New loggings

 As the internet wasn't working at home last night and thus TV viewing was impossible, I turned on the radio and logged a couple of stations. As usual there were Chinese stations all over the bands, but there were some pretty good signals coming out of AIR. Unfortunately I had verified all the frequencies.

But then I stumbled across VoA on 15620 kHz coming out of Pinheira, Sao Tome in Somali at 1035 UTC. The signal wasn't too bad - probably 35343. Africans are not easy to hear during daylight hours in Malaysia, so I am quite pleased with it.

 The second logging was much easier - RFA via Tinian Is in the Northern Marianas on 15195 at 1104. The broadcast was in Laotian and the quality was 55555.

DXing Tales

This is an exercise in self-indulgence. 

I have been privileged in my DXing life to get to know and DX with most of New Zealand's top DXers. Being unmarried until my early 50s, I had a lot of time to indulge my hobbies. Once I returned to New Zealand I made up for lost time and DXed a lot in the company of others. I was trying to think of something that happened in a DXpedition recently and had trouble recalling what it was. Therefore, I thought I would write down what I could remember and keep it for my own sake. If you find it vaguely interesting then that is a bonus.

Much of my knowledge and success in the DXing game came from the instruction I received from Raymond Crawford.

Ray was a stalwart of the Southland Branch of the New Zealand Radio DX League – he was also a patient teacher and is still a very good friend.

I acquired a Barlow Wadley XCR30 from Bryan Clark. This was a notoriously difficult beast to drive – you needed soft hands and a good set of ears. Ray came up to my place in Darfield in my early teaching days when I lived in a school owned house. I had a random length of wire stuck out the living room window. I couldn't hear a lot, but with Ray’s experience of the Barlow Wadley, a set of good ears and a little patience he conjured things up out the ether that I hadn’t heard before. I remember we logged Zimbabwe on two tropical band frequencies, when that country was very young and was known as Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

For a couple of years in the early 80s I used to finish school at the start of the holidays at 3.15pm, get in my Morris 1100 and drive the 8 hours or so to Invercargill to stay at Ray’s. I always had a warm welcome from the Crawford clan and still do to this very day.

One particularly wet and windy August evening we went out to Tiwai to do some DXing. The original road in was pretty rough and we had to go through what resembled a bomb crater. Due to the heavy rain it was full of water. I pushed the car at it and through we went. How we ever got out the other side I will never know. I must have had the car waterproofed! Nobody in his right mind would have bothered to go to Tiwai, but for me this was a dream come true. We set up and started listening. There was nothing but noise from one end of the band to the other. Except at the top of an hour on 1470 a signal came up and announced ‘Esta es Radio Centinela de Pereira….’ It gave a few more details and played a bit of music. It must have lasted about three minutes and then disappeared back into the murk. It was the only thing we heard that evening. We both wrote to the station but only I got it back. A 2kw Colombian was a very exciting prospect. I thought that Best of The Year would be mine – only to be thwarted by Steven Greenyer – another good friend, who got a 1 kilowatt Colombian back.

In those days in the early 80s I never heard too much at Tiwai. I logged and verified Saudi Arabia in the mornings on 1512 and 1521, but I can’t remember much more than that.

I went to live in the UK in 1993 and came home in mid 2001 and then the DXpeditions started again. We went to Tiwai for Easter on an annual basis until I left in August 2007 for ten years abroad.

Ray was always a starter for Tiwai and were joined by Paul Aronsen, who ran the place, and Arthur DeMaine his main partner in crime. Others joined us too – Steven Greenyer usually came, Bryan Clark, David Norrie, Sutton Burtenshaw, David Headland, Frank Glenn, Paul Ormandy and even Tony Magon. Eric McIntosh usually dropped in as did Eddie Macaskill, who brought along his Marsh Special to show us.

One year we had a large gathering – it was supposed to be the farewell to Tiwai – we had several of those. I had to go to Oamaru for a wedding on the Saturday night. The conditions were pretty good and I left rather reluctantly, however it was my best friend getting married and I couldn’t say no. Sods law prevailed and conditions on the night I was away were magnificent with all sorts of things being heard including Panama on MW. The other DXers made sure I knew all about it when I returned! It is the only time I think I have ever been truly envious. All was well though as I logged and verified Radio María in Panama City the next year.

We would usually move from Tiwai to Waianakarua (pronounced Why a nack a roo a), or Ynak, on the way home from Tiwai. This is a tiny hamlet about 20 minutes south of Oamaru. The venue is a small ‘crib’ (shack – but not in the derogatory sense) in the middle of a farm paddock, owned by the Ormandy family. Paul Ormandy being totally committed to any hobby he pursues had set up aerials 1500m plus in length to all corners of the globe. As Paul’s interest in DX has diminished (with the growth in his interest in ham radio), so the antennas have decreased in size. It is a lovely venue – quiet, isolated, but extremely cold in the winter – seriously cold. The little coal fire struggles to warm the place and you wake up in the morning with a very blue nose!

We had some fantastic times at Ynak and we heard some amazing things. There was the evening when we had an opening to South America. It was basically northern Argentina and southern Uruguay. It was like shooting fish in a barrel – you didn’t know which station to log next. The next evening it was an opening to California with so many low powered stations to be heard. On another occasion it was a Florida opening and I managed to log and verify a 130w station, which sounded like a local.

I lived for almost 9 years in the south east of England during the 1990s-early 2000s. I was able to do a little DXing there, but conditions were not great due to high noise levels. I did build myself a loop aerial and set to work.

There are only a couple of things that remain in my memory. One was when Radio London celebrated an anniversary and broadcast on 1 watt of power from a vessel tied up in Frinton on Sea in Essex. It would be close to 150 kilometres away. In the middle of an afternoon I logged and verified it with quite a good signal. That is possibly my best MW verification.

On another occasion in the depths of winter I stayed up late and logged some North Americans. I got WTOP in Washington DC and WBBR in New York City. In addition I heard two Canadian stations on 930 kHz, both were in St John’s – one was in New Brunswick and the other in New Foundland – Saint John for the former and St John’s for the latter to be precise. I got one of them to verify and both the Yanks. It was quite an evening. Logging the two on 930 was difficult as they both ran ads at more or less the same time and which was which was confusing because of the similarity in names.

One year – it must have been about 2006, I went to a DXpedition in Kingaroy, about 3 hours north west of Brisbane. We stayed at John and Jean Bastable’s place and DXed out of his large shed. Steven and Jeanette Greenyer stayed in the caravan in the shed and probably had the most peace and quiet. It was an amazing weekend. We ran a very, very long length of wire basically northeast in the hope of hearing some Yanks. No chance – it was not working at all. Instead we tapped into John’s two 3 metre EWE antennae – one pointing northeast and the other southeast. We heard a few things on those. I decided, since we had a spare EWE floating around, that it might be a good idea to erect one pointing northwest.

This was duly done and the results were amazing. We tuned the EWEs properly so as to avoid back end interference and what followed was the best advertisement imaginable for the EWE. On 1386 using the SE EWE we heard Tarana in Auckland at very good levels after 7 am local time (9 am NZ time)! By switching to the NW EWE on the same frequency, there was Kenya. Ray Crawford and I got the veries back too. It was a wonderful weekend of hilarity and comradeship that was not easily forgotten.

Through all of this runs the camaraderie of DXers. I have been privileged to know and have DXed with some of New Zealand’s finest latter day DXers. I would count among them Ray Crawford, Steven Greenyer, Paul Ormandy, Sutton Burtenshaw, Paul Aronsen, Arthur DeMaine, Tony King and Bryan Clark. The thing about them is their willingness to share information and resources. Everybody supports everybody else and wishes each other well as we chase that elusive verification.

Bryan Clark is a special case in point. He now lives in Mangawhai about 100km north of Auckland. Bryan and Sandra own a home in the Tern Point community, right down on the water’s edge. He doesn’t have much soil, only sand, and 100 olive trees from which is produced the most wonderful olive oil. He also has an aerial farm with 3 EWE antennae – 4.5 metres high and about 15 metres long. With these he hears just about anything that can be heard in New Zealand. I have had the privilege of staying with Bryan and Sandy a couple of times and of DXing with him. WGIT 1660 in Puerto Rico was the best logging I have made in Mangawhai, and I got it back too. It hadn’t been heard for a while in New Zealand.

When last I was with him we heard and logged a few things and when I went home he emailed the necessary sound files to me. Bryan is a truly selfless DXer and his exploits on the bands are of the highest order. In FM DXing he is unsurpassed. With my experiences in Mangawhai, it was no surprise that I suggested to my wife that when we relocate to New Zealand in the middle of 2018 that we do so to Mangawhai. We have the land and now await the house being built on it. The Mangawhai Branch of the NZRDXL is born!

New veries have arrived

They say good things come in threes, for me they come in fours as today the good folk at Radio Free Asia have sent me four QSLs. They are for broadcasts in Mandarin and Tibetan on 7470 via Mongolia and 7520, 9370 and 9745 all via Kuwait.

A new verie

KVMI, 1270 in Tulare, California has veried after a follow up report. The email signer is blynch@momentumbroadcasting.com

This is a 5kw day and 1 kw night station. I heard them via the DX League's SDR receiver back in mid-November. They were playing back to back Christmas music with no announcements. I was very puzzled until a friend pointed out that in the NRC magazine the station had announced it would be doing this. That was enough. If it was 1kw night, it was a very good 1kw. The verie is very welcome.