Dear ZL4OL, Mike
Thank you for your interest. Because of that, I shall translate a
part of my e-mail into English.
From 1953 to 1955 I worked as a radiotelegrapher in
Northeastgreenland. It was in Danmarkshavn on a very isolated
weatherstation. It is placed on the coast of Germanialand in the bottom
of a small natural harbour. The lattitude was near 77 degrees north. We
were 11 men there, of which 3 were radiotelegraphers, a stationleader,
who was also radiotelegrapher, 3 radio sounding assistents, a
radiotechnician, a cook, a handyman, and a machine engineer. Our nearest
neighbors were the first year the BNGE, British North Greenland
Expedition, about 300 km from us on a nunatak called Queen Louises Land.
500 km south of us was another wx stn, Daneborg, and 600 km north of us
was Station North, wx stn and airfield. No other people in this vast area.
We had ship once a year in the first week of August, and once or
twice a year the military sledgepatrol passed us and stayed for a couple
of days.
If we got very ill and needed an operation, we had all means for i
and were expected to do it ourselves, mwhich we also did. All survived,
at least when I was there.
Normally we send the weather obs every 3 hours on 5254 KHz to Cape
Tobin at Scoresbysund, about 800 km south from us.
We sometimes had difficulties with the contact. There was "white
black out" and "dark black out". White black out was whwn we had
snowstorm and hard frost at the same time. Because of the friction of
the dry-frozen snow, everything became electrical loaded, and if we were
on our way from the barracs to the radiostation, we had to avoid
touching an empty oildrum, if we did not like to get a painfull electric
schock. All that static electricity made a lot of sparks everywhere, and
from the coppertube which connected the antenna to our longwave
transmitter small lightnings flashed to nearby metallic things. Under
such circumstances it was impossible to read any signals, so we sent our
wx obs blindly on 5274 KHz hopefully that Cape Tobin did not have the
same weather.
Some times we had "dark black out", often in the Dark Time, i.e. in
winter we had 4 month canstant night, where the sun did not rise. There
were lots of green polarlights south of us and the shortwaves were
compleetly dead. Then we sent our telegrams on long wave on a frequency
near 110 KHz. Tx power were about 600 watt, and the antenna was a
cageantenna with rings and 6 wires 40-50 m long up 40 meters. this was
in fact the topload, and the "feeder", which consisted of 4 wires with
quadratic spacers was in fact the vertical radiator. As the station lay
on bare rocks, we had a big net of counterpoises on 3 m high ironpoles
under the antenna. Thus we could bridge the 800 km to Cape Tobin with
normal CW.
If you have questions, I shalltry to answer them.
Vy 73 de OZ7NB, Niels
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