DX Highlights in September at King´s Village

St Petersburg DX-CLub´s Alexander Beryozkin visited Finland in September on his way to the EDXC Dublin. We spent a few days around Kotka and Kouvola and visited among other places the Kouvola Tube Radio Museum. Alexander discovered also a secret with this receiver - he started DXing with this heavy tube rx (photo) in 1968 - the secret is that while listening to 19 mb was forbidden in Soviet times - the clever designer in Riga had made "an Easter Egg" to the receiver: by pressing both SW1 and SW2 switch down you can tune in to the 19 mb as well. We spent also some time in the old border of Sweden and Finland at Abborfors (10 kms South of the King´s Village) to celebrate the 200 years anniversary of the freedom of Sweden andFinland at the very border station down there.

Further tests of a modest HP-laptop (HP530) has been made recently - now I have this very modest laptop as a mobile pc with Perseus SDR. It has actually only a Celeron 1.83 cpu, but after the downgrade from Vista to XP (and an additio of memory to 1Gb) it works rather well, even when recording full 1600 kHz. The HD has been changed as well, but also the new 80 Gb is rather small for huge sdr-recording. What is the best - the unit´s PSU seems to be practically noise-free!
When visiting the Northern DX-QTH at Haapavesi in September I made some antenna tests with a BOG (400 mtrs East) and heard some Asian stations - unfortunately some powerline noise made very difficult to get Aussies on X-band.

Also a new antenna wire reel system was tested while working with a 300 m horse fence wire to West (plastic wire with three bound coppercoated steelwires), pretty light weight and inexpensive antenna but needs insulated supports (fence sticks were used).

Got my Far East BOG finally working at King´s Village QTH in the end of September - and noted the first X-band Aussies in the beginning of October (1701 and 1620).

Great Trans-Atlantic conditions continued all the time with stations from Brazil, Peru and Ecuador among others. Some of these signals can be heard almost daily with small antennas also at Home with ALA100 loop under an old oak tree!

The decisions to announce the August and September DX-stations at King´s Village are to be made very soon - stay tuned!