03/10/2007 | CN2WW Another nice experience from Morocco and potentialy a new M/S African record...

The station, "dx-ped style", was built-up from scratch in one and a half day and dismantled in half a day after the contest. We arrived Wednesday evening in Casablanca airport with our 70kgs of luggages, and friday at 13:00 everything was operational. The 80m
beam,designed for high F/R (dipole/director with 8m spacing) thus protecting us from the high EU-QRM quickly appeared to be a real "killer" in this contest. In spite of our confidence in the antenna simulation, none of us had ever expected to work so many West-Coast stations on 80 and 40, and a few of them with incredible signals...

In general propagation conditions have been excellent on low bands with low QRN levels. 160m was like EME, with low signals, but just the band white noise. The 15m was a real good surprise on both days with such a low SSN and unfortunately no miracle happened on 10m ! 20m closed very early on Saturday evening, but remained open one hour and a half later on Sunday, which allowed us to see the AF-record at our hand.

Equipment-wise, This was the first time that we ever used the IC7000 in real pile-ups... Despite its "miniature" size it really revealed to be a fantastic and powerful small toy - everybody loved it !
N1MM-logger worked without a single glitch - as usual -
In fact, everything worked perfectly without equipment failure or any kind of problem, despite high thermal winds (the spiderbeam "heavy duty" 12m fiber mast was strongly bent in the direction of the sea in the morning and the other way during afternoons, but it resisted).

Being at the the end of the cycle 23 (or right at the beginning of the cycle24 - who knows ?), we did not think that it would be possible to beat the current M/S AF-record (EA4KR/EA8) established in 1993, 3 years before the end of cycle 22, but I think we did it !

- Thanks to Mohamed CN8PA for his precious logistic support, for helping us with the installation and for driving us in the incredible Casa labyrinthe and road trafic - Once again, without him, the operation would have been much more dificult!
- Thanks to Andre HB9HLM for renting us his appartment and to the "Beach house" direction for giving us the authorization to access the various terrasses and to install the temporary antennas.
- Thanks to my Rabat friends: Said CN8LI, Kacem CN8LR and Said CN8WW for their assistance, loan of spare equipment, relations with the administration, etc,etc...
- Thanks to Iberia for not charging us for the luggages excedent and for delivering the luggage in Casablanca airport in a timely manner - taking into account the tight expedition time-frame, a single luggage lost in Madrid would have dramatic for the success of the operation !
- Thanks to Elena and Stefano IK2QEI (the CN3A team) for visiting us in Dar-Bouazza. It has been really a nice evening; Stefano has so many contest stories, and such a talking-talent, that we forgot that we were all a bit tired !

We left Mohamed CN8PA at Casa airport wednesday at 11:00, with the head full of new exciting projects.
See you soon again from Morocco !

For the team
Patrick - F6IRF/CN2WW
more on http://cn2ww.blogspot.com/ -- F6IRF