SV9/G4FRE/P 2000

SQUAREBASHERS 2000 MINOAN EXPEDITION
 
 
 

 
 

The 2000 radio dxpedition was again to the Island of Crete in the company of my wife Meg (G7FRE, N2NQI), Walt (G3NYY) and Tim (G4VXE). Operation again took place from the shack of Manos, SV9ANJ at his Pela Mare apartment complex. Unfortunately Manos had block sold all his summer accomodation to to a Dutch Travel Agent, all bookings had to be made through them. Being a Dutch agent all their accomodation packages aligned with the dates of Dutch charter flights to Crete, which meant the "vacation week" did not align with UK charter flights to Crete. For this reason, this year we were forced to fly from Luton to Amsterdam on Easyjet, so we decided to stay a day in Amsterdam and see the sights then fly to Crete on the Transavia Charter which left at Amsterdam at 0630.

A day was spent in the city, we  had an early canal boat tour of the city before the tourists arrived then went to the Rijksmuseum. There was a big queue for the special exhibition so we did the rest which was very interesting, especially the Dutch history section which recorded the Battle of Chatham, something you dont get to hear of in English history lessons (England had its flag ship "stolen" from the river Thames!)

G4VXE arrived late in the evening; we got a taxi to the airport at an unseemly hour the following morning and boarded the plane. Due to air traffic restrictions in Crete our plane was unable to take off till 0830, so we watched cartoons on the apron at Schipol and so arrived late. We were greatful for the pool when we arrived.

Again we used Manos' Icom 706 and the IC706 brought along by G4VXE were used with the resident Windom Antenna. For RTTY QSOS we dumped the troublesome IBM 755 Thinkpad that caused us the grief last year and brought along Meg's IBM Thinkpad 560E with internal Wave sound board which was used along with the K6STI DSP program and the WF1B logging program. For the Australian ANARTS RTTY contest we used a new logging program, WRITELOG, which despite crashing 5 times during the contest was generally easier to use than the K6STI/WF1B combination. During the contest 754 QSOS were made, winning the SV9 section.

The QSO breakdown of SV9/G4FRE/P was a total of 1362 of which 1254 were CW, 101 were RTTY and 7 were PSK31. Meg had a brief appearance on 20m SSB and had 12 Phone QSOS as SV9/G0FRE/P.

              Greenhouses in the south of Crete                                                SV9/G4FRE/P ANARTS RTTY