For the last week I've been on a "playing radio" holiday in Southern Spain
and Gib'.
My 8 days were split evenly between Gibraltar and the Spanish town of Nerja
which is about 50km East of Malaga. The main radio event of the week was the
CQWW SSB contest over the 30/31 Oct. During those two days Tony, A45ZN, and
I were at The Caleta hotel on the Mediterranean side of the rock, a good
location for Europe and Asia and far away from the noise in the centre of
town. The Caleta is an 8 story building and had given permission to put
antennas on the roof during our stay. Although I was not able to listen on LF
during the 48hrs of the contest, two stations IK5ZPV and G3WSC had offered
to provide beacon transmissions in the early morning about an hour after dawn.
Gibraltar 1/11/99. 07.00 - 07.15
I was listening for Valerio, IK5ZPV with a 160 foot wire antenna mounted on
the hotel roof and running down at an angle of about 60 degrees.
Unfortunately I had arranged all the QRS transmissions to be in the early
morning period about an hour or so after dawn. Surprisingly, this turned out
to be probably the worst possible time for the test. - ( See other posting
on propagation etc. )
Out of the 15 minutes I managed to receive a few signals on the correct
frequency, but not enough to confirm the identity of the call or even a full
morse character. (excluding an E or I which don't count!) The path length was
about 1500km and was mainly over water. I had been fairly hopeful that this
would have succeeded, but it was not to be. Thanks Valerio.
Nerja Spain 3/11/99 IK5ZPV / G3WSC.
This time located at a small villa 2km out of town and about 250m ASL.
Antenna again a long wire 150 feet long (GVC style) running horizontally from
the top of the building to a nearby olive grove.
Of the two possible signals I viewed Derek and Lech's transmission from the
Crawley club as a very long shot....2000km mainly overland. However, this
time there was no sign of IK5ZPV on 137.710 but at 09.10 I saw some
"straight lines" appearing out of the blue / black haze on the G3WSC
frequency. At best I received two well defined dots of the "S" with the third
broken by local impulse noise. About 30 seconds later a dash and dot but then
nothing......Oh well. It was one of those situations where there's not
enough of a complete signal to identify, but if you looked at the screen, you
would immediately see where the data was appearing. I think at the right
time of day and with EA7 or ZB2 op's licensed, LF QSOs to the Southern Med
area will be possible but difficult.
Thanks to Valerio, - and Derek and Lech for putting the stations on-air.
73
David G0MRF
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