SA30IL 2m-MS activity from JO69 May 15 2005

Background

Portrait of LM Ericsson On the 5th of May 1846 a man called Lars Magnus Ericsson was born. Lars Magnus was a resourceful man that in 1876 founded a company that made copies of Bell telephones. Bell had forgot or possibly ignored to seek a patent in Sweden. The company soon grew a bit and today is one of the market leaders in telephone systems. A few years back they still made telephones but today that line of business has been moved to another company known as Sony-Ericsson. If you are lucky, you may own one of their telephones.

To celebrate the memory of Lars Magnus the radio club in the nearby cities Grums and Vålberg have a Field-Day each year at the place where Lars Magnus was born. This year will be no different. The hard hams go there saturday about noon and put up a tent for the overnight stay. The radio is manned but since there is no access to power they also keep a gasoline generator that power the equipment.

The radio club SK4IL was founded in 1975, so this year they celebrate 30 years of activity. As an extra spice to this they have gotten a special callsign to use during the year. The call is SA30IL. Please note that the fourth character is the figure zero. Sierra Alpha Three Zero India Lima. The call thus has nothing to do with a group of chemicals used as lubrication or to heat your house. Lars Magnus old homes grid square is not very far down the list (place 196) of most wanted squares in Europe, namely in JO69. In order to market MS-operation on 2m I will join in on the field-day and bring my equipment for Meteor Scatter. The field-day is short and my participation even shorter but I hope to be able to work some stations at least. If my goals are met some other stations will get QRV as a result.

Plan

I have communicated a bit with PE1AHX to get some input on how to do this. I have been recommended against making too many skeds. Instead I will study the input from people reporting that they want to make a try. Then I will make a schedule for antenna directions to try to optimize the possibilities for QSOs. Unfortunately the time is so short that any real schedule feels a bit strange.

Activity will be FSK441A, preliminary strategy CQ362 first when calling stations with direction >= 180, second for stations with direction <180. Perhaps I should stick to one period to maximize possibility for QSOs but I want to show realistic operation also. Due to the location of this place I will have no access to the packet clusters. Neither do I own a mobile phone capable of accessing the ON4KST chats via WAP. In fact I don't even own any phone, but I will try to borrow one so that I possibly could receive SMS, provided there is coverage for the mobile phone network.

I will try to leave home at 05.00 local time. The trip there is approx 2 hours and then I will need another hour to get the gear set up. So activity should be on from 08.00 local time, 06.00 UTC. I will continue until at least 12.00 local time, 10.00 UTC. I will stay as long as I can.

If you want to follow my trip closely I will have my APRS tracker mounted. Hopefully there will be coverage at least most of the way. So look at findu.com and you can see where I am.

When Lars Magnus was born many things well known to us, like the Maidenhead locator system, The WGS-84 world geodetic system, or the GPS system had not yet been invented. Therefore the location choosen for his home was not exactly in the middle of the JO69 square, but seems to be close enough. Preliminary figures claims it to be JO69KL, but I will bring a GPS-receiver to confirm this.

Goals

The trip is set up to have more than one purpose:

Equipment

I will bring things that I have previously used for MS-activity both from home and from my holiday QTH in JP74. Hopefully it will work Ok.

RIG Kenwood TS-2000
PSU 1 Microset PST-125
PSU 2 Home Made Linear (Warning, Silent but only allows for 20W Po)
Computer 1 650MHz Laptop with WSJT software
Computer 2 2.4GHz Laptop for slideshows and other demos
Interface Home made simple cable
Antenna Unknown, provided by the club

People who have registered their interest

I have requested information from stations who want to work the square. The purpose was not to set up skeds with these stations but to see how big the interest was in different antenna directions. So far only 9 stations have reported in and they are pretty well distributed. 
                                  Peak Eff
  Az    Dx   Call     Locator     %   UTC    %   UTC
  145  1194  SP8RHP  (KO10EF)     54  06     93  12
  153   838  SP2JYR  (JO92GP)     56  06     89  13
  161  1457  HA4XG   (JN96LV)     67  07     88  13
  174  1044  OK1TEH  (JO70FD)     74  07     82  13
  186  1656  I4YNO   (JN54KP)     83  07     77  14
  202   914  DF6YL   (JO31WS)     88  08     63  14
  213  1833  F5VHX   (JN04FT)     90  09     59  15
  213   983  PE1AHX  (JO21OS)     91  08     53  14
  238  1183  G0GMS   (IO82XT)     97  09     34  15
The following schedule has now been set (local times, subtract 2 to get UTC times): Antenna will be adjusted upon received signals, so if you are not within the directions above, don't give up, I might hear you and turn the antenna.

If you want to send me some reports off-air you can find my E-mail address on buckmaster, the swedish callbook and the VHF-DX database

Checklist for packing

73 and CUL de SM4RPQ/Leif