Your QSOs with Antarctica

[sm5mek]

there is a station on the south pole active to day, heard him mostly on 30m. You can see him on the cluster, great pileup i guess, my 5W was not good enough for this time, just waiting for next opportunity.
PS if you are doing an tour on upper deck, don´t disturb the ships cat, not much of rats on board yet so give him a steak just for safety.    I give the &%#**~cat an herring so he have something to do.    Now have to clean up.

[GM0LVI]

Thanks for that link Michel, there's a lot of interesting info there. I was a bit surprised though that the link about ships didn't include any British ships.
My good friend Milke GM0HCQ (/MM) / VP8CMH/MM spends several months down there ever year in his job as comms manager on RRS James Clark Ross, supplying British bases and doing science. He left home today to fly to Punta Arenas to pick up the ship on Monday evening. He works 99% CW and usually self-spots on the DX Cluster when QRV.
He's got a good web page -

http://www.gm0hcq.com/

We visted the ship when it called in at Dundee after an Arctic science deployment this summer. It was fascinating seeing all the equipment.

[VE2TH]

Hello Dave,

Well on the first link,  http://www.waponline.it/AntarcticLinks/tabid/75/Default.aspx

I found the one you are talking about:

GMØHCQ Antarctica Home Page: http://www.gm0hcq.com

But Yes I looked and nothing about any British Ships,
But I will look at some other places, between my quarter at the lighthouse :--)))

72 Michel

[VE2TH]

Hello,

To GM0LVI, I found this:

http://clarkema.org/vp8dmh/

Rothera Station: November 2009—March 2011, and

Halley Station: December 2011—February 2012

72, Michel/back to my duty at the lighthouse...

[GM0LVI]

Thanks Michel!
VP8DMH's website is really interesting and his linked page detailing the bases is pretty good though there's quite a few missing on it. I note that he operated from Fossil Bluff on Alexander Island - that's a very rare one not only for Antarctic bases but also for IOTA chasers as it's IOTA AN-018 and seldom activated. I think the previous activation was back in 1994 when VP8GAV made just short of 1000 Qs in 6 days.

Dave.

[ve3lyx]

worked a JA who was a weather researcher in Antartica back in the 80s . It was on CW and really bad month of conditions .I had designed and built a Cw reconstructor that filtered the noise through a hi/low pass audio filter(pair of 741 op amps with a preamp. and also clipped it before it passed through. I fed the output to an optoisolator and used it to trigger a piezo  buzzer. Very spooky copying Cw without background noise but it worked. He said I was his first human contact in 30 days and he darn near wore my arm out on the QSO. About a year later he sent me a card from his home in Japan. I recorded the whole QSO but no longer have a recorder that will take that odd style of tape. Without the reconstructor the QSO would have been impossible as with the ear one could only tell there was a signal, not read it.
Don