KONG51 Day Six. We Didn't Need This!

 Woke up to a frosty (-4 Celsius), clear and calm morning - and another good DX day. Or so we thought.

Icy windscreen, and view to the east

Because, what's this??? The sun is calm, K-indices are down, and then we're having a proton event? It doesn't make sense. But there we are, trans-polar paths are very poor. Proton events are the worst the sun can throw at us. The only properly working signal path now is to the south.

Bad, bad news

We did hear a few seconds or minutes of audible signals between 22:00 and 22:30 yesterday from usual dominants like WLAC-TN 1510, WLQV-MI 1500, WWKB-NY 1520, WCKY-OH 1530 and CBEF-ON 1550, and indeed also from a few North Dakota and Manitoba stations. But few other stations made it through the "proton barrier".

During our drive to replace battery and SSD at the alt-Loran site, we also encountered this autumn's first snowfall at the coast. Not that the white stuff will hang around for much more than a day or two. The photo at the bottom shows the alt-Loran site today with its Zarges case which we saved from that rising pond yesterday, in tarpaulin camo.

First snow

alt-Loran

So, today's catch from North America apart from those mentioned above were KNOX-ND 1310 (and likely KWTL-ND 1370), CJRB-MB 1220, CHSM-MB 1250. And I found TWR Africa, Benin, 1476.

Another task we had scheduled for any windless day was repairing the connection between the feedline and antenna for one of my two FM antennas. Today was that windless day. We needed to lower the mast with the FM antennas and after a bit of work (and likely a bit of luck) we managed to get the non-working antenna up and running again. They are directed towards northwest (Iceland, Greenland, will I ever hear Canada?) and east (will I ever hear China?). The one-hop European scene is mostly done on my part, so an antenna pointing south towards another Es towards western Russia, the Baltic etc. isn't very interesting. Polar FM DX-ing is in some ways fundamentally different from DX in southern latitudes.

Dinner! We have two signature dishes on the KONG DXpedition, and King Crab (KONGekrabbe in Norwegian) is one. The other is scehduled for tomorrow. But first things first, it was prepared in a - for us - traditional way. Crab legs baked on a bed of sea salt in a Dutch oven - actually the same pot as today's bread was baked - including dried seaweed, spices and slices of lemon. Served with Pasta Carbonara and a Kim Crawford white wine from a favourite radio target for us - New Zealand.

A few words on weather to round up this blogpost: Throughout the day light precepitation as sleet or rain, just above zero so to make things extra wet. It seems that tomorrow will be more of the same.