S21DX Islands On The Air & World Lighthouse On The Air

 Finally two OM & one YL operator (S21RC, S21AM & S21JS) and one of our Ham interested friend managed to join the IOTA AS-127. We have reached St. Martin’s Island on 16^th Afternoon; the arrival was delayed due to heavy fog on the road and along the river.

.....

Antenna Tragedy:

We immediately started assembling the ancient beam bearing in mind about the dark evening. It was a Mosely 3 element 3 band very old beam donated by S21DM raised on a 20 feet bamboo pole. At the same time the others started putting up two stations in the small wooden cottage. To our disbelief, the beam gave us SWR 3 flat in all frequency. The whole night we checked cable, element etc and didn’t get anything wrong. Next morning we raised the beam another 10 feet thinking of the dense bush beneath the antenna changing the SWR. Finally no luck with the beam….. finally we decided that we will not lose time anymore fixing this old scrap, it was a full 24 hour we lost due to the faulty antenna.

Antenna recovering:

After realizing about the beam problem S21AM quickly started fabricating 80m, 40m, and 20m wire dipole hanging from coconut trees. Our first contact was A71EM 7064.5KHz 1740Z 16Jan2009. The dipole was having directional properties and the trees were playing enemy. 18^th Jan, when there was no propagation S21RC started fabricating a 20m Vertical in the paddy field at the back of the cottage.

The vertical produces very satisfactory result. A great amount of QSO was done with the vertical 20m. Next day we installed an 40m vertical using the Spiderbeam glassfiber mast, we were out of antenna wire and had to bring down the 80m dipole for making the counterpoise of the 40m vertical. The final antenna lineup is following:

• 40m Vertical (Thanks to spiderbeam for their support)
• 40m Dipole
• 20m Vertical
• 17m Dipole
• 10m Dipole

Equipment:

We are running two radios with laptops for logging. Radio powered by 230AH battery. We are running a Honda (bought for this expedition) 750VA generator for all our power need in constant basis (Yes, it is true that there is no electricity in the island, Thanks to all the donor for their support)

Running two station at the same time was almost impossible due to lack of Bandpass filter (lesson learned, next time we need BP filter for each band). Due to operator shortage it was also not possible to run the station 24/7. We hope next time (AS-140) we will do it in much batter shape.

•  For online LOG please visit http://s2iota.eb7dx.com
• QSL Manager EB7DX

Thanks to all the supporter of this expedition. Special thanks to W5BXX, Davis S Topp for being the gold donor.

Good hunting, 73’s from the Island, S21RC & S21AM

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