At the end of January, LB0VG and LB5SH from LA2T took a rather spontaneous trip to Svalbard to activate some calls and run some contacts. LB0VG used this opportunity to activate JW1K, for which no recent activation has currently been found. This blog post is a summary of that trip, and the recent activity with the JW1K callsign.
We started the trip with the first flight from Trondheim at 06:00 Friday morning, and arrived in Longyearbyen around 15:30. During our stay, we stayed in and operated from the club locales of JW5E, the radio club of Svalbard.
JW5E allows people to rent their shack, an offer available to ham radio operators visiting Svalbard. The shack provides basic facilities, like a small kitchenette for basic cooking, refridgerator (really) and hopefully soon, a working toilet. Although quite tempting with a couch, it is not allowed to sleep in the club house because of regulations regarding fire. The shack is fully stocked with all tools, coax cables and other neccesities that may or may not have been forgotten when packing. Though the shack is fully equipped with two high-end transceivers and accompanying PAs, visitors need to bring most of their own radio equipment when renting the shack.
The radio I used during the operation was an Icom IC-7300, one of two transceivers which were available at JW5E as a “loaner” for guest operators. However, to run a serious operation on Svalbard one truly does need a PA, which at JW5E understandably fell under the practice BYOPA (you can probably decipher).
With that in mind, I had brought my own homebrew LDMOS-amplifier, visible in the picture above. Having not been tested since the last DXpedition in April, all new modifications were made approximately 1 week before departure to Svalbard, leaving plenty of time to debug forgotten problems and new bugs. Even with a couple of auxiliary fans duck-taped to the top panel and some other last minute mods, it luckily performed adequately during the trip.
The shack at JW5E sports a number of antennas, covering (mostly) all bands through 160 to 6m. Rotatable beams and dipoles are present for 40-10m+6m, while 160-60m is covered with traditional dipoles and slopers. Virtually all bands are also equipped with high-power bandpass filters, which help tremendously when operating two shacks simultaneously. The shack also has a great antenna switch- system with seperate controllers for each desk, accommodating two operators to connect to the plethora of antennas with ease.
The activation of JW1K was mostly a courtesy towards LA1K, by getting the callsign activated in recent times. The activity with the JW1K-callsign started quite late during the final hours, so the number of QSOs were rather lacking compared to the other activity during the trip. The conditions for SSB were unfortunately getting a bit scarce in the end, though several people now have JW1K in their log with the help of our all-favourite digimode, FT8.
A bit sleep-deprived but happy with our efforts, we finally left Svalbard on the 12 o’clock flight on Sunday morning. In total, we brought in around 4000 QSOs across the different callsigns used during the mere 40 hours spent on Svalbard. Most of these hours were spent in the shack, so I think we will have to retry the sightseeing-part on our next visit. During the trip, we got to activate both JW2T and JW1K, plus our own calls JW/LB5SH and JW/LB0VG.
I can reveal that another trip to Svalbard is in the works, with hopefully a bit more effort put into running the JW1K call.
More details about JW5E and the calendar for their shack is available here.
More details about our DXpedition to Svalbard are also to be found on LB5SH’ blogpost about the trip.
