Strange Conditions

Early night: Nada
Night: Nada
Late night: Nada
Morning: Getting better
Late morning: Better!! Stations like KRTA-610 and KPDQ-800 visited us along with many WA and OR stations. Kinda saved the day. Nothing exciting from Asia or the Pacific, and excessive noise on the easterly directed beverages.

It was sort of depressing to sit here during the night and have SMS after SMS from the Andøya gang reporting excellent DX. While there are always local differences that can vary over hours and days, I think it is quite obvious that the western, coastal locations of the Vesterålen (in the case of Andøya) and Lofoten islands are superb locations for trans-atlantic DX. About time they are tested.

I had a bit of time to do other things than DX as well. Olav Skår from Stavanger, who visited us a few days ago, left an Icom IC-R1500 receiver for me to test. I did some measurement tests, and tried to find out how it could work as a MW DX receiver. A quick conclusion on the latter issue is that it won't. The user interface may be good for scanning, but not for MW DX. It is simply too cumbersome to operate, whether you use the software interface or the remote control. I thought that it was very unsensitive on MW - well it is but not as bad as I had thought with sensitivity figures in the -96dBm range or around 4 uV. On shortwave sensitivity is around 1 uV. I assume that it has a 10 dB attenuation pad built in, which probably can be removed, if the receiver could work well otherwise. I'll spend more time with it though and make a write-up.

Weather: Still mild with 5C, and still windy, SW winds at around 40 km/h.