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Some Thoughts On Our Trip To Iceland 2011 – G4ODA
Firstly, our thanks go out to everyone who expressed an interest in our trip and who helped us in so many ways.
Having been granted a 4m permit and given the efforts made on earlier trips on 144/50 MHz we decided to put most effort into 4m this time. We had hoped to go to Iceland in June but it was not possible to obtain space on the ferry then (in order to take a vehicle there is only one ferry a week going from Denmark via the Faroe Isles to Iceland and back) and we were left with no choice other than to go late July and to stay for August. This may have been a blessing as we were camping throughout and in places camp sites were closed in mid-June with snow drifts over waist height, indeed 2011 was the worst summer in Iceland since 1952.
To give a basic idea Iceland is about the same size as England plus Wales together but with a population of about 300,000 people 2/3rds of which live in the South West corner, around Reykjavik . Around the outside of the island runs route 1 (a number of the outer peninsulas are outside of this road) and most farms and settlements lie on or close to this road. When I first went there over 20 years ago much of route 1 was an unsealed gravel track. Most (but not all) of it is now sealed road with a surface similar to Tarmac. Once off route 1 however the roads/tracks can become very rough. The centre of the island is either glacial or highland desert with no settlements. Here any tracks can be mile after mile of black sand, lava sheets, river crossings or washboard pitted tracks. Very rough and putting a great strain on both vehicle and fitted radios. Speeds can be as low as 10mph.
Again on earlier visits the usual campsite was a slopping grass field, often rocky and difficult to insert tent pegs. Facilities tended to be a small wooden shed with a couple of toilets and outside sink for personal washing / washing clothes / washing pots & pans. In those areas having the benefit of natural hot water, the sinks would have hot water which smells of sulphur, but is very soft; Whilst these can still be found most sites now have hot and coldwater, showers and mains hook-ups. A few also have internet connections. The downside of this, however, is that provision of mains electricity brings with it the use of TVs fridges etc many of which have switched mode PSU’s; it is now difficult to operate from most campsites because of this QRM. Camp sites can have low occupancy rates and pitches are not marked out, it’s simply a question of turning up and pitching wherever required; It is not the Icelandic practice to pre-book and so this system, in my opinion, is far more civilised than camping in many places in the UK . However, away from settlements and campsites and away from electric fences (Icelandic horse keeping / riding is a national pass-time as is swimming, football and golf), the bands are VERY quiet. Most roads are built on banking, perhaps to help keep them clear of snow (?), so pulling off to operate is not possible, but then there are also some good parking places with great take offs.
Around the south coast un-obstructed sea view with clear take offs can be found. We were hampered however around the central South coast where we drove for hours in thick sandstorms. This has become a serious problem as a result of the two recent volcanic eruptions; Not only can the dust damage vehicles but it also percolates into any space in the vehicle and can be tasted, forming thick deposits on the road. This makes driving in these areas far worst than driving in fog. Unfortunately this curtailed some of our planned operation from potentially better areas.
Around the North and West peninsulas all take offs are to some extent obstructed, often by mountains and glaciers well over 1000 feet high; Often the best we could do was to try and direct a signal along a fjord to get some path before the obstructions caused by the mountains.
Here is an additional note before I write about our results and some more general comments. Before we embarked on our visit to Iceland , the perceived wisdom was that JT6 was the preferred mode for MS contacts on the 4 metre band. Whilst on our visit, someone suggested that FSK441 may be better; Having tried and tested both on our visit to Iceland this year, I have no doubt that FSK441 is far superior to JT6 for 4m MS. Once we changed to FSK441, QSOs were far quicker, with data recovery from short bursts being significantly greater. For us, the Persieds meteor shower was almost a “non-event” despite putting in much effort. As mentioned earlier we put in a lot of effort to try and ensure we had no noise when operating, it was a joy to have a completely quiet background on RX but it became blatantly obvious that many of our QSO partners did not have this advantage. On a number of times we easily obtained all QSO information from a station calling us, even where signals were only 1dB above our noise floor but we were unable to complete many QSOs because of high levels of noise at the QTH of our QSO partner.
We had very few equipment issues. Both the laptop and the generator could be slow to start (our generator started easily on petrol but disliked liquid petroleum gas), on the first day of operation we had a damaged RF connection on the RX, perhaps as a result of vehicle movement on the ferry and this did stop a few QSOs on day 1 before it was noted and fixed. We also had one damaged connector on the aerial, again easily fixed. Other than these relatively minor issues, everything worked throughout our trip.
On 4m our equipment was - an Elecraft K3, with homebrew transverter and PA which was a single 2C39 valve amplifier at 100w exactly, being our permitted power by the Icelandic Authorities, this was fed to a homebrew 4el yagi.
We operated from 13 different squares in Iceland (some on more than 1 occasion) and had 4m contacts from each of these squares. We were also lucky to work two SpE openings, the first of which was whilst we were in the central desert area, IP15, during the morning of 7th August; this opening produced 11 contacts, not a strong opening, but useful. The second SpE opening was the following evening which we worked from IP34; our operation for this opening was from a great sea cliff location. This was a good strong opening, we made 35 contacts in 45mn including our best 4m ODX into OK [ Czech Republic ].
Audio of this contact from OK1TEH Matej at http://ok1teh.nagano.cz/4m/tf_g4oda_4m080811.mp3
See video from OK1DFC Zdenek at http://youtu.be/ORKNj3xgzY8
and from G0UWK Ian at http://youtu.be/E5J5B-iSP9Y
I believe this operation included the following “firsts” from TF on 4m;-
GM to TF GM6VXB 29/07/2011 @ 15.55 via Meteor Scatter propagation
GW to TF GW8ASD 29/07/2011 @ 16.42 via Meteor Scatter propagation
LA to TF LA4LN 30/07/2011 @ 14.43 via Meteor Scatter propagation
ON to TF ON5VW 07/08/2011 @ 09.04 via Sporadic E propagation
OK to TF OK1DFC 08/08/2011 @ 19.35 via Sporadic E propagation
Once again, many thanks to all of those who made contact with us and we are sorry to those who were not able to make a contact. Also, our thanks to the Icelandic Authorities for permission to use 4m, to the members of the Icelandic Radio Society for making us so welcome at their club meeting and the Lighthouse on the Air weekend (and Gulli TF8GX for the great BBQ) to Robert G1ZJP and Howard G0VTL for acting as liaison between us in TF and home and without whom many of the contacts would not have happened and for all others who helped throughout our trip.
Oh, and ….. Yes, we had a great holiday as well as making lots of radio contacts; this was despite the weather varying between sunny t-shirt weather to overnight frost on the grass in the mornings and bright sunshine to thick sea fog and strong winds.
73
Keith G4ODA.
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