Saturday, March 31, 2012

Busy activation of PAFF-039

With some time on my hands I headed over to the most wanted PAFF (as all of them have been activated at least once I compiled a list of the activity level based on info by Igor EW4DX - the updated list is on this page).

PAFF-039 Fochteloërveen - North Netherlands


I found an entrance route into the park quite quickly and set up my multiband wire for 10-20-40m. This saves me time not having to take down the antenna for the different bands. With only 2 hours of time on my hands I did not want to waste any time changing bands. This meant giving up on 15 or 17m.

My extended Spieth mast set up @ PAFF-039
I started at 13:30 UTC. 10m turned out to be rather dead. The same could not be said about the 20m band.
Luciano, I5FLN was as usual the first one to call in. Propagation to Italy was not very good at that time, it improved a lot however in the next hour.

For one hour I stayed on the same frequency working 84 stations - not a quiet moment. Local conditions weren't all too strong but there was a lot of DX - 17 out of the 84, especially from the east. There were three OMs from Japan calling in with signal levels comparable to a lot of European stations. This happened to me only once before - at PAFF-014. From the west activity was not that strong with only the two familiar North-American OMs K1QS and VE5XU calling in.

When the activity seemed to slow down I switched over to 40m to enable short skip contacts. Luciano was the first one again. QRM was manageable this time while signals were rather good - a well balanced propagation. In just under one hour I worked 71 stations.

In total I worked 155 stations from 36 DXCCs in just under 2 hours of radio time. Max QRB was set by a JA7 OM to 9100km.
Manuel EA2DT, Luciano I5FLN and Narciso IZ1JMN came by on both bands. Of all contacts about 30% were new callsigns to me.

Thanks all for calling in & being patient in the pile up!
Lars, PH0NO/P

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