Hi all,
Another night of LF experimentation has been arranged at the Quartz Hill
club station for Saturday 20th March. The focus of activity will be an
attempt at a two-way QSO with the planned DXpedition station UA0LE (UATLE)
near Vladivostok, thanks to Ed RU6LA and his team.
We have near-finalised arrangements for the administration to allocate
Quartz Hill a special call sign for LF operation in the 136 kHz band, so we
are hopeful that ZM2E will be able to be used for the attempted QSO on
Saturday 20th March. ZM2E was selected for having minimal characters and
brevity to send a full call sign (ZL6QH happens to have all letters with
four elements, and even using DFCW/FSK coding, it has significantly more
elements than ZM2E). Our first request was for ZM0E, and using the same
approach as Ed, the zero could be sent as a T, however the administration
declined to allocate us a call sign with a zero number, and in any case we
would not want to become known as ZM naughty :-)
As ZL sunset is some 3 hours ahead of Vladivostok sunset, we can provide a
beacon transmission for reception in The Americas (and hopefuls anywhere
else) in the time before we change to QSO mode. So the intention is to
beacon with distinctive coding QQQQQ .... with 120 second dot length, DFCW
0.4 Hz FSK, using 137.7890/137.7886 kHz, from before ZL sunset till 0930
UTC. At 0930 UTC we will change to 60 second dot length and QSO mode, using
the same frequencies with 0.4 Hz shift, and use ZM2E as the call sign for
the QSO attempt. We understand that UATLE will use 137.7895 kHz QRSS60 for
any reply, so an Argo screen set for 137.7890 kHz mid screen, with 60 second
dot length, could capture both sides of the attempted QSO.
We are fortunate that the 11,311 km path between ZM2E and UATLE is
substantially north/south and we have nominally 9 hours of mutual dark path
to try for a QSO. We have Saturday 26th March as a reserve night for
finishing a QSO, but if necessary we could share with an HF contest at ZL6QH
for having further tries with UATLE on 27th and 28th (assuming those at
either end can keep awake).
If there are any changes to the arrangements outlined above I will post
another bulletin.
73, Bob ZL2CA
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