Chesterfield Islands

Update #9

“The wind continues to blow. If you imagine being in a wind tunnel with a wind speed between 20 – 30 knots, and occasional stronger gusts you’ll understand the challenges. Wind and tent noise makes it difficult to hear, even with cans, so we apologize for repeats. Sleeping is difficult because the tents are shaking. The pile-ups are energetic and orderly, THANK YOU. The team continues to be in good spirits and dealing with the situation as you would expect.

Safety is a priority – we’re being overly cautious when it comes to taking chances with antennas. Today we installed the 2 SteppIR beams and tried to install the Battle Creek Special but the winds were too strong to complete the installation, The SteppIR are withstanding the wind and working well.

The tents are holding up well, the very deep sand requires us to pay constant attention to all guy wires and ground stakes.Placing 50 pound (22 kg) sand bags at the most critical guy points has helped immensely. Because of the rough seas the skipper will bring supplies to the island 2 times per day until the sea calms down. We are hoping for a break in the weather in 24 hours. Being on a tropical island you may not think about it being cold, but tonight it is cooling down and we’re all wearing layers and jackets, however there has been very little rain.

The bands are in good condition, with excellent runs to all geography, we’ve had excellent openings and hope propagation continues to be favorable.”

Team Chesterfield 2015

Update #8

“Good morning from Chesterfield Island,

We experienced extremely strong winds overnight and this morning, with heavy rain this morning. This caused us to lose some time in setting up additional antennas, all the stations are setup waiting for antennas. The team is installing the SteppIR beams and will work on the Low Band antennas next.

Those of us that stayed on the island last night had a long sleepless night. The bands were in good conditions to EU and NA, 20 meters had many good openings.

We will continue with tent and antenna maintenance. The sand depth is about 1 meter and doesn’t hold the tent and antenna guy stakes well, we’re using 25 kg sand bags to augment the typical guying and staking arrangements. We have an unlimited supply of sand on the island.

The team is in good spirits and is eager to make addition progress today. As you would expect, the temperature is very hot, but the humidity level is comfortable. However, due to the conditions we are behind schedule.

The crew of Evohe has been wonderful to work with, they’ve done a lot of the heavy listing and will return to the island later today to assist with additional setup later this morning.”

Team Chesterfield 2015

Update #7

Greetings from Chesterfield Islands,

After 3 full days at sea we arrived at the island at 10:15 (local) on 1 Oct, we had good weather throughout the sea voyage. The skipper brought the boat as close to the island as possible, about 500 meters.

We began loading the Zodiac and ferrying equipment to the island at about noon. All the equipment is now on the island, we raced against sunset to get as much done before we returned to the boat for the evening. We have several tents installed and two antennas, but not enough for the team to spend the night. The wind was intense which made it difficult to install the tents.

We will return to the island at 06:00 on Friday morning and expect to have one CW and one SSB station on the air soon after.