Category - Blog

Well the band conditions have been so good that we have decided to stay at the Clubhouse
in GW for a few more days, intending to travel home maybe Monday.

Conditions on 12 and 10m here having been unreal. Tim M0URX and I have logged well over 1000 q’s
in the sporadic operating over the last few days and probably 900 of those have been into NA.

We almost worked all States on each band but missed out on HI and the two Alaskan stations we worked turned out to be in a different area than the Callsign showed ;-( When 12m actually did close around 2030utc we took time out for a few beers with Stuie VK8NSB joining in the fun on SKYPE.

Ah well, there is always today….and tomorrow…..

Logs are already uploaded to LOTW (thanks Chris G1VDP) so the many people that thanked us for the new slot on 12 & 10 should already have it confirmed.

****had another good run on 40m this afternoon/evening and log for this latest visit now ended with 1740 qso’s logged. Thanks to all that worked us this weekend…. I will be back as MC0SHL in a few weeks!

Typhoon Francisco continues to become better organized in Northwestern Pacific waters as it spins southwest of Guam.

The system barely missed the island of Guam twice on its southwestern track before it changed direction to the northeast. Francisco has developed in a similar area to where former Typhoon Wipha formed last week. Francisco is now located southwest of the island and is moving northwest with maximum sustained winds of 96 mph.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecast has the storm moving north-northwest towards Japan over the next week.

New studies released at the American Astronomical Society’s 45th Annual Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Denver, Colorado suggests that Comet ISON could make it through its close perihelion passage near the Sun.

The first criterion for ISON to survive perihelion is its nucleus size. Comet nuclei smaller than 200 meters in diameter, with an average density or lower typically do not survive a close passage to the Sun. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as smaller telescopes, suggest that ISON is between 1 and 4 kilometers across..

ISON may be just big and dense enough not to be vaporized and to survive its close encounter with the Sun. So it looks like ISON appears likely to survive the combination of mass loss due to sublimation and tidal disruption for most plausible scenarios.

ISON will pass inside the Roche limit of the Sun, which is a distance of 2.4 million kilometers with temperatures approaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on closest approach. Comet ISON is expected to be the most active and put on its best showing post-perihelion – if it survives.

This weekend, Thursday 17th through to Monday 21st October 2013, MC0SHL will be on the air from the club HQ on the Pembrokeshire coast. This is not a special IOTA but mainland Great Britain (EU-005).

Please do call in and say hello. Tim has taken his radio and amp down so there could be 2 stations active on different bands at any one time.

The first batch of Logs arrived yesterday for the ZM90DX event.

The ZM90DX Logrsearch is available via Clublog but any log enquiries are welcome. Please email me at [email protected] for any searches or queries you may require. Qsl cards will be printed in the coming weeks.

Your Qsl Cards are not required (unless you wish to send them). The fastest way to receive any Qsl Card I manage is to request them via M0OXO OQRS.

Please listen for Marc (V31MA) in CQWW SSB this year as V3A from Belize.

The special callsign was issued by the Director Of Telecommunications yesterday and will be used in CQWW at the end of this month for the very first time.

Your Qsl Cards are not required so where possible, please do not send through the bureau and use OQRS.

The fastest way to receive any Qsl Card I manage is to request them via M0OXO OQRS.

I am pleased to say that the G100C Qsl Cards were mailed yesterday.

Again I apologise for the severe delay in getting these cards out whiuch was unfortunately beyond my control. Please see this link for further information http://www.qrz.com/db/G100C

234 cards were mailed Direct by First Class mail yesterday and approx 1800-2000 cards will be sent Direct to World Bureaus in the next week or so. Bureau cards are sent at my expense direct to World bureau as the Bureau to Bureau system is far too slow and I aim to have these cards with you within 6 months dependant on how fast your bureau is of course.

The fastest way to receive any Qsl Card I manage is to request them via M0OXO OQRS.

Great  news from the Mediterraneo Dx Club International Team. The leader Antonio, IZ8CCW and co-leader Gabriele, I2VGW are happy to announce to the DX community that after many months of hard work and with the great help of a local friend, Manjur, they were able to obtain a wonderful set of twin call signs that  will accompany the team during their new DXpedition to Bangladesh:  S21ZBC AND S21ZBB.

As a matter of fact, they are going to use the first one ( S21ZBC) with the DXpedition starting November 16th and ending November 22nd. Then they’ll shift to the other call (S21ZBB) that they’ll begin using November 23rd for the CQ WW CW CONTEST  week-end and for those remaining days until they pack up and leave the country.

For any further news and updates please visit the official website of the Bangladesh 2013 adventure: http://www.mdxc.org/bangladesh2013/

An intense earthquake swarm has been going on offshore North Iceland, 10 km NW of Gjögurtá, since September 25, 2013. This morning, 2 earthquakes reaching magnitude 3 and 3.2 occurred at 06:14 and 07:41 UTC. Roughly 1 000 earthquakes have been recorded by Icelandic Meteorological Office in last 6 days.

The depths of the quakes vary from about 15 km depth (crust-mantle boundary) to near surface. The area is located on an active fault line related to rifting, and a possible cause of the earthquake swarm could be a magmatic intrusion at Tjörnes Fracture Zone volcano.

A new submarine eruption started on September 28, 2013 NW of the island Jebel Zubair in the Red Sea. The ongoing eruption is SW of the 2011-12 eruption which created a new volcanic island there.

Satellite image from January 7, 2012, suggested that the eruption has risen nearly completely above water. A plume of steam, other volcanic gases, and ash spewed from a distinct cone. The land surrounding the vent has grown, and was about 530 by 710 meters (1 700 by 2 300 feet) across. Once above water, past eruptions in the Zubair Islands were primarily effusive, with relatively runny lava forming thin lava flows. In contrast to the fragmented rock that forms when lava interacts directly with water, lava that solidifies on land is tough, so this new island is likely to stick around.

The 5-km-long Jebel Zubair Island is the largest of a group of 10 small islands and submerged shoals that rise from a shallow platform in the Red Sea rift.

This latest phase of activity occurred on the morphologically youngest islands of Zubair, Centre Peak, Saba, and Haycock. Historical explosive activity was reported from Saddle Island in the 19th century. Spatter cones and pyroclastic cones were erupted along fissures that form the low spine of Zubair Island.