News

LOGS ARE ONLINE

3 Nov. Hi Maury, We have better comms on the boat now. Some emails never got sent. Monday morning 0930 local we vacated the island. Lost an anchor yesterday and skipper dived just now and found it! We will be in Manus tomorrow staying one night. No radio operation from there. Wednesday we fly to Port Moresby and Thursday fly home. I get into Heathrow very early Friday. 73 Derek

29 Oct. Hi Maury, We are 60 mils from the Hermits but by the time you see this we should be there. Could you please find out a new 17m trap for the I1UJX antenna. Accidentally high power was applied and it is badly burnt! Almost all the traps have been modified and I hope we have trouble free operations from now on. The sea is much calmer today and we are having a smooth ride. We ran through some large shoals of tuna fish. Lots jumping out of the water to escape some sharks. We caught 3 tuna in quick succession. I am sure they will be on the menu for diner tonight! 73 Derek

27 Oct. Hi Maury, We left Garove Saturday but the sea was rough and we sheltered in Peterhavn up on the east coast of Garove. We set off at first light on Sunday but have had a rough crossing and so decided to take a break off the little island of Ilam to the south of Manus. We are here as I type this. We plan to arrive at the Hermits early on Wednesday morning local time (gmt+10). Hope to do some repair work on the multiband verticals while we are here. 73 Derek

25 Oct. Hi Maury, We are pulling down the stations and will be leaving Garove in a couple of hours. This last night was very good with lots of 160m QSOs around the world. We also had good runs on 40, 30, 20 and 17m. Mike has had a field day with EME. WX looks a bit rough so we may pull in at Peter harbour up on the east coast of Garove. We are still having problems with the I1UJX and ECO multi-band verticals but we are managing! The coax was left on the boat all last year and the connectors are in real bad shape. I only brought 4 new connectors and so we cannot swap them all. Please send a note to Hugh, K6HFA. Tell him you are regularly putting info on the website and give him the web address. 73 de the team,Derek

22 Oct. Hi Maury, In the lagoon here we are surrounded by high hills and its difficult to send emails so apologies for not sending daily updates. We leave here Saturday morning local time for the Hermits. Its about a 60 hour voyage. Here we are located up on the side of a hill and using the school buildings. We are QRV all bands but last night with first attempt on 160m the violent storm here prevented any QSOs. QSLs for OC-181 should go to SM6CVX and OC-041 should go to G3KHZ. Thanks 73 Derek

"At 03:08 gmt, Saturday 18 Oct. the boat left Kokopo for the Garove Island, Witu Group, OC-181.  The skipper anticipates a 40hour trip for this first leg to Garove. The four operators on board are Derek-G3KHZ, Alan-AD6E, Mike-K6MYC and Skip-W5GAI. It's good to be back on Barbarian II again with almost the same crew as last year when we made the dxpedition to OC-283 and OC-284.  We are all happy and enjoying a smooth ride accompanied by the dolphins and flying fish.
We have a little modification work to do on the HF multi-band antennas and hope to do that en route before reaching Garove".