[IRCA] Cliffhanger Report

["a1d26764@xxxxxxxxx" <ve7aul@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday morning I spent the hour before LSR doing some DXing at the Rockwork 4 site using an Eton E1 with a C. Crane external "twin ferrite" loop. The E1 is more of a brick than an ultralight radio so I also had a barefoot Sangean DT-400W with me.

Since the loop is not a broadband antenna I had to tune both it and the E1 to work my way up and down the band as quickly as possible during what remained of the pre-dawn window.

With the E1 I consistently heard:
 738 Weak female speech/singing
1008 Strong carrier
1503 Very strong signal with a conversation between two women. One was speaking English with an AU/NZ accent. The other mostly spoke some unrecognizable (to me) language with some English words mixed in. They were talking about life insurance.

With the barefoot ultralight there was no trace of the 738 signal but 1503 was audible though not comprehensible.

Most of my medium-wave time is spent listening for new domestics so I am certain that a more experienced 9 kHz spacing listener would have picked out much more DX from underneath the overlapping sidebands of the domestics. The site was much quieter than my home in an ordinary residential neighbourhood. I heard only two things -- broadcasters and static. Unlike at home, there was nothing that sounded like man-made interference.

Before leaving home, I worked from the details provided by Guy and Gary to locate the Rockwork 4 site in Google Earth and StreetView and then labeled it in Google Maps. The night before leaving our hotel in Astoria, I reset one of my car's "trip counters" to 0.0 km and then used Google to give me the driving distance to the site. That, combined with the time I had previously spent in StreetView to know exactly what to expect, worked extremely well for getting me to the correct location on time. Relying solely on the maps app in my phone would have been clearly inferior because it's GPS feature was unable to update my position quickly enough to tell me where to pull off before it was too late.

I had planned on trying out the Cape Perpetua site on Wednesday morning but, after two days of driving all over two states on an overly-ambitious tourist itinerary, I could not drag myself out of bed that early. Driving past the site during full daylight I thought the same techniques would have led me there but with a bit more risk of driving past it. For anyone approaching from the north, the Rockwork 4 site has the advantage of a few earlier pullouts to act as visual cues. I actually pulled into the Rockwork 3 sight first for a quick look around and could already see Rockwork 4 ahead of me as soon as I got back on the road. Fortunately, at that time of the morning there was very little traffic so I could drive more slowly than during the day.

I strongly advise anyone visiting either of these sites to bring full-size headphones. There were enough heavy trucks roaring by to make me glad I was not trying to listen with speakers or ear buds. The ones fully loaded with logs were particularly loud.

Good luck to those of you on the DXpeditions next week.

73,

Brian
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