It’s taken a few days to update the final day of the operation as I had travelling and a family visit to VK5 land to attend to. But I’m happy to say that this 5 day IOTA DXpedition has been a lot of fun and very satisfying. It’s been hard work keeping to the 18 hour per day operating schedule with a 2 hour lunch midday break and 4 hours of sleep, however I feel I was in front of the dials for every opening that occurred. The 5 days resulted in 3925 QSO’s into 93 DXCC entities which averaged out to around 800 QSO’s per day. This was a nice improvement on the 350 per day on Magnetic Island OC-171 and 500 per day on Fitzroy Island OC-172.
The big success was the short path to Europe on 20m and 15m with the Spiderbeam doing a great job. It would have been nicer to have better conditions to North America on 40m, 15m and 10m (20m was dead), but still I ended up with 248 QSO’s there – not good enough, but much better than my previous IOTA trips to OC-171 and OC-172. Here is the breakdown of what happened.
Band QSO’s
21 1548 39%
14 1496 38%
28 733 19%
7 148 4%
Total 3925
Mode QSO's
SSB 3828 (98%)
PSK31 97 ( 2%)
Continent QSO’s
Europe 2456 (62.6%)
Asia 976 (24.8%)
North America 248 ( 6.4%)
Oceania 237 ( 6.0%)
South America 4 ( 0.1%)
Africa 4 ( 0.1%)
I’ve started receiving QSL cards and I’ve replied back to them today. My wife and I are on a Pacific Island cruise from April 2-15 (no radio!!) and so expect a couple of weeks delay in replying during this period. Then I’m off to Magnetic Island OC-171 again for my last DXpedition on that IOTA for few days on April 17-20 to try the Spiderbeam there.
Thanks to everyone for the QSO, I tried to give as many contacts out as possible. I hope to work you on Magnetic Island in April if you still need OC-171.
73s de Craig VK4LDX / VK8PDX
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