T30PY Aftermath

T30PY pedition is over. Total number of QSOs exceeds 40k according to their website..

The band conditions have been reasonably good, but the produced signal to OH has been quite disappointing. The unusually thin OH participation in the Clublog charts tells the sad story.

So I think some aftermath from the "customer" point of view is in place.

First I want to stress this is not a complaint. I had my QSO with the pedition and got T30PY to my log and my call is listed in the clublog. I was looking forward the QRP qso, but there was no opportunity to even try.

1. Band conditions

As I already wrote the band conditions were reasonable. SFI was in steady raise (120+) and K stayed low during the pedition. So the conditions were reasonable.

K indexes for the period of the pedition (source NOAA):

day16  17  17  18  20  21  22  23  24
K*  1    2    1    1    0    0    0    2    1 

*)Daily K average calculated from 3 hour average by me

The VOACAP calculation that I did earlier was for QRP assuming the optimal placement of their VDAs. I redid the calculation with the more recent knowledge about the antenna placement and the picture did not get any better. The best opportunity was on 15m between 8z-11z and propability 50%. In a pileup situation this is pretty much hopeless.

The best propagation between OH and T30 is during the normal office hours, when people are at work. Looking back the calendar there was only one weekend during the pedition (Sat 20, Sun 21). I think this had a significant impact to OH land participation.

    2. Antenna placement

The common agreement is that on island DX the VDAs are the way to go. 9M4SLL (Spratly) did outstanding job with simple multiband verticals placed very close to the ocean so expectation for T30 was al
The T30PY main antenna according to their website was:

• Big IR SteppIR 6-80m mounted near the water

There is good deal of wisdom available about what that "near water" must be for saltwater vertical to really come alive. Team Vertical has done numerous studies what is the right placement for verticals near salt water. The empirical result is 1/4 wave lenght or closer to the ocean! Very interesting reading is the study they conducted in 1998(!!) Quote from their study (appeared in CQ): "As the vertical was moved back from the water, there was little change until we came close to 1/4 wavelength from the water. At that point there was a 3 dB increase in signal level!"

So I take that the antenna selection was the right one.

The placement what I see from the pictures from their website was not optimal shoreline 1/4 lambda, but further inland, so this may have impacted the signal strength both ways.

3. Pedition focus

Cross review of band activity and propagation to OH based on cluster spots found from DX Summit archives.

As can be found from Voacap forecast the best propagation is between 6am-12 on the high bands, so lets see where they were and for QRP it had to be CW.

T30YP: 6am - 12am band activity

Oct 16 Tue
30m
17m SSB

Oct 17 Wed
40
30
20 SSB+CW
17 CW

Oct 18 Thu
80
40
30
20 SSB

Oct 19 Fri
160
80
40
20 SSB (lots of EU spots on cluster)

Oct 20 Sat
160
80
40
20 SSB

Oct 21 Sun
160
80
40
30
20 CW

Oct 22 Mon
80
40
30
20 CW + SSB
17 CW
12

Oct 23 Tue
80
40
30
20
17
12
20 CW

Oct 24 Wed
40
20 RTTY :), CW

Summary

Great job on low bands. Lots of activity on 30m, which is very good.

OH-wise the most optimal frequencies and times were not utilized by the T30PY team, which indicates that the Northern Europe was not high in their priority list.

Basically for QRP we can forget all SSB openings. The only viable option would have been Monday to try the QRP qso, but as said that was a work day and I was traveling. So no QRP this time.

I think the ops made good effort asking JA/SA/NA to QRX when working EU.