XX9D - Noticias DX y calendario DX

Añadido/actualizado

04/03/2019

Indicativo(s)

XX9D

Fechas inicio-fin

11/02/2019 - 26/02/2019

Utilidades

Seguimiento y estad.

Spots recientes

DX Atlas

Calculadora propagación

DXCC

XX9 - Macao

Zona CQ

Página WEB

http://xx9d.mydx.de/

Modos planificados

CW, SSB, Digital

Bandas planificadas

160 m, 80 m, 40 m, 30 m, 20 m, 17 m, 15 m, 12 m, 10 m, 6 m

Fuente

DX-World & OPDX

Búsqueda en log Clublog

Información

Update Mar,2: The 2019 XX9D adventure has come to an end. A good end for all members of the crew after arriving safely and in a good shape at home. No damaged equipment, no problems with the customs and the airlines, no health-problems….

So far so good….We didn’t meet the targets we set ourselves and we are very sorry about that. We and probably the DX-world has expected more despite the actual sun-spot conditions. With the experiences of the 2017-expedition in our background we expected to do much better with a bigger team and upgraded antennas. We knew about the limited space situation in our hotel, but we didn’t know about the ‘improved’ illumination- and machinery situation with a dramatically increase of man-made noise there.

There was no way for us to run out of the given situation, we had to cope with a noise-level of 9+ during the night time and 10 dB less through daylight time on 160 m to 30 m. We knew that we had solid signals on those bands and it made us more than sad to be able picking up only a small percentage of the stations calling us.
The team was fighting until the last minute, it was often more a puzzle than solid call-sign-picking.
As promised, North America was our main target, we worked hard but with 8,5% we were far behind that what we expected. But better than 2017!

Conditions on the higher bands were poor as forecasted. Although we tried SSB, but with only a little fortune. 5 to 10 minutes without any respond led us often to go back to CW or FT8.
We appreciated all comments, hints and criticism via e-mail. Most of the comments expressed their understanding of our situation, many others encouraged us and gave us a positive feedback. A few others, a minority, gave us unqualified comments, often with fake call-signs. We would like to ask them: Come here, spend your money for a trip to Macau and make it better.

Our equipment with K3s-transceivers, microHam MKIIs and SPE-Experts, our pentaplexer and the filter-cascades for multi-band-operation worked fine without any distortions ore failure. The same with the UCXLog in network operation and the WSJT-X-software. Our new lightweight 5-Band- 2 Element-wire-beam from LZ Antennas is a good option for DXpeditions, we were very satisfied with that.

Finally we had around 36000 QSOs in our logbook on all bands and possible modes included more than 1000 on top band and nearly 5000 on 80 m. There is still some work to be done to integrate all FT8-QSOs from F/H-mode in our main log. Thanks Joe K1JT and Bill G4WJS for helping us with a new WSJT-X 2.0.1 version.
Please be patient and wait until we have completed the logs on ClubLog. QSO-requests please only to our QSL-manager DL4SVA!
On behalf of the whole team we would like to express a big Thankyou to all our supporters. We are preparing a photo-collage for You.

Last but not least we should mention the 6 XYLs we had with us. They have had a lot of fun using the sport- and recreation facilities of the hotel, practicing Yoga, walking around in Macau and spending money in Macau’s gorgeous shopping-malls. They helped us in moments of frustration and were good guides and companions on our tours to Hong Kong and more. Therefore also a big Thankyou to our XYLs.

Update Feb,18: After 6 full days of operation this is the first summary.

All team members are a little bit disappointed about the high noise level here on all bands, especially on the low bands from 160 m to 30 m. Levels are mostly around S7-9. We are sure the situation is much more worse than two years ago. It seems that this is man-made noise which is about 10 dB stronger between 5 pm and 7 am. It must be something like a machine or light-facilities in the hotel or the nearby golf-range. You might imagine what problems we have to identify call-signs under these lousy circumstances, which we are not able to solve. So with that we have to lower our expectations what means grey-line QSOs and our targets on the low-bands. To activate Macau on the lower bands will be a more and more great challenge in the future.

Update Feb,14: This DXpedition was possible by the great help of the management and staff of Grand Coloane Resort, the CTT authorities and Bom, XX9LT.

All team members including the baggage arrived well in Macau at Sunday-afternoon, February 10th. The team has fixed the complete station setup and all antennas within 24 hours. The successful inspection of CTT was on February 11th. So we were able to be on the air around 10 UTC the same day. After 48 hours of operation we have around 6500 QSOs in the log. So, this is a good starting point. A first log update to club log was made today. Still a few FT8-QSOs from F/H-mode are missing in the log. Sorry about the confusion with the pile-ups of V84SAA sometimes.

Remember it is difficult to find a good place for ham radio in Macau. We had to follow the restrictions of the hotel and the nearby golf-rang. That means limited space for antennas. All antennas were installed above the 8th store of the hotel-building. We are able to use only 30 m length of the railing there. (see picture on our homepage)

For 160 and 80 m we are using wire verticals on 18 m high Spiderbeam poles with elevated radials. On 40 m we have a vertical as well, on 30 m we are using a delta-loop. Unfortunately there are no receiving antennas possible. Noise level is high on all low bands. Our new wire beam from LZ-Antennas works fine on all five higher bands 20 – 10 m.

We have made a detailed propagation tool for the difficult parts of the world via SP and LP from here. On FT8 we are also using the F/H-mode. Please check our new actual frequencies. (7070, 14079, 18105, 21079, 24920 …)

In CW we recommend for outside US stations 1-3 kHz up and for US stations 2-3 kHz up splitting. Please don’t call only 1 up. North America has by the way our highest priority. On 160m the highest allowed transmit- frequency for us is 1825 kHz.

Macau has an interesting Portuguese history and also the status as an world culture heritage. As You know we have 6 wives of operators with us. They take the opportunity to visit the places of interest of this with tourist crowded city. Next days they plan to visit HongKong and probably China-mainland.

Update Dec,18: FT8 seems to be a more and more popular mode for DXpeditions. We will use this mode on the usual frequencies as well as the dxpedition mode on the announced frequencies. Please consider, that we will use the newest version WSJT-X 2.0, which is the regular one from January 1st, 2019. Don't call us on our audio frequency and make sure that you follow the hints given on the WSJT-homepage.
Hopefully the conditions will be fair or better. All 4 to 5 stations will be manned around the clock. Having the antennas relative close together, we can only have one active station per band the same time.
We will have no pilot-stations worldwide, but reports about band openings are welcome via internet. Please accept that we will not arrange skeds.
LoTW uploads will made for our supporters first, all others 6 months after the last day of our expedition.
For now we wish you and your families a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you in 2019 on all bands and modes.

Update Sep,3 Operators mentioned are Werner/DJ9KH, Bert/DL2RNS, George/DL4SVA, Thomas/ DJ6TF, Olaf/DJ7TO, Uwe/DJ9HX, Frank/DL1KWK, Heiko/DL1RTL, Wolfgang/DL4WK, Axel/DL6KVA, Olaf/DL7JOM, Rolf/DL7VEE, Franz/DL9GFB, Kenneth/OZ1IKY and Bom/XX9LT. Activity will be on 160-10 meters using CW, SSB, RTTY and FT8.

Suggested frequencies are:
CW - 1823.5, 3526, 7026, 10102, 14026, 18086, 21026, 24906 and 28026
SSB - 3805, 7095/7182, 14210, 18120, 21275, 24955 and 28465
RTTY - 3595, 7046, 10144, 14090, 18099, 21090, 24917 and 28090
FT8 - 3573, 7074, 10136, 14074, 18100, 14074, 21074, 24915 and 28074 kHz
6m - 50105/CW, 50120/SSB and 50313 kHz

They will operate with 15 experienced operators 24 hours daily with at least 4 stations. The 5th station will be monitoring 6 meters or will be active on short-waves as well. Their special focus will be on North America and the low-bands 40-80-160m. They will have separate antennas for each of the low-bands. For 20 to 10 meters they will have a 2-element beam combined with a pentaplexer which allows them to operate with 3 stations simultaneously on the higher bands. Beside RTTY they will also use FT8 as another digital-mode. QSL via DL4SVA, LoTW or ClubLog's OQRS.

Update Aug,30 A 15-man team will again be active as XX9D during February 11-26, 2019

Old information from 2017's operation: XX9D will be QRT on February 26, 24 UTC. In the last 12 hours until our sunrise on Monday we will be QRV only on 17m CW/SSB/RTTY, 160m CW and 40m CW/SSB/RTTY for everybody with two stations. Please no dupes! No 160m on the weekend because of CQWW 160 m SSB Contest. Thanks to all our sponsors and all of you for joining our low budget and light weight DXpedition.

Update Feb,22: We are now in last days of our DXpedition. With 32.000 + QSOs we hope to reach our goal of 40.000 QSOs soon. Most of the QSOs were in CW and RTTY. We have nearly 1800 US QSOs in our log. For SSB QSOs in the future Bom, XX9LT, as local ham is QRV with beam and amplifier.

Most of NA-sigs are extremely weak. Some US-hams were complaining about our team and operation manner. We still see no reason to accept their arguments. All the team-members do their best, day and night, and will not forget that North America is in our special focus. Please remember that we are in a hotel resort and faced with not ideal receiving circumstances. We don’t have separate receive antennas. Signals from NA are often deep in the noise and it is very hard to pick up these signals out of the noise especially on 80/160 m. This noise is not caused by EU or JA-stations. Last night we had a lot of QRN and a thunderstorm.

This DXP gives us some new experiences: It is possible to work with 3 stations with 5 antennas mounted closed together and having almost no interference between the stations. As the operation-site is very close to the antennas we have a lot of RF in the shack. Most of the computers were affected by RF, the backup K3 was lost. We got a great support from Elecraft. They sent us a spare part for our KPA500 via US Postal Service. It has not arrived yet but we hope to have it installed soon. 160 and 80 m-operation will be changed from night to night.

Update Feb,17: We arrived well and completely in Macao on Sunday afternoon. Thanks for the great help to Mr. Rudy Leung, Business Development Manager from GRAND COLOANE RESORT MACAU, who is also a ham, and the excellent service from the hotel stuff. We lost several hours for a correct import procedure. Mr. Iam Chi Veng from DSRT helped with new papers for import and export. The station examination by DSRT was already 24 hours after we arrived. All team members got an own short time-XX9-licence. XX9XX mailed us that the Macao ham radio band plan from 1994 is still valid. We got is also printed with our license papers. Macao is Region 3.

A special thanks to Bom, XX9LT. Without him this expedition would not have been possible.

We have 5 antennas now on a very limited space, but on top of the hotel area: 18 m high vertical for 80 and 160 m with elevated radials, 15 m high vertical for 40 m with two radials, 12 m high vertical for 30 m with two radials, 12 and 17 m band single loops on a 12 m mast, a hexbeam for 20/17/15/12/10/6 m 10 m up, only used on 20/15/10 m with a triplexer. Our technical setup works very well. Good coax cable, small and big bandfilters for each band, current baluns for each antenna and others gives only a few interferences at special band-mode-configurations. We think this hotel is one of the very few places for a low-band operation from Macao.

After 60 hours we reached the 10.000 QSO mark. Japanese stations are very strong. We think in the next days the chances for North America will be better as we have already a lot of Jas in the log. Bad news – we lost one of our three amplifiers.
Next we will start on 160 m CW.

Update Jan,28: Everything looks okay – just two weeks left before we will head to Macao.

The team is very grateful for the great sponsoring from the ham community. As written earlier, in Macao we will be faced with a very difficult situation – antenna space, local noise and poor conditions on the higher bands. We spent a lot of money to improve this situation and we are sure that we found technical solutions for most of the problems. The generous sponsoring from DX-clubs and single hams helps to reduce these extra-costs for our team-members and enables us on the other hand looking optimistically forward to a successful DX-expedition.

We are planning to operate JT65 as a second digital-mode beside RTTY from time to time. For that purpose we will use K3 no. 4 with about 20 watts on the usual JT65 frequencies. We will practice short-QSO traffic and we are interested to see if JT65 is an option for expeditions under bad flux values. The other three 500 watt stations will operate around the clock in CW, RTTY and SSB as planned.

Update Jan,5: Our QTH will be the 5 Star Grand Coloane Resort. That is the hotel from which XX9TGM and XX9TYT have worked recently. You can find a lot of information in the story from Gerben, PG5M http://www.dx.to/dxpeditions/asia/xx9tgm-macau

The hill behind the hotel is not the property of the Resort, but would have been rather ideal as an antenna-ground. Unfortunately the owner doesn’t wish any antenna setup there. We got the permission from the hotel to set up antennas on the balconies. That means, the maximum distance between our planned 5 antenna masts will be around 40 meters and we need special constructions to fix the masts on the balconies. We have booked 6 of the 8 rooms with balconies on top floor including a separate room as a shack. For this special situation with three 500 watts stations we have optimized our technical equipment. There will be a collection of vertical and horizontal antennas, which will be used flexible. As there is no space for our spider beams we have to use a hexbeam, which we got on loan from SP7IDX. Thanks Waldi! It will be used on 20/15/10 meters with a triplexer. Our antennas have to be relative close together, so we have to take special precautions in filtering and blocking. We will have small W3NQN bandfilters between transceivers and amps and additional high power bandfilters from DG0SA between amplifiers and antennas on each band. New high quality coax cables, current baluns and common-mode filters are prepared and will be fixed on each antenna and station. Besides that we will take special care for line-noise filtering. Depending on the local situation we will see what we can do on 160 m, it is unpredictable in this moment, but we will do our best. The overall situation for all bands is a fair takeoff to the north and a very good one to the south (Long path North America).

We are planning to join the ARRL International DX Contest in CW (18./19. Feb 2017)

Update Dec,19: Suggested frequencies are:
CW - 1814.5, 3526, 7026, 10119, 14026, 18086, 21026, 24906 and 28026 kHz
SSB - 1849, 3805, 7095/7182, 14210, 18120, 21275, 24955 and 28465 kHz RTTY - 3595, 7046, 10136, 14090, 18099, 21090, 24918 and 28090 kHz
6m - 50120/CW and 50120/SSB

** PLEASE NOTE: These are the planned operating frequencies. Depending
on local situation, they may change the frequency. Please listen!
They will work always split....

They plan to have three stations on the air. QSL via DL4SVA, direct or
by the Bureau. Please use the OQRS on ClubLog (preferred) for XX9D for
direct and Bureau requests; they don't need your QSL-card!

Update Dec,18: Added link to the Web site

XX9LT, DJ9KH, DL2AWG, DL2HWA, DL2RNS, DL3HRH, DL4SVA, DL5CW, DM2AUJ, DM2AYO and DL7VEE will be active from Macau as XX9D between February 13-26, 2017. QRV on 80-10m CW, SSB & RTTY. QSL via DL4SVA.

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