[IRCA] Grayland DXpedition - February 17-21, 2016

[Bill Whitacre <bw@xxxxxxx>]

I was fortunate enough to get to the Grayland Motel & Cottages again last week.  It was not at all clear that I would make it this year when my first attempt ended up landing some 15 miles from where it took off when smoke filled the cockpit of our Alaska Air flight just after take-off from Washington National Airport:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/smoke-in-cockpit-grounds-alaska-airlines-flight/

So, shorted two days at Grayland but spared something much worse I arrived on Wednesday, Feb. 17 to put up the usual âwinterâ antenna - a 160â DKAZ âfacingâ ~290 degrees.  In a hurry, the first night I suffered through not only âdisturbedâ geomag conditions but a fixed 1KOhm termination resistance [Rt].

On day 2 I replaced the fixed Rt with a Vactrol and about 500â of CAT5 cable.  With that I was able to get ~ 30dB nulls on Portland stations and ~ 25 dB nulls on Seattle stations â not bad considering neither is directly off-the-back of the antenna.  Those are groundwave nulls and as anyone who uses a flag antenna will tell you those donât hold up quite as well at night under the onslaught of varying arrival angle skywave.

Nick Hall-Patch joined me on Thursday evening and we immediately put up a ALA100 phased array to compare.  I believe Nick will tell you that he preferred the DKAZ except for some intermittent noise caused by a bad coax run of over 600â â diagnosed and cured the last day of my visit.

Nick got his famous âDX Fishbarrelâ program going from the Grayland Motel and it ran for most of the next couple of days.  It was impressive to see the signal levels from Grayland as compared to his home QTH in Victoria, BC.  Made it kind of hard to leave â

â but leave we did on Saturday for what turned out to be an extended drive back to Seattle for a chance to meet with other DXers.  Taking very different alternative routes Nick and I managed to find our way to the gathering spot and enjoyed a good rag-chew with fellow west coast DXers.  Oh yes, the cause of our alternative routes?

http://komonews.com/news/local/officer-involved-shooting-follows-high-speed-chase-in-lakewood

Nick continued on home after the gathering and I returned for one more night at Grayland.

Iâm still going thru wav files but you can see the fruits of our efforts so far and come back over the next few weeks to see more appear at this web page:

http://realmonitor.com/am_logs_grayland13.php

I can hardly wait to get back to Grayland again!

Bill Whitacre
Alexandria, VA


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