

The 4 x 5 element array on one of the better days!
We had heavy rain and 70km/hr winds on 5 days of the 10!

The array against the crimson dawn sky with the full moon in view.

In the South Pacific the term "Beach Resort" is relative.
The 3M x 3.6M "Beach Hut" accomodation was very basic!

A wardrobe was turned on it's side as a desk for the radio equipment!

However, it all worked out quite well really, and during the quiet
times some operators sent a random text message with the contact!

For example, from Kony JM1GSH ...

And from Joe K1JT ...

And from Guy VK2KU ...

The 100th station in the log was a particularly special contact.
Not only was the contact with another portable operation, their
callsign was not listed in the call3.txt database and yet it was
still decoded correctly dispite the low received signal levels.

Also remember - no skeds, no Internet, no telephone at A35RS!

The 100th contact with UK/DL9LBH.

The weak traces every 100Hz are from the amplifier HT supply.
They appeared after an insect got into the tank cage on the 4th day
and caused a mighty flashover. I managed to repair the HT supply,
but could not eliminate these new traces with what I had on hand.
Fortunately they did not effect the receive performance unduly.

Here is the reason why it is a good idea to s-p-r-e-a-d - o-u-t !

"White-out" EME conditions at A35RS !!

Up to 19 sync traces were seen at any one time making contacts
difficult when many stations were within one JT65b "passband"!

A35RS results, 05-14 January 2009 ...

124 different callsigns contacted via EME

List of callsigns via EME from A35RS

and 1 Meteor Scatter contact (ZL1IU, 1897km)

But the main thing ... were we all having fun?

You bet we were !!! See you all again from "the next one" !!!

Bob ZL1RS/A35RS

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