Tag: RS-44

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Milluzzi Bros 2025 DXpedition: The Bands Are Alive!

The bands came to life this afternoon and I was able to work a small pileup on 17 meters. I’ve spent over 50% of my time on 17 meters, sticking to our original plan. I hope we were able to help folks out! I was able to make a few CW contacts, but it has been hard due to the contest this weekend.

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We took a break from our island QTH to venture to a beach to enjoy some sun, sand, and satellite passes. After the RS-44 pass (which was much more tame than yesterday), we went to dinner.

The plan for this evening is to keep the QSOs coming. I am working FT8 on 17 meters while I get a few things setup. Tony caught the end of a 6 meter opening. He will probably QSY to 30 meters and work some folks before we hit the hay.

Tomorrow morning will come early as we are participating in the HamSCI Meteor Scatter QSO Party. Tony will be working 6 meters and I will be on 10 meters from 4 to 7 am! We will try and be on the air until noon or so, when we need to checkout and head to the airport for our flights back to the USA. There will be one last operating update post tomorrow morning.

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Milluzzi Bros 2025 DXpedition: Back At It!

Good morning from Tortola! We worked into the evening last night with Tony making QSOs on 30 and 80 meters and me switching between 40 meter SSB and FT8. While bad conditions weren’t great, we did log over 400 QSOs between us.

I am starting today on 17 meters and Tony is switching between 12 meters and 6 meters. Tony made a 6 meter contact into the UK, which we hope means more openings are coming. The bands were really bad mid day yesterday and have been improving since.

The plan is to continue to work our goal bands (6, 12, 17, and 30) today and Tony has another RS-44 satellite pass planned. I’ll keep this post short so I can shift off FT8 to SSB. Hope to hear you on the bands!

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Milluzzi Bros 2025 DXpedition: Solar Storm Sends Us Digital

As band conditions fade in and out today with the solar storm, we have been forced to move to FT8. I made 8 SSB contacts and tried for a few hours. I was not successful on CW, with signals fading in and out faster than I (or my computer) could reliability decode.

FT8 has been up and down as well. Stations picked up this afternoon and I have had a constant stream of 3 or 4 stations hunting me on 17 meters. Tony had a crazy satellite pass on RS-44. So it has a good trip so far, just not the QSO count we were hoping for.

We did deploy one of our backup wire antennas as Tony’s Super Antenna vertical was okay for 10 and 12 meters, but wasn’t doing enough for any other band. The random wire into a 1:9 unun up about 20 ft (to the tree in the photo below) is working well. It tunes up on 80 and 160 meters, so might try those tonight!

Overall a pretty fun trip so far. More frequent updates on the various spotting networks and twitter!