This year will bring two trips to JP74. The first one is already over as it was from mid to end of june. The next trip will be late august.
During the first stay there were some really good openings but we are really selective nowadays about what to work and what not. So even if we likely could have worked 200+ stations there were less than 50 QSOs logged. These however gave us three new DXCC and about 10 new squares each.
We also made one of these extremely few tropo contacts when talking to SM3BIU one evening. He's our closest neighbour amateur active on 50MHz about 180km away. (There has been one LA station closer but we have not heard him for a few years.)
We had one day where we could detect AU sigs from the GB3LER and OH9SIX beacons. We could however not hear any stations calling and did not get any answers for our CQs. We also heard the JW beacons on a few occations (AUE?) but no stations were heard there either.
This was quite a dissapointment. Even though I was active on Meteorscatter every single morning possible there were only three QSOs completed. Extremely few pings were heard aswell, so there were no stations to call and almost no one called me. I had one sked set up with HA6NQ but that also failed due to few reflections.
I'm not sure what caused this failure, but likely i was just unlucky with the meteors.
We did bring a serious wire-dipole this time so that I would not have to work on the feeders to the other antennas. This was actually the first antenna to go up but the one with the least activity. I did expect to use it for the VHF-net on 14.345 but I never heard any stations there and no one answered any CQs. Has it gone due to everyone skedding on internet?
The antenna however seems to tune on 80,40,20,17,15,12,10 and 6m so a little time was spent on these bands too. On 20m one QSO was worked and on 80 and 40m the swedish monthly contest was worked. This was the first time active on that contest and I knew the rules are a bit strange so I only answered other stations calling, which gave me 5QSOs on 40m and 2 on 80m. I never did send in the log and will likely not participate again due to the odd rules.
This part will be filled in september