T33A Banaba Island Update

T33A has only been active a couple of days and I haven’t had much time to work them yet. Interestingly, I worked them on 10 meters the first day they were on. Quite easily too. Usually the “Big Guns” are squeezing me out of the pileups, got lucky, maybe they were asleep. Then this morning I worked them on 30 meters after trying for quite awhile.

Unfortunately they pulled the plug on my DXA program for showing real time QSOs. I put a lot of hours into it so I am pretty disappointed. They were having multiple problems with their networks. There are two separate station setups, one CW and the other SSB. They are located quite a ways apart and each has a separate local area network. Initially they had problems getting the satellite links working, they never did get the SSB one working.

They were also having problems getting the N1MM logging program on each PC to synchronize with each other. Rather than troubleshooting the problems the dxpedition leader just started disconnecting things until it worked and then did not want to reconnect to find out where the problem lay. That pretty well shutdown DXA since the web site isn’t getting updates anymore.

As I said I am quite disappointed but I’ll continue to try to get them on more bands as the dxpedition continues. We had done a lot of testing and had everything working but as often happens when you get in a real world situation things can change.

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