The German expedition station VK9XX on Christmas Island far away in the Indian Ocean has still been putting out consistently good signals into the UK on 40m all this week. Some days as early as 14-00UTC they were audible on SSB at readability 3 and S3 on 7045khz with QRM. Signal strength went up during the day peaking at RST 579/589 on CW by 22-00 UTC accompanied by a huge pack of stations mainly calling HF of them as instructed by the VK operator who was clearly calling “CQ UP”. Unfortunately the operating discipline of far too many of the EU stations was very poor with people often calling directly on the DX station’s frequency rather than several khz HF of them. They were also ignoring the DX operator’s requests for “CQ SA/NA only” – i.e. replies wanted from South America or North America only. I must say that I did not hear any G stations breaking the CW operating etiquette. The operating standard by VK9XX was absolutely first class
The golden rule is always to listen first to find out what is happening before transmitting then use the TX clarifier or second VFO to operate split frequency. It is not always easy to pick out the DX operator’s frequency through the QRM. Tuning gradually LF of the pile-up is one way, the other is calling up reports on the DX cluster via Ham Radio Delux on the internet.
Yesterday during the late afternoon (Tuesday 24th), VK9XX was down as low as 7001khz right at the band edge but previously he was up around 7009/7010khz. The expedition will be active until December 5th. . There had been no postings so far today on the DX cluster by
15-00 UTC but take a listen !
73, de Derek Atter , G3GRO
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