Steve G3VMW writes;
”We had our first brief opening on 10m today and worked a lot of southern EU stations, but propagation was poor further north into EU. The only G worked was G4CCZ. 12m has been quite good at times, but the opening is here is short and at best, only for an hour or two around 12z.
160m and 80m were very good last night and Bob and I plan to be there again tonight from about 21z onwards, although I doubt we will be QRV all night. We worked a couple of ZLs on 80m this morning at around 06:15z, and 80m might be a good bet for the ZLs needing 9G. G signals generally are really good on all bands with us, but the pile-ups are still quite heavy. However, we do have our G ears turned on, and recognise many of the the calls of our G colleagues calling in the pile-ups.We plan to try some RTTY tomorrow, probably on 20m to start with. Over the weekend we will be on RTTY and WARC bands, away from the contest activity.
Some of the guys have gone off to look at the old slave forts along the Cape Coast at Elmina today, so we are down to only three ops. We are still troubled with our KAT-500 amplifiers tripping out, either from RF or low volts. This is despite the big voltage regulator we’ve borrowed to stabilize the mains volts, which often drops to 190 volts. We are also experiencing daily power outages and although there is a standby generator here, changeover is not automatic, and very slow.
All of us were delighted with Iain M0PCB’s effort in the Commonwealth Contest, despite poor conditions. A great way to celebrate his 32nd birthday.
This is a fabulous site for radio, high in the hills above Accra, but has very basic accommodation and is still very much work in progress. We have had to put the good resources of Mr. Fred, G4BWP to procure some decent food locally for the cook here to prepare. However, our Dutch host has been very generous in allowing us to rig our many aerials all over the hotel roof and in the grounds. Finally, we are being constantly troubled by people making duplicate QSOs. Thankfully, not our G friends, but there seems to be a hardcore of EU stations who feel the need to crack the 9G5X pile-up every day, just because they can. It is very annoying!
Thanks for all the QSOs so far and especially to Charles M0OXO for his good work uploading our logs to Clublog and LoTW.
73 Steve, G3VMW” QSL via M0OXO OQRS or Direct Post Mail.
