[IRCA] First Two Days at Grayland

["John H. Bryant" <bjohnorcas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wednesday was my travel day from Orcas Island to Grayland. Rain some 
fog and numerous accidents in the Seattle area forced me to divert 
widely around the metropolitan area, and take an additional ferry to 
get here. A normal 6 hour trip became a low stress eight plus 
hours.  The travel delay and early sunset meant that I only had time 
to get up the standard westerly 600' BOG and the NW 800 footer.

Given the conditions that I found Thursday AM, I probably should have 
just waited until Thursday to hang any wire at all.  Thursday AM was 
the least interesting, least productive ,morning of DX that I've had 
here in several years.  From the way that the band was behaving, I'd 
guess that there was some kind of solar disturbance. I DXed 
periodically from 1130 until 1530.... Going back to bed twice in disgust.

A number of DUs were in most of the morning, at just above threshold 
levels... 531, 549, 612, 702, 1116, 1512 and 1548. None ever got to 
really listenable levels, but they hung around a long time. All of 
the usual Japanese were there, though usually at their late October 
poor levels.... once in a while, one of the Big Guns would pop up for 
10 minutes or so, before dropping off to fair/poor levels. The 
Chinese were almost totally absent, with 963 and 1206 being notable exceptions.

The only two bright spots were a really good log, early (1300UT) of 
738 Taiwan Fisheries, parallel a much worse 1143 and CNR1 639, very 
late (1500 UT).  I've heard them both a number of times before, but 
they were still the class of the field for Thursday morning, October 25.


OOPS,   PATRICK AND DAVE WILLIAMS ARE HERE... MORE LATER!

JOhn B.

Thursday was a beautiful sunny day here at the beach and I had great 
fun putting both my Wellbrook Array and Guy Atkins' up ready for some 
more serious Beta testing on Friday morning and, I sincerely hope, a 
load of great DX.

FRIDAY  11:00 AM

My keyboard is doing some strange things this morning, so things may 
be a bit scrambled.

I DXed from 1130 until 1615UTC this morning with somewhat  better 
results and a pot full of antenna testing. Overall conditions still 
seemed sub-par, but a good deal better than the abysmal conditions of 
yesterday morning. The Aussie Big Guns were in at 1130 and more or 
less stayed in until things FINALLY shut down after 1600. The larger 
Japanese were there, along with some of the second and third line 
stations, though levels were generally sub-par. The Koreans were back 
for the most part, though not too strong and there were quite a few 
more CCs around, though still quite low level.

The more remarkable loggings included:

603 NHK1 Synchros

639 Fiji (presume) Threshold non-Asian, non-EE talk on the Westerly antennas

1170 There was Japanese mixing with KPUG just after 1200. Since there 
are no JJ stations there, this pretty much has to be Korea BS in 
their International Service. Already QSLed some years ago, but still 
a very irregular visitor.

648 The Russian transmitter near Vladivostok was in nicely this 
morning, running a VOA program until TOH @ 1400, then they either 
slewed the antenna away from NAm or left the air, as after 1400 there 
was only threshold audio on the frequency.

990 JORK in Kochi was dominating that frequency for a while. Also 
QSLed long ago, but a relatively rare visitor.

531 was a mix of at least two, maybe three DUs for quite a while 
before 4KZ dominated at dawn. Unneeded, again, but fun to listen to 
at a decent level.  Crime Stoppers PSA, local Toyota dealer's 
commercial nautical weather and sea conditions for the area

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