Tuesday, 17 February 2009

K5D - Desecheo Island Expedition - Worked!



Desecheo Island off the coast of Puerto Rico was activated and will be on the air from February 12 - 26, 2009. The ops at K5D are covering most of the HF bands for the duration. Check your DX cluster of choice to discover their operating band and mode. They also have a very detailed website and also an online logbook that's updated at least twice a day. I've just worked them this afternoon on 17m SSB and they have an excellent signal to the Ottawa area. They've been on most days and I had a few spare minutes so I decided to work them. The ops work split and announce the listening frequency on the cluster and occasionally while transmitting. Still, you hear many ops trying to work the expedition on their transmit frequency.



I've been using the FT-950 and my re-furbished Cushcraft R6000 vertical. It's a nice combo and K5D came back on my second call. I'm running 100 watts and a wee bit of processing (20%) - seems to be working well. His signal was S5 - S9 and the ops are very very good in working all the stations. Not rapid fire fast, but a nice easy pace.












The FT-950 is very easy to set up on split and with the latest "PEP950" updates the receiver is very quiet - signals jump out. The "PEP950" updates include processor and dsp fixes and new features added to an already great transceiver.



K5D is the 6th most-needed DXCC entity world-wide, the 3rd most-needed DXCC entity in Europe and the 2nd most-needed DXCC entity in Asia.

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