VK9LA Lord Howe Island DXpedition 2009

Sydney

We had a big delay with our plane from LHI but finally we arrived to Sydney at 7:30 PM local time on Friday.

We also had an official dinner that brought a real end to the expedition. Preparing a big update to the blog. Hope I’ll manage to post it before departing for EU on next Tuesday. Meanwhile - touring Sydney!

VK9LA QRT

Each dx-pedition must bring to its end. So do we…. VK9LA officially went QRT on April 2, 2009 around 9.00 local time. We had to put the antennas down earlier due to rough wx conds (again!). We ar also supposed to leave our apartments earlier than scheduled.  We will upload the newest and the latest log update soon. Everybody is really exhausted due to lack of sleep and physical efforts to keep everything running. Feeling sort of melancholy when seeing all things being put down and packed…

The night before I was so happy to bring more Q’s on 160m to EU. I’ve been there for 2 hours at EU SS, then I have been swapped by Bill VK4FW for another 1 hour. I had a really huge pileup on 30m that night.

We tried 160 today to, but after 1h of CQ calling nobody replied. 40 & 30 were in poor conds, too. However we managed to work some EU on 80m SSB.

I’ll do another blog update maybe today evening our time inc. a story about our hard hike trip to Mount Gower. Pictures are already in the gallery.

Last 24 hours on Lord Howe

Yesterday Kasia and I were at the local hill around 300 a.s.l. The view to the ocean, Neds Beach and the mountains was perfect. You are gonna see it on the photos we provide after we get to some decent Internet connection or at least when we get home. By the way - there will be a film available after we get to Poland as well.
Speaking about climbing — Stan, Vicky, Tony and Maddalena has managed to get the tallest mountain on the Island — Mount Gower. It was pretty hard and they looked really really exhausted in the afternoon.

We had a nice conditions to Europe this night. I was working on 80m SSB for couple of hours late night. There are couple of SP as well, dzięki! Thank you all for your efforts I hope that all of you managed to make QSO with us.

We are getting closer and closer to the end of our lovely stay at Lord Howe Island. Last night was the last one we were active on air. We are going to put down all the rest of antennas today. There will be only one CW station on the air (40/80/160) no stations, we are QRT. Tomorrow we fly back to Sydney. Part of the team goes off the Island today.

Weather is bit worse since couple of days. There is no such a great sunshine which colorized the island in so spectacular way. Strong wind, some rain and cloudy sky is what we have since then. But this is even better for us. Hopefully it will be easier to leave the island. Today we will be signing out some of the operators. We hope that it is not the last time we see each other. I am pretty sure that this expedition will be a beginning of some cross-continental friendships. I will do my best to get to the next dxpedition organised by Bill VK4FV and ODXG.

We’ll keep you updated about our moves. The closest one is Sydney.

New photos

Just uploaded some new pictures of LHI’s landscapes, you can find them here.

We are back online!

After 3 days of lack of the Internet access we are back online! I just updated the online log which I prepared on Saturday. Will make another update tonight our time.

Now it’s clear the island has been hit by a tropical storms which are remains of the TC “Jasper”. Winds are still VERY strong and I can’t even imagine how they would be strong like if this was the TC itself!

High QRN continues unfortunately. I’ve been to 30/cw today morning for almost 3 hours but I was forced to give it up due to extremely noise level making reading takers impossible.

If the wind continues, we will be forced to take some beams tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1)  leaving verticals and dipoles for 160/80/40/30. Feels like VK9LA starts to bring to its close… We leave on Friday Apr 3rd.