KONG53 Minus Five Days

I had a brief visit to the KONG-HQ on Saturday and Sunday. All of a sudden, after an extraordinary mild September and early October, winter struck. It may look tranquil and nice on the photo below taken at the highest part of the mountain crossing. But to the west (left) loomed dark clouds with snow and hail showers, and the black tarmac was actually icy - blind ice as we call it. I met a German campervan on the way, They drove with great care, contrary to what many other foreign tourists do in the winter season. I had my winter tyres on last Wednesday.

Appearances can be deceiving...

After arriving at the KONG-HQ, the rest of the day was spent indoor. There were a few chores waiting - I had brought with me most of the food and beverages we need for the DX-pedition that start next Friday - and my readers will know that we eat a lot. I also had to replace a PC that wasn't performing as it should. That, and a software issue turned out to take a lot longer than I expected. Which probably was to be expeced....

Of course, I couldn't resist the temptation to make a proper KONG-HQ dinner, with a fried and baked salmon loin and tagliatelle with proper pesto. I had half a bottle of a Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc left after Ole and OJ three weeks ago. A white wine from Down Under is never wrong!

Windy with showers throughout the rest of the day, but calming a little bit in the late evening. I stood at the front door a couple of minutes to try and capture the mood. I'm not sure if I succeeded, but this is what my mobile phone camera saw:

Blustery Saturday evening at the KONG-HQ

Temperatures were low, but luckily stayed just north of the zero mark. I have a somewhat complicated water delivery system - a part of it is on the ground and as we know, water tend to freeze.

Saturday was my planned outdoor day, and the weather had improved quite a bit with less wind, fewer snow showers and a bit "warmer" - if you can call +2.5 Celsius that.

Calm Sunday morning at the KONG-HQ

Road conditions were even worse than Saturday though. The main tasks was to inspect the new, ultra-slim wires after we had 27 m/s wind gusts on Thursday. All is well. I  also set up physical markers for the alt-Loran beverage antenna. It's very easy to stray off course when walking the wire out, especially when the target point is out of sight. Moving the wire back into its path is time consuming - we've done that a few times. Yes, we do use GPS but hand-held units do lack some accuracy and you tend to forget to check. Two weeks ago I walked the path and sprayed red paint on rocks along the way. Today I supplemented with fibreglass rods that are easier to see and navigate by from a distance.

Inspecting antennas at the KONG-HQ. A dense snow shower moving in from the north.

Leading the way - marking the antenna path at alt-Loran

If all goes well, the next post will be on Friday October 16th!

KONG52 Season Preps - Final Day

 A bit more windy today, 10 m/s gusting at 13, yet sunny and temperatures above the 10 Celsius mark. When we were out yesterday we heard the odd shot in the distant, telling us that grouse hunting season has started. Maybe we should have worn those red KONG caps...

The MW band was amazingly noise-free last night. This early in the season only 2-4 hours of trans-polar DX is possible. We had a good peak at 01z. Mostly mid-west - Michigan and Wisconsin stations were very clear as indicated in the yaslog below (that peak on 1240.0258 is WOMT).

WOMT Manitowoc WI

Less common is KNIM Maryville MO 1580, surfacing just enough for an ID after the full hour. The signal is visible inside the white circle. CKDO is the 1580 dominant in conditions like this, it's the steady signal to the left.

KNIM Maryville MO

Since my guests Ole and OJ have a long drive head of them, we decided to end KONG52 with a hefty lunch at 11:30 local with fried (with proper butter) and baked chicken fillets together with Jasmine rice, a sweet chili sauce with ginger, and blueberry (bilberry), cloudberry and lingonberry chutney. At 12:40 they were off, heading towards Finland, Sweden and then back to Norway. That's the shortest route.

Lunch. KONG-style

We will meet again for KONG53! Starting October16th, ending on the 25th.

KONG52 Final Season Preps - Day Three

 Another magnificent day in the Arctic!

Last evening, the 19 and 20z full hours brought a few interesting logs. A handful of Aussies, a few from the Philippines (like DXUM Davao City 819 and DXKS Suriago City 1080) and some of the former NHK-1 (now NHK-AM) stations, plus RFC Radio Fukushima on 1395. The most surprising catch however was AFN The Eagle 1512 kHz from Pohang, South Korea. 500 watts listed.

Overnight, the new, ultra light 310 beverage proved its value with an unusual low noise level and a nice peak before and at the 02z slot. Nothing out of the ordinary, though.

The most important task today was checking status at our alt-Loran site, 30 km away. Everything seemed to be in good order, the antenna reel and fibreglass support rods were untouched since last October. On the way we drove into Berlevåg for some supplemental shopping, at what is claimed to be the world's northernmost SPAR store (for most non-Europeans: SPAR is one of the largest food chains in Europe). That's me (left) and OJ posing in the face-in-the-hole board...

No further comments please...

 Back at the KONG HQ we had a beer or two outside in the excellent weather before finishing the antenna works with improved grounding and termination on the "far" side of the dual 340 beverage. 

A beer or two. Ole (left) and OJ. Dead calm.

Dinner! No KONG without salmon. This time with Carbonara. With proper Pancetta. We fried the salmon in the Pancetta fat for some extra flavour and it worked out very well. Another bottle of Kim Crawford white wine was a perfect match. Later on I strolled outside at twilight to try to catch the evening mood. I didn't quite succeed, but this one worked out reasonably well.

Earlier in the afternoon OJ had been out walking, and took this beautiful picture of the 50-degrees beverage. 

Weather: The day started cloudy, but by 14:00-15:00 local the sky was clear. 13-14 Celsius and not the slightest breeze until evening. It looks like Sunday is going to be a bit milder still. 

Evening conditions are good, with strong signals from Japan. Some with signal levels exceeding -50 dBm. At 20z we noted AFN The Eagle again, confirmed offset is 1511.9862. A few of the low-power (100 watts) NHK-AM stations also surfaced at that time, such as Kumamoto 1341 and 1503, Yamagata 1584 and maybe Akita (two outlets) on 1017.

Tomorrow Sunday is departure day so we will only stay to around lunch time. We will see if the few hours are worth a blogpost.

KONG52 Final Season Preps - Day Two

Friday - Antenna day!

The goal was to erect the dual, staggered 340-degrees beverage, and replace the current 310-degrees beverage wire with the new UL wire. The 340 was set up with the original Hofi wire at one site, and the new HDS-NEU at the other.

Starting point of the HDS-NEU 340 wire

All of this went well. We were a bit surprised though to note that the 310 had a 2.5 - 3 dB gain loss with the new wire. We have a nearby NDB that we use for regular antenna gain checks. We did not see a similar effect on the 340. A snapshot from just before 01Z to 03 shows that the UL does work. The question though is - will it last? We will leave the old wire in reserve in case the UL doesn't survive the coming autumn winds.

310 Beverage, first night

Some indoor chores were finished as well. OJ and Ole have a lot of gear to configure for the coming season. From the photo below it looks like they mean business! Btw the drawing above the HDDs is from a photo taken around 1925 when the house was relatively new, and a lot smaller than today.

 

The weather was perfect. Calm, partly cloudy and 12-13 Celsius. No mosquitoes this late in the season. We couldn't ask for more.

Dinner! Bjarne's fish soup, made from scratch, is a tradition on the September gatherings. The usual Norwegian stuff - chopped carrots, seleriac, potatoes, leak and haddock, with a red chili thrown in for extra flavour. The Kim Crawford white wine from New Zealand is a traditional companion.

For dessert we enjoyed creamy dessert ice cream with wild forrest berries, topped with locally made cloudberry chutney. The chutney had so much clove flavour it almost felt like Christmas. A bit of Amaretto with the ice cream.

A couple of photos below showing the autumn colours.

Late afternoon sun (obviously facing west)

KONG-HQ (facing north)

KONG52 - Season Final Preps - Day One

 Greetings from the KONG-HQ! Bjarne, Ole and OJ are here for an "oval" weekend, preparing for the coming MW season.

KONG Crew with KONG Caps. From left: OJ, Bjarne, Ole

This year sees new antenna wires from DX-Wire in Germany. Light-weight and quite a bit more flexible than the Hofi wires we have used so far. We bought two kinds for testing, the Ultra Light version with a 1.5mm diameter, and the HDS-NEU cable, heavier and more resilient yet only 2mm diameter. If they work well over the winter, we will likely replace all our wires next year - or maybe earlier! Size and colour comparison below.

DX-Wire - Will they be the new standard?

Quick but not particularly light dinner yesterday (Thursday) 2 x 160g Angus burgers each, with Brioche burger bread and red wine or beer.

Today Friday is calm, partly cloudy and 11-12 Celsius. Perfect for outdoor work! More as it happens.

MW Season Underway (sort of)

With August coming to an end, it's already 8 hours between sunset and sunrise here. So, skywave signals from other continents are beginning to show up. On Sunday I will fly down to Oslo for a few days so I thought it was time to make operative a couple of beverage antennas. No reindeer that could make a mess of the wire were in sight either, happy days!

Sunny and calm when I arrived on Friday afternoon. Ocean swells were poundering the coastline at the time, and the effect was seen, and not least heard! in these protected waters as well. Check this 16-second video out (headphones or a proper subwoofer recommended!):

The 50-degrees beverage, laid out as a BOG last weekend was raised to its normal height, and Queensland's 4QD on 1548 was heard clearly together with Radio Farda. Narracoorte on 1161 was also audible at times, not much else though.

After my Saturday morning coffee and some breakfast I reeled out and elevated the 310-degrees beverage. It's short for a beverage, 275 metres, but that's what the terrain allows. Looks good, and sounds good! Perfect weather for outdoor antenna work: 18-19 Celsius, clear skies and only a light breeze. The no-knead breaddough I set on Friday was put into its final 2-hour proofing at noon, and.... Yes! We have result!

No-knead bread is better than no bread

A couple more pictures from Saturday evening, 22-ish:

View to the north. That white spot on the lower right is actually the control unit of a MegaDipol MD300DX!

View to the west

Summer at (and around) the KONG-HQ

So, it's been a few days since the Midnight Sun waved goodbye. Another MW season is about to start! The FM season started here early May, with hopes to hear stations from Siberia, Kazakhstan and China's western provinces on one antenna, and stations in the Arctic, Iceland, Greenland and possibly Canada on the other. I and Ole Forr had SDRPlay receivers that did the FM band, but not the distance (hopeless reference to a Cake song) which is double-hop. 

Most logs were noted from as far east as Russia's Komi Republic to as far west as the Netherlands. Ukraine was logged for the first time this summer. The usual UK high-powered stations from Scotland mainland, Orkneys and Shetland were heard, and a few (much less than previous years) from Iceland. Greenland and a couple from the Arctic islands were also noted. As with previous years, the combination of waterfall BMPs and IQ recordings off HDSDR, together with playback on SDR Console, worked well.

Another tool that may make band surveillance a bit more efficient is the new RDS Bridge by British DX-er Graeme Stoker. It can scan the FM band continuously, and also play back IQ files, such as those recorded with HDSDR. RDS Bridge is as add-on to the SDRconnect software and uses a browser interface so no installation is required. We're basically in "test mode" at the moment, but it looks like it decodes RDS roughly as good as SDR Console. RDS Bridge today is very much a work in progress.

RDS Bridge - luckily for me also available in light mode

Antennas

Antenna wires need to be replaced now and then. We have used extremely strong wires with a copper core inside steel strands and insulation. They don't stretch like copper wires, and they perform admirable in a very demanding climate. But the insulation is thin, and if it's damaged the steel will rust and eventually break. The steel reduces flexibility too, and the wire weighs a bit, 25.5 grams per metre. We will experiment this season with lighter wires which hopefully have enough strength.

A bit of work had to be done with antenna supports as well. We use a combination of treated wooden fence posts and fibreglass fence posts designed for electric fences. A few places the antenna wires would touch terrain which of course damaged the insulation and ulitmately caused the wire to break because of rust. Below is a hopefully permanent replacement at one such spot.

New antenna support

Transformers

Or baluns as many call them. Important hardware! We have used transformers from DX-Engineering for many years and they have performed well. One of them went bad last year, maybe because of a nearby lightning discharge. We bought in a set of new transformers from QRO.CZ, not necessarily to replace but supplement the DX-Engineering ones. As you can see on the image they are a lot larger but they also offer better protection and at a substantial lower cost - at least in Europe. A no-name transformer I bought for USD 9 at Alibaba is shown for reference (it is quite useless on MW).

Transformers.

Inside the QRO.CZ transformer

Ole, OJ and I will meet at the KONG-HQ for a few days around September 10th to set up all our gear. The "proper" DX-pedition will take place in week 43, but beginning on October 16th.

And here is a view from late in the evening last Saturday.

Smøla-HQ Repairs and Maintenance Trip

It was time for the annual trip to the island Smøla! Smøla, "flat as a pancake" sits a few hours' drive southwest of the city of Trondheim. For me, that involves a whole day of travelling. First, several hours on a plane, followed by a rental VW ID.4 from Trondheim airport. Ole and OJ live closer, but this time it was impossible for them to join. So, it was just me, along with the host and radio amateur Rolf. I arrived at his property just before 20 local on Thursday.  I had brought with me some sushi I bought on the way.

Pancake Island, aka Smøla

Winter at Smøla is challenging, and our beverages were in a sorry state. The 315 beverage had been cut almost at the starting point, while the 290 beverage was broken after around 200 metres of its 700-metre run. Antenna supports were broken or missing. Most of Friday was spent outdoor, repairing and tensioning wires, inspecting the full length of the antennas including the far ends - which are on the other side of a narrow tidal channel!

Pancake pt. II. The mainland mountain range in the background. 

A test after the repairs had been done confirmed that performance is good. We had good luck with the weather - 16-17 Celsius, calm, but very humid. I was drenched in sweat when I had finished..

Smøla HQ

Dinner! Yes, we have great dinners at the Smøla HQ too. Two 180-gram burgers each, with salad and a bottle of Alleanza Wongraven red wine. Wongraven is actually a Norwegian label on this excellent Italian wine with a drawing of the Norwegian folklore devil Fanden. After dinner we checked out a couple of high-octane beers before calling it a day.

The Devil is in the .... bottle!

Saturday was rainy parts of the day, but with most of the outdoor work already done, that was fine. OJ's dismantled and disassembled 14-element FM antenna was put together again and set up in a north-westerly direction, hoping again for signals from North America. One fine day....!

FM antenna pointing to the northwest

Cooler, but quite calm most of the day. 13-14 Celsius. Increasing wind towards the evening.

Dinner! Bacalao! Smøla is in the middle of Klippfisk country, salted and dried codfish, the core element in Bacalao. Main markets for klippfisk are Portugal, Brasil, Italy and Spain. Rolf prepared an excellent version of this famous dish for us. We had a Sauvignon Blanc with the Bacalao, fittingly named Croisée de la Mer. We finished off with a taste of exquisite Scotch whisky.

Sunday was departure day, and almost all of it was spent travelling. After leaving Smøla on the car ferry at 09.15, I had a brief charging and coffee stop underway, and arrived at OJ's place at around 13. Two hours later it was off to the airport, and the rest of the afternoon and evening was spent airborne, including three different aircraft and seven stops underway until I landed in Vadsø just before midnight.

Leaving Smøla "....on a Ferry Cross the Edøyfjorden"

Arctic FM Season Has Already Started!

 They say that FM DX is a summer thing. Certainly, early May is not compatible with "summer", especially not in the Arctic. But it happened!

In the morning on May 6th I had two short (less than 2-3 minutes) Es openings, one at 05:53 UTC and the other at 08:20. Unnoticed without IQ recordings if I had not been there at the time, and very hard to spot had I not recorded half-hour waterfall BMP files with HDSDR. What a tool! It was quite easy to go back to the IQ recordings with SDR Console and pick the ripe berries.

The early morning opening was confined to all of southern Finland with the odd Russian joining in. The later one went to southern Sweden and northern Denmark. On an FM antenna pointing perpendicular to the logged stations!

Logmap (fmlist.org)

SDR Console's Navigator tool makes it super easy to navigate in time (albeit not in frequency) to find the spots where the signals are readable, and hopefully RDS-able. The example below shows two stations nearby each other, one being Swedish Radio P2 with their E402 PI code, surfacing for only a few seconds.

SDR Console's Navigator - navigates you to the interesting signals!

I admit I was a bit taken aback by this early start of the season. That said, from the beginning of my FM DX "career" nine years ago I've been surprised many times. So, don't forget: Expect the Unexpected!

KONG-HQ April Logs - And a Bit of Perseus Stuff

I thought the MW season was over at the end of March - I was wrong. The others in the KONG Crew persuaded me to keep the 310 beverage antenna up for a bit more, and it certainly did pay off - one new log on the very last day! KCII Washington IA 1380 literally boomed in with their lousy 500-watt daytime rig on April 18th.

A few days before, almost as rare 1-kW KDJS Willmar MN had surfaced through the dominant KVGB on 1590. I've heard them only once before.

But now all beverages are down! And the rather short April log is here.

Last Sunday I had a beautiful drive back to Vadsø from Kongsfjord in clear skies and dry roads. Wednesay morning King Winter announced that he's not quite done yet, as seen on the video below.

It's probably not the last time. But temperatures will rise again soon.

Elad/Microtelecom recently published Perseus and Perseus22  beta drivers for ARM64 PCs. Having recently aquired a Snapdragon-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop, I was eager to find out if I could run those SDRs on the laptop. Earlier ARM64 SDR compatibility tests have been a mixed blessing.

So, the short version is: The Perseus (legacy) ARM64 driver seems to work well except it took a while to open Perseus software v.4.1a, and I could also run the Perseus with SDR Console and Jaguar (presumably also HDSDR although I forgot to try). There are some bugs still to be sorted out with the Perseus22 driver.

Oh, and it doesn't get completely dark at midnight anymore! Nautical twilight is as dark as it gets now, just over three weeks prior to the midnight sun.