k8gu.com

///////////////////////////////////////////
April 2016 trip to American Samoa

Posted: 17 May 2016 07:06 PM PDT
http://www.k8gu.com/?p=1662


I had originally planned to make a maintenance and upgrade visit to my
instrumentation in American Samoa in February 2016.Â* There are lots of
advantages to February:Â* Its cold here in W3, the ARRL DX CW contest is in
February, and the phenomenon Im studying is most active during the
equinoxes.Â* I scheduled a 7-day trip that ended with the weekend of ARRL DX
so I had the opportunity work through the weekend or play some radio if
work went better than expected.

My flight had been booked out of Washington National (DCA) airport at 5:15
am Monday morning, which is the best possible time of day at the worst
possible airport.Â* A snowstorm of unknown magnitude was bearing down on the
mid-Atlantic.Â* And, around 4:00 pm on Sunday afternoon, I fell asleep on
the couch.Â* When I awoke 90 minutes later, it rapidly became clear that I
had a nasty stomach flu.Â* As my condition deteriorated further, I finally
decided I didnt want to be fighting that for the next 24 hours on 767s on
my way to a foreign place where I wasnt sure what kind of medical
facilities I could access.Â* I cancelled the trip and spent the next 24
hours in bed instead.

The trip was rescheduled for three weeks later in March and I managed to
get this itinerary out of BWI, which is much more convenient.Â* I loaded up
my gear and went to the airport at 4:00 am.Â* My upgrade had cleared so I
didnt pay excess on my overweight and extra Pelican cases.Â* We sat at the
end of the runway on the tarmac doing the preflight checks and the cabin
lights started flickering intermittently.Â* And we sat, and we sat. And, we
returned to the gate and sat some more.Â* I nervously refreshed the ETA on
my phone finally watching the arrival in PHX slip past the departure to
HNL.Â* I deplaned.

The agents tried to convince me that I could just take the flight to
Honolulu tomorrow.Â* With some effort, I communicated to them that the
HNL-PPG (Samoa) leg my journey only goes on Mondays and Fridays and that I
would rather be stuck at home for a week rather than a week in Honolulu.Â*
So, I cancelled the trip for a second time.Â* My bags went to PHX and were
delivered to my house the next day.Â* I rescheduled the trip for late April
with a night in Honolulu on the outbound leg to avoid this bit of bad luck
happening twice.

Two days before I left, my local contact called me on the phone to tell me
that Tropical Cyclone Amos was bearing down on the island.Â* Fortunately,
the hurricane dumped some rain and brought some winds but passed to the
north of island.Â* The April trip went off without a hitch, although it was
scheduled for four days (Monday night Friday night) instead of the
original seven.Â* So, I was hustling to get my work done and find time for
radio.

I was vaguely aware that KC0W is also in KH8, but given my historical bad
luck with this particular visit, I didnt reach out to him.Â* In fact, hes
the one that contacted me once I arrived.Â* We met for breakfast at the
McDonalds in Tafuna one morning and had a nice long ragchew about radio and
travel.Â* Typical hams.Â* I decided to focus on bands (especially 160) that
Tom wasnt on given my limited time on the island.

Fortunately, I had access to this mobile phone tower, which I use for my
wireless networking for instruments as well.Â* So, I climbed up to check on
the network equipment and put a pulley on the tower so I could raise and
lower ham antennas safely after-hours when no one was around.



The tower is on the top of Cape Matatula, which sticks out of the northeast
corner of Tutuila island.Â* Its the bit of land jutting out in the middle of
the photo below.Â* If you open the full-size photo, you can see the tower
just at the edge of a rather precipitous drop-off toward the rocky shore
about 1/3 of the way from the right-hand side of the frame.Â* Needless to
say, its a great QTH with 270 degrees of sal****er view as Ive mentioned
before.Â* At sunrise and sunset, the middle and higher bands are open to EU,
JA, and NA/SA all at once.Â* The pileups are thrilling but very challenging.



Heres the radio setup from this trip:Â* K2/100, KPA500, WKUSB, and TRLinux
running under VirtualBox on my Mac.Â* This worked OK, but the WKUSB would
drop out every few QSOs and needed to be completely rebooted which meant
that I had to unplug the USB cable and restart TRLinux.Â* Obviously, this
worked when I tested it at home but I was not stressing it like I was in
the field.Â* Im not sure whether it was an RF issue or software/hardware.Â*
In any case, I will probably be installing another Windows VM like Ive used
previously.



I only ended up making about 400 QSOs on this trip, which is way down from
the approximately 3000 QSOs I made over the past two trips.Â* The
combination of aggressive work schedule, glitchy keying, and poor 160-meter
conditions (too late in the season, but I made a few guys happy), made it
hard to get excited about operating a lot.Â* Furthermore, my operating
position was located in a room with an air compressor nearby that would
kick on every few minutes.Â* Even with the excellent Etymotic MC5 earbuds,
it was still loud.Â* Enough complaining!Â* There will be at least one more
trip out there under my present project and if KC0W hasnt worked everybody,
Ill be there to give you all new counters again.Â* I just uploaded the log
to LoTW before I posted this blog entry.Â* I have not responded to any
direct QSL cards yet.