Inside Bouvet: Live with the 3Y0K DXpedition Team

Worked them for an ATNO during very brief openings on 17 & 12m fone, 100W into the WARC-band element on my TA-33 Jr! Thanks, guys!

 

Worked them for an ATNO on 12 and 17 digi and 15m CW.
Didn't believe to break through a big pileup in CW with 80W and a simple Levy antenna in inverted V configuration 25ft high.
But we were lucky in EU.

 

Propagation was poor here also ....however the CW jammers and other lids came through just fine ......

 

Ok, I have to say it was great ! I have tried twice before without even hearing the call...but this time I have already been able to confirm 30m and 40m , used 200 Watts and a wire or vertical from AZ. Thank you to the team ! Morgan WW7B

 

Looking forward to Adrian's presentation at the Santa Maria DX convention next month. It should be very interesting to see and hear about the expedition.

 

Worked on 2 bands QRM nightmare and light from Reno Nv. Not a great path. But Big Kudos to the team thanks for a new one.

 

I saw them 1 time on 30m FT8 for about 15 mins then faded out and never caught them again on any band.

 

Спасибо за ваш труд!

 

Heard them briefly ...it was a cluster **** omg biggest pileup in history!!
100k contacts i wonder what that workout to be per contacts and the thousands to get 100k in contacts...im thinking 2000$ per contact

 

very low ssb operation, not a ft8 fan so sorry no contact

 

Someone said they made 100,000 contacts, and the DXpedition costs were said to be around $2 million.
That would make it about $20/QSO.

 

The only band that I heard and worked them on was on 40 meters using a quickly built and deployed pair of phased verticals beaming long path with 300 watts.

All of the higher bands from 20 to 10 meters, where I have my highest gain 2 and 4 element yagis, never got any use because they were below the noise floor and unreadable on short and long path.

The entire Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, accounted for less than 1 % of the total 100K qso's, we really were in the black hole for Bouvet propagation.

 

Got them on 10 & 12 SSB and 12 CW with a low 80M full wave loop. Many thanks to the team.

 

I've already posted this on the "DXpeditions" forum, but here it is again:

I think that the 3Y0K team would have preferred to make most of their contacts on CW and phone, but after experiencing the demented behavior on those modes, they decided that they could make significantly more total contacts by using FT-8 much of the time. For those of you who wonder why FT-8 has become such a popular mode for DXpeditions, consider this: It eliminates much (but not all) of the LID behavior in the pile-ups. It eliminates the continuous calling stations, the guys who repeat their callsigns over and over again. It eliminates the “tail enders”, those guys who delay making their call until after other stations have called. It eliminates the guys who “drop in” their callsign before the DX station has finished a QSO. It eliminates the guys who continue to give their call when the DX station queries a partial callsign that is not even close to theirs. Those lids are their own worst enemy. Then there's the frequency cops who cause more QRM than the guy who forgets to hit the "split" button. These behaviors make for an extremely difficult and exhausting operation for the DX station, and it slows down the QSO rate tremendously for everybody. If you are disappointed that FT-8 is the mode of choice of DXpeditions, then everyone needs to quit being a LID and operate like gentlemen on CW and phone. Send your full callsign once, and wait for the DX to pick a station out of the pile. When you make contact, give a signal report and nothing else, let the DX move on to the next QSO. Of course FT-8 also eliminates the emotionally disturbed wankers who play music or make noises or stupid comments, or otherwise get their jollies from screwing things up for others. On FT-8, the object of the pile-up doesn't hear the mayhem, he merely looks at the signals that are decoded and clicks on a few of them at a time. That's MUCH less stressful than trying to pick a callsign out of a CW or phone pile-up, and the automatic transmit and receive cycles prevents the "tail-enders" from extending the calling cycle to ridiculous lengths. Unless the phone and CW pile-ups become much more civilized, FT-8 will probably continue to be the mode of choice for many DXpeditions. FT-8 gives the "average ham" with 100 watts and a modest antenna a sporting chance to work a station that he otherwise would probably never be able to work.

 

I would like to see some other digital modes used too. PSK31 and RTTY