We arrived to Vanuatu on Monday late afternoon, early evening. We started to set up the station in Thuesday morning. It took couple of hours to set up the station and test everything, but when we finished it, there was mains blackout for a couple hours. We are running one station with 400 watts
The antennas are set up on 12 meter high spider pole in the salt water. The good news is that we have exeded 5000 QSO in the first 4 days. The pile up is huge on all the bands, as you also can hear.
The bad one is that, unfortunately, we could not be on the air as much as we liked, due to the efforts we made to be QRV on the 160 meter band. We made all the efforst to be on the top band, as well, but we have to decide to make more antenna tests or to operate on the other 8 bands. After 4 days of unsuccesful efforts, now we decided to operate as much as possible on the rest of the 8 bands and we will not continue the very time consuming antenna test for 160 meters. Sorry, but we hope and do belive that still there is life beyond the 160 meters band. There is very high demand for YJ on the other bands, as well.
The internet access is limited, however we can upload the log to the LotW and to the log search, but we can not upload photos. We will do it after arrival back home for you better information on our daily life on the island.
Tha antenna maintanance is a permanent daily program due to the strong destructive effect of the see. That is the number one project each morning during the low tide.
During the night operation we need to ask QRX frequently due to the insect invasion. The repellent is our best friend during the night
Now we kindly want to rise the EU station attention again and again to their very bad operating practice. We want to ask more patient and attention in the pile up. It should result more chance to log you. We can achive 3, 4 times higher rates working with stations from other continets. It means 3, 4 times more stations in the log. Please consider when you have the higher possibility to have you logged? If you call us continously without any respect to the other station we call, you making difficoult for us to copy the right callsign and log the station we called only with several request to repete and clarify the callsign because of the QRM. It is very time consuming and means less chance for you to have logged. The solution is very simple and it is in your hand. Please call us with more patient.
The other aspect of this attitude: the DX station operator can hear the callsign of the QRMer station. Have these QRMer operator ever had thinking about what the DX operator shoul think about this person? It is not too difficult to imagine. We still belive in the good operating practice. Do hope it is not only a dream for us when we working with EU stations.
73, Pista and George
