06/16/2007 | KL7FF Kevin, KL0RG and I visited Prince of Wales Island, Alaska (IOTA NA-041) in grid locator CO35 to take part in the 2007 June contest. Kevin lives nearby, in Ketchikan, but I travelled by Alaska Marine Highway ferry from Bellingham Washington to get there.

We operated in the Multi-Limited category with 6-meters and 2-meters being the only bands that we had. We did reasonably well, considering that most contacts had to be made via meteor scatter. Only a few contacts were via sporadic-E.

On 2-meters, we utilized the WSJT FSK441a mode and made a whopping 16 contacts on that band in 9 grid locators! We worked stations in Alaska, British Columbia, Western Washington, Eastern Washington, Oregon and Idaho ARRL sections on that band.

On 6-meters, we were limited by the propagation gods to the use of meteor scatter to make most of our QSOs. The exceptions were two stations in Eastern Washington (W7MY in DN06 and W7IUV in DN07) who clearly were received via sporadic-E. The other exceptions were stations worked in South Central Alaska. They also had consistent signals, indicative of sporadic-E propagation. Our result on 6-meters was 74 QSOs in 27 grid locators. All QSOs were limited to single hop distances. Our most distant contacts were with stations in BP54, DO42, DN47, DN12 and CN82.

We stayed in a very nice cabin near Thorne Bay. We selected this location so as to be back away from any mountain range that would block our signals. It's difficult to find a suitable place to operate from because of the mountains that exist everywhere in Southeastern Alaska. -- K7CW