Hello All,

 

It's now 1640 UTC in my motel room here in Grayland and 972-HLCA still had strong audio until about 5 minutes ago-- pretty wild. Nick was right-- Grayland exceeded my expectations this morning, with powerful TP audio all across the band, Japanese, Korean and Chinese stations were all well represented, including many second tier stations with S/N pegging power. Besides the usual Japanese and Korean big guns there were S9 snarls on 1044 (Korean and CRI's Japanese service) and 1134 (KBS and JOQR), along with multiple 1035-CNR1 stations sounding like an echo chamber. All of the upper frequency CRI stations (1017, 1044, 1206 and 1323) hit S9 levels from 1400-1500, while 603-HLSA, 657-Pyongyang, 1044-CRI, the 1053 Jammer, 1287-JOHR, 1566-HLAZ and 1575-VOA all pegged the PL-380 S/N readout during the session. The middle and upper band Chinese were far stronger than the lower band Chinese on 603 and 639, for some unknown reason. 936-Anhui and 981-CNR1 were vibrant, but 756-CNR1 was missing in action.

 

This session was the first test of the new 17" DXpedition FSL, which has 129 Russian surplus 200mm x 10mm ferrite rods and weighs over 35 pounds ( http://www.mediafire.com/view/n85a6ppdz9a7uuo/17inchDXFSL.jpg ). Full details and MP3's from the wild session will be posted later. Good luck to the LBI DXpedition crew-- I hope that you all had the same kind of productive session.

 

73 and Good DX,

Gary DeBock (DXing in Grayland, WA)

7.5" loopstick Tecsun PL-380 Ultralight +

17" DXpedition FSL antenna