Jan Mayen Island again…

Since I want to be active more with my portable setup this year I took the FT-817 with me in the car today. At lunchbreak I drove to a good DX location which was about 4km from my job in the polder on a dike. I setup the Watson Multiranger 200 antenna on the car and checked the SWR with my MFJ259 analyzer. I found it to be 1:1.1 on 14.200 again like always. First contact was with ID9Z who clearly didn’t like to talk as he called CQ just after giving me a fast report. I tried to call CQ around the QRP frequency and got a reply from EA1FL/P Edu, we had a nice QSO and he explained his equipment was a military radio PRC320 with 30W into a military whip antenna. After a few overs we could give each other 5/8-5/9! I was using the FT817 on 2,5W so actually I could sign PE4BAS/P/QRP, I thought it would be too long but Edu had no problem with it at all. In the mean time I took my mobile phone to record the last over of the contact but something went wrong and at the end I recorded a totally different QSO with…..JX9JKA at Jan Mayen Island. Svein was sometimes a real 5/9 here and I got a signal report of 5/5. Remember I was transmitting only 2,5W in a mobile whip! I’m again really surprised about the little FT-817 and think this is a good start of the portable season. It also interested me in Jan Mayen Island, there is a website on the internet about this Island which has a nice history of Dutch Whaler fisherman searching for new hunting grounds there. The Island is actually named after a Dutchman. If you draw a line from my location to Jan Mayen you will only come across water, so I’m not surprised after all that I could make this QSO. At the link hobbies on that website there is something about the radioamateur station on the island, I don’t know if it is up-to-date as last revision was in 2004. 

The recording:

http://www.divshare.com/download/17797842-aed

Bas, PE4BAS, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Groningen, Netherlands. Contact him at [email protected].

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