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Avainsana: English

Good Stuff

Monday evening was well spent sitting in front of the radios. Pillows are much in need with this hobby 🙂 It all started at 1430 UTC with Greece, 1500 Normandy and thereabouts again, 1615 Turkey and Greece and the archipelago in between, up until 1705. New round at 1915 with a tougher set of Normandy and Jersey Islands, 1925 Spain with a strong peak at 1935, fadeout at 2005, but short openings came up and down until 0110 local time.

The gems are all listed in Harri’s blog: http://www.uto-fmdx.blogspot.com/

Our card playing championships’ third round was cancelled yesterday evening because of the opening. The game is Reverse Old Heck/Reverse Up and Down, a fine variation of ”Oh, hell” that Wikipedia claims to be Bill Clinton’s favourite game. As usual, the bookkeeper keeps on winning (not me).

Radio Dio, Saint Etienne (42), made its first visit to Finland.
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I Do Like Mondays

Finest of French

 
This morning offered a mixed two-hour session to Normandy. Mostly familiar stuff, but Aunt Esmeralda had some surprises in her bag as well.
 
The afternoon opening from Central Finland to Holland went straight over our heads, so it was time to fix the vertical aerial. Now it’s in a much better place and all kinds of interesting stations flow in, eg 99.8 Kelyje (Klaipeda-tx LTU).
 
A new personal tropospheric scatter distance record was made last night with 102.1 PR3 Bygdoszcz-tx. The distance is a whopping 749 km. Mr. Hepburn says the theoretical maximum for this propagation method is around 700 km. Of course, this distance limit is not valid for ”real tropo” (which we haven’t had at all). The troposcatter signals can be really surprising, lifting up one station at a time up to noise-free levels for a minute or two. The Baltic Sea makes it happen much easier than on the mainland.
 
Midnight at the Utö village

 
Frog crossing

 

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Here Comes the Sun


 
The sun came out and so did we for some BBQ sausages. Somehow we managed to forget to keep our ears on the band and only caught the tail end of a Spanish opening. Highly embarrassing.
 
Check also: http://uto-fmdx.blogspot.com/
 

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Give Me Hope, Esmeralda

Radio Espérance during a nice French opening today

 
The morning dawned still windy and cold (+9 C). The wind had blown away the reflector of our OIRT antenna, otherwise the antennas had stayed in place. After a refreshing morning jog around the island (6 km) we saw a red cargo ship approaching us with the name KESS painted on it. Was it a greeting from our dear friend Es? It seems so, as 0700 UTC Sherlock’s MUF map started looking interesting.
 
The band opened at 0727 with a brief Spanish opening in two intervals, followed by a Balkan opening focusing on Bulgaria and Thessaloniki but only reaching 94 MHz. The best part of the day started at 0945 with a rather good French opening up to 108 MHz that lasted for an hour or so before starting a hanging ”hiccup” situation of some French and Balkan stations coming and going. Portuguese stations were also heard on some frequencies, but the mystery remains whether they were real or just immigrant services from France.
 
Now at 1357 Sherlock looks promising but the band is empty. Everybody’s drooling for more…
 
 

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Introducing the Band

Triax in the wind

Antennas are in place and they’re rocking back and forth in the merciless wind. Lot of troposcatter in the air all the way from Bornholm, Gothenburg, Kaliningrad, Klaipeda and of course Gdansk. 101.7 R Plus Gdansk reaches RDS levels from time to time.
 
Sporadic E has been non-existent since the UK opening yesterday when we still were on our way here. Let’s hope the trend is not turning against us: so far we’ve had Es on every day in June.
 
JJS and MB rigging up the vertical

 
If all else fails, there always time to enjoy the beautiful archipelago (read: watch football on tv with a pint of the excellent local beer 😉
 
Official beverage of the Utö6 FMDXpedition

 
 

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Utö 6 is live!

Harri braves the bitter wind

The team arrived here at midnight. After a short night’s sleep we started setting the antennas up in the bitter wind. It’s only +12 C outside and the wind forecast says up to 20 m/s is expected this afternoon (8 Beaufort). It’s blowing with unobstructed force into our semi-detached cabins. But inside it’s nice and warm, some tropo to inland Sweden and continuous meteor pings. Time to get acquainted with the exciting and ever changing band before Es (hopefully) hits…



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