Timor-Leste, Atauro Island, finally in the log!

It has been a long and interesting week on the bands, with a high Solar Flux Index meaning the higher bands have been open, sometimes well after dark. 12 metres in particular has been excellent here, with a number of new ones put in the log since that great day last Saturday.

Timor-Leste is located between Malaysia and Papua New Guinea

However, during the past week, for one reason or another, I found myself busy and when I was on the radio I wasn't able to hear the 4W6A most of the time. One or two days I could hear them on 20m CW in the morning time but I wasn't able to spare the time to sit and try to work them.

So it came to today, Saturday, and with the Dxpedition drawing to a close, I was more anxious about working them. I sat for over an hour, perhaps two, trying to work them on 12m CW but just after they worked my friend Thos EI2JD, they said "QSY 20m". So I missed 12m. But in the meantime, they showed up on 15 metres. So I set the radio up with 21.023.5 as the VFO A frequency and started listening on VFO B to see if I could hear where they were listening. As is always the case with big pile-ups, it was wide enough, and he was working stations anything from 1 to 5 kc above his calling frequency. As usual I turned the beam 180 degrees to see which path he was stronger on and sure enough the long path seemed to be better, so that's the path I kept the antenna on.

But my consistent searching for his QSX frequency paid dividends and after about an hour, with his signal getting stronger, I finally heard my call coming through the noise. I gave him a 599 TU and punched the air cheering. After nearly two years on the air, I can say there's still nothing that beats the thrill of putting a new DXCC into the log!

For the record, that brings my total DXCC worked to 228, although five of these have been deleted so I can only claim 223. Of these I have 175 confirmed, mostly through ARRL's Logbook of the World, which is a brilliant ham facility.

By the way, congratulations to all the EIs who have got 4W into their log. It is difficult for EI to work because on the short path we are beaming across Europe and have all of EU to contend with! As of this moment, there are 24 EI callsigns in their log. Not bad at all. I should be the 25th!

Update: 17:38: Just put them into the log on 20m SSB after about 10 minutes calling. Yes!!