In case anyone was wondering

On the Bands
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image

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Seems to have been intense but brief, if reports I’ve seen elsewhere are accurate. No aurora spotted from here, but I’ll check my meteor cameras in the morning just in case…

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Southern hemisphere photo collection

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Great pictures, thanks for sharing those

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I worked OE on 80m with aroral tone last night.
David G0EVV

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My second-ever failed activation* yesterday following that event, on ZL3/OT-526. Tuning around, bands were absolutely dead between 2025-01-02 0000Z and 0100Z following that. A few S1 squarks of FT8 on 20m and a trans-tasman maritime net/sched on 14.315 but nothing higher or lower.

Straight off, I did manage one 40m contact 3/3 into Christchurch with normally 5/9 ZL3OY and heard (but was not heard by) 1 caller each on 80m, 40m & 20m, none of whom were moving the needle. But over an hour of CQs brought no more completed contacts.

I would have persisted but I recieved an alert that one of my web servers had run out of disk space, and attempts to resolve that from a summit via ssh on a mobile phone were proving painful!

*OK - failure to qualify an activation, if we’re being pedantic. And discounting occasions where I, or essntial components of my radio gear, failed to reach the summit!

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Good stuff. I think the more methods you have deployed to fail to qualify an activation, then the more battle-hardened SOTA activator you are!

  • <4 contacts
  • Equipment failure
  • Battery discharged
  • Antenna breakage
  • Abandon due to inclement wx
  • Operating spot subsequently found to be outside of AZ
  • Equipment missing/forgotten

I can claim a “full house”!

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I reckon I got lucky yesterday. Was using the 4’ whip on the KH1 with a whopping 3w during the peak hours on a pair of summits and cashed in both times. I’ll have to thank the skill of the chasers, as I’m nothing special.

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