Category — TI5/K9JY

Quick update:

I’ve ordered the QSL cards for the TI trip and the CQ WW RTTY Prefix and ARRL CW contests here in February. According to the reply back, I should be getting the cards in two weeks and I’ll start processing them then.

Scot, K9JY

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What a great contest! The ARRL CW Contest offered it all of us in Costa Rica…a little Murphy lurking at the beginning of the contest, some issues with keyers and software, great runs on all of the bands and the normal sleep deprivation.

And a bonus, for this time of the sunspot cycle: a two hour ten meter opening Sunday afternoon resulting in 120 QSO’s and 28 multipliers. Hopefully, we made those 120 hams on the other end a little bit happy. We were pretty jazzed over it all.

For our two operating positions, we hit 300 QSO’s an hour a couple of times and had great good runs on all of the bands, including 160 meters.

Our preliminary score is 6,000 QSO’s and about 5.5 million points.

And a really nice time — thanks to our hosts, Keko and Sophie.

We had a good contest as TI5N here in Costa Rica. Raw score a bit of 6.0 million before submission. We’re going to submit the score from here.

QSL’ing for the contest and TI5N is through the manager.

The TI5/xxxx call signs we are using outside of the contest should be QSL’d to the home call.

Monday and today we took a side trip to the Pacific Ocean and a resort called Punta Leona. Stayed overnight, sat on the beach, had a good glass of wine and generally hung out not doing much. Exactly what I need from a vacation.

Of course, we had to try a little radio stuff. N7OU brought along a K1 and we strung up a 50-foot wire on the beach. The K1 puts out 1.5 watts and with a AA-battery amplifier puts out 3.0 watts into the antenna. From the beach, he worked one stateside station and got a 449 report. Pretty wild.

Here’s a picture of the beach at Punta Leona:

It’s a tough life of a DXpeditioner, but someone has to do it. I volunteered.Scot, K9JY

So…off to bed to get a good nights sleep before the contest tomorrow night.

Here’s what we did today:

• Set up the laptops
• Set up the radios and interface devices
• Set up the amplifiers
• Modified the 80-meter dipole for CW off from SSB
• Tested the set up on 15, 17, 20, 30, 40, and 80 meters. Working fine.

Most frustrating thing for the day:

Calling CQ on 80 meters for a half hour on both RTTY and CW and only working 4 stations on CW (EU and NA).

A good day. We’re ready to go. We’ll be on the air in the morning as well. The rest of our group arrived today and they are a little tired. Sleep is a good thing.

73 until tomorrow…

Scot, K9JY

Here are some pictures of the antennas we’ll be using in the CQ WW RTTY prefix contest plus the ARRL CW contest next weekend.

The most interesting thing about this picture is the very short bar, the third line down from the top of the picture.

That bar is a placeholder for the top of a 40-meter quad. You can barely see the insulators on each end of the bar. The quad is then brought out by guys to get the diamond shape configuration. So, 40-meters pointed at EU.

Can’t wait!

This pic is just for fun. Every ham loves tall towers and to take a picture from the base of a really tall tower that has a few antennas on it is really a great thing.

Warm here, too, with that nice bright sun.

Scot, K9JY

Well, an uneventful trip to Costa Rica yesterday. After getting to TI5N’s place, I slept for a good eight hours.

This morning, Ron, WJ7R, and I did most of the setup with the radios and PC’s, ensuring everything is working. I still need to get an amplifier set up with the Kenwood TS-570, but that will be this afternoon. But, transmit, receive, RTTY, PSK-31, CW is all working.

As I am writing this, the power just went out here (a car hit a power pole and lost).

I have a few more blog things to upload and then I’ll get on the air. I know it’s a little reversed from the normal DXpedition, but I wrote a bunch of posts for my blogs on the plane yesterday. I can get those loaded up and set for the rest of this week and next, then can pay attention to radio.

In the meantime…here’s a picture of the quad we’re using:

Hope it makes you totally jealous…more pics later.

Scot, K9JY