HAM-MAG - WNYDXA

Old US Naval personnel once based at
Havannah Harbour on the northern side of
Efate may have their memories dimmed, but
many of the scenes on the current series of
Survivor are filmed at a location where, during
World War Two, up to 100 ships at a time were
anchored. The jungle has long since overgrown
the base.
Originally sent to the wrong resort owing to
booking problems, we stayed one night at Le
Meridien and then on to Le Lagon late on
Saturday. The poor old FT990 did not fare well
in transit ­ the front panel was damaged.
Apparently “fragile” in some language
translates to place under Mack truck gently! I
had no display, but had planned to use the
computer interface anyway, thank goodness.
The clarifier was intermittent , and there were
no filters at all for CW. In fact, the receiver
seemed to be even wider than ordinary SSB,
and very easily overloaded, but I will work that
one out when I fix the rig. The front PC board and display were both broken. SSB was usable,
RTTY a write off and CW was very tough going.
Got the antenna up with one hour to go. Not lagoon­front as promised but higher up which
made grounding difficult. Coral makes a very poor RF conductor! 40 metres was particularly
bad, and I gave up at 10:00 local due to lack of contacts. Next morning at 11:00 am I tracked
down the resort plumber and got some pipe from him to raise the aerial to around 4 metres.
This improved the performance no end, and I finished the contest with just over 100K points
from 300 QSO’s. Realistically, that should have been 1000 QSO’s minimum but that's life. The
rest of the week we operated intermittently as the wife reckoned we were there for a wedding
anniversary. I made the decision to operate CW to get more bang for my buck in terms of
output, as the RF speech processor was creating hum on SSB. Initially, I thought it might be
earth loops, but realised that it was trauma­related when the fault proceeded to come and go.
Had my variable transformer filters in out and over the line with no effect.