YNOMY DX Group: Looking back at LXFF expedition

The weekend of November 8 and 9 we were radio-active from LX. We stayed in a hotel just across the border in northern France and from there went out to activate 2 LXFF parks on Saturday and 1 LXFF park on Sunday.

Saturday November 8

Saturday started out well. It was a bit foggy but we managed to find an area within LXFF-0053 quite quickly and set up two stations - one QRO station with the tried and trusted hexbeam and one station focused on 40m with a vertical wire antenna.

Hexbeam @LXFF-0053

Vertical @LXFF-0053

There had been a strong geomagnetic storm in the previous days and the Kp value was still high - so little DX - but it did result in short skip opening of 20m with high QSO rates. We were active for about 4 hours and logged 671 contacts.

We then lost a lot of time trying to access the second park. We failed to access two candidates we had planned to visit and ended up in our last park for the day: LXFF-0043. The higher bands were poor by that time (16h local time) but 40m was good. We stayed there for 3 hours and logged 394 contacts.

Sunday November 9

On Sunday we went a bit further north to LXFF-0044. Bands were not particularly good and 40m was crowded due to a contest so the going was a bit slow. The good thing was that 10m was open so when time went on we worked DX across the globe (10m = the yellow markers on the map below). As the bands were slow we decided against moving to another park and spent all our time before moving back to PA in this park. We stayed for 5,5 hours and logged 761 contacts.