KONG 50 - Preps For A New Season At The KONG HQ

Friday 12-SEP

The 50th KONG DX-pedition! Who would have known, back in January 1997, when we had our first KONG. My goodness, we've come a long way.

We were gathered late afternoon on Friday the 12th, when Ole and OJ arrived from Andøya after a stop-over in Kiruna, Sweden. I had been on-site since Thursday afternoon doing what I do best - preparing the dinner, baking a bread and doing some light-hearted antenna work. Some internet issues were partially solved.

This is a proper bread

So...dinner: The traditional fish soup, comprising fish (aha!), chopped carrots, potatoes, seleriac and leek, and of course a red chili for a bit of bite. For dessert we had chocolate pudding with custard - a rather common choice for us. Calles Riesling with the soup, Grappa with the dessert.

Bjarne (left), Ole and OJ. The roses on the table is a definite first in our KONG meetings. Was it in honour of the anniversary?
 

View to the west after sunset

Quite a windy day, gusting at 20 m/s  but only a light breeze in the evening. The temperature maxed out at 20 degrees Celsius, itself almost unheard of in mid-September at this latitude. The minimum temperature was 14!

Saturday 13-SEP

Followed by a view to the northeast before sunrise!

Weak signal levels from North America overnight on the 310-degrees beverage antenna, with only the common stations at readable levels. Smøla HQ recordings were a bit more exciting for me, with WALG Albany GA heard on 1590. The day before, the rather common WAUB Auburn NY dominated that frequency.

My ISP was here on Friday and set up a new fibre box from Zyxel which for most of their customers will double as a router. I had ordered they put it in bridge mode because I have a well working RUTX10 router from Teltonika "inside" of the fibre box. But they didn't do that, did they? It became very obvious that they hadn't, so that had to be fixed. So, we configured the Zyxel for bridge mode, reset, and everything was fine. But when I tried to log on to the RUTX10, I ended up at the Zyxel device! With the Zyxel down I was able to access the RUTX10, only to find out that it was set in bridge mode! But why??? Anyway, I decided to not pursue the matter any further, and let the RUTX10 be connected to the Zyxel. Why? The case is that I have lots of Sonoff devices here that need to speak to Wifi. They can not connect if the wifi password requires special characters. The Zyxel router however does not accept a wifi password without special characters. Go figure.

Most of the rest of the day was spent outside erecting, repairing and configuring the 50-degrees and 340-degrees beverages. The 50-degrees is complete, (or so we thought, see Sunday) the dual, staggered 340 wires are up but some final adjustments, such as grounding and weatherproofing will be done Sunday.

After a windy and cloudy start, the wind calmed and the clouds disappeared so with temperatures close to 20 Celsius we could work in shirt-sleeves.

Dinner! Fried and oven baked pork tenderloins, fried and baked small potatoes, with a salad of broccoli, chopped celery stalks, red grapes, sweet cherry tomatoes, finely chopped red onion and a dressing made of red wine vinegar, olive oil and a little touch of sugar. Chocolate pudding again for dessert. An old friend of ours, a 2023 Belleruche Côtes‑du‑Rhône red wine joined us for the main course, and one of the most exclusive brands of grappa, Grappa di Brunello, kept us company for the dessert. 

Dinner!

Late afternoon I also set another dough of bread, It will need 12-14 hours to rise, so that's a story for...

Sunday, 14-SEP

Up at 06:30, I just managed to save the dough before it collapsed! Then followed two hours with light massage between 30-minute rests, and a two-hour final proofing before going into the oven. Good result.

The 310 and 340 beverages delivered very well overnight! Their directivity properties were proved (again), as 1450 kHz gave us WMFJ Daytona Beach FL on the 310, and KFIZ Fond-du-Lac WI on the 340.

The 50 beverage however appeared to be in a bad state. The miserable reception required some fault finding, and finally some adjustments late in the afternoon lowered the noise floor by a whopping 15dB or more. Result! 

The morning was crisp, calm and chilly, a welcome change from previous days. During the day the temperature rose to around 16 Celsius, in the evening around 12. The coming week will see gradually lower temperatures, and some rain. Since September is known to be a rainy, cold and windy month, we're extremely satisfied with this weekend's weather.

View from the HQ. Goosanders resting in the bay before heading towards southerly winter locations.
 

And then, the last dinner this time: Baked cod loins on a bed of pre-baked root vegetables along with red onion, bits of bacon and cherry tomatoes. The cod was baked with Sriracha salsa from Wildfire, an excellent spicy touch to the excellent fish. Served with rice. The selected wine was Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand.

Salsa Cod

For dessert we had the rest of the chocolate pudding, along with some Grappa. Later on we checked the MW band on the 50 degrees beverage. The band was awash with Japanese stations and a few Australians as well.

This will be the last post from us until it's time for the KONG51 log, starting the third week of October. Ole and OJ will drive south at 06:00 tomorrow and will visit DX-ers in Sweden along the way. For me it's a 2.5 hour drive back to work.

Receivers and antennas

Antennas: 

50-degrees, 520 metres. Directed towards northern parts of Asia and the Pacific. Western Europe on the backlobe.

310 degrees, 275 metres. Directed towards eastern North America.

340 degrees: 2 x 340 metres, staggered. Directed towards western North America.

Receivers: 9 Perseus SDRs (3 each). Preamps and splitters. Software is Jaguar Pro, version 10 or earlier.