N5J Jarvis Island DXpedition

Jarvis Island is part of Palmira Islands goup, is located in the south Pacific Ocean a few degres south of equator line and around the Dateline meridian. The distance from Italy is about 15000 km. It is a United States possession, the island is uninhabited and his surface is 4,5 square km. The N5J Jarvis Island DXpedition has been organized by an american group of radioamateur, the Dateline DX Association to activate the island on the radioamateurs bands.

The particularity of the N5J Jarvis Island Dxpedition is that just five radioamateur gained the island to instal the radio stations the antennas and provide the logistics quarters, two more teams, instead, operated the radio stations from remote site in the CW and FT8 modes.

I only operate in CW mode and, other than contests, I ejoy to contacy DXpeditions to lost and uninhabited islands. Recently I contacted TX5S Clipperton Island and 3Y0J Bouvet island that gave me a a lot of satisfaction.

The N5J Jarvis Island Dxpedition I strongly wanted to connect it because his position on the Dateline almost at the antipode respect to Italy. I follow their signals since N5J operators were active on the island. Their signals arrived mainly on the morning on 21027 kHz CW, but too low to worked.My antenna was beamed toward north through the short path passing over the north pole with about 5 skips on the F ionized layer to reach jarvis island 15000 km far. Until the mornig of saturday 17 august 2024, N5J arrived quite strong since 0700 local time but not enough to work.I resumed the watch on 21027 kHz at 1100 local time and his signal was quite strong to work them. I check the long path also via south pole but the sgnals was quite low.

First i checked the split area of about 15 kHz wide up, At this point I was sure to be enable to contact the expedition. I switch on the PA adjusting the exticer to 500 W output and the transmitting frequency in the middle of the split area, the antenna was to northward, I called for ten minutes but none replay. So i Checked better the split area with the SDR receiver ELAD FDM Duo, so I reconized that the traffic was situated mainly on the top of the split area. Then I adjusted the transmitting frequency on 14030 kHz where there was more free space to call. In about three minute N5J replayed to me. So I contacted N5J at 0927 UTC 17 of august 2024 on 15 metres.

I have to say that there was a lot of inexperienced european radioamateur tunning and calling isofrequency N5J, and what saying about the etere policemen that contribute to the qrm. In this case i activate my own uman selectivity that allow me to listen only the station of interest to me ignoring all the others, I perform better this functionality using the earphones. An exsample of this function is a group of people that speak all together , but we can concentrate to listen only one person of our interest.

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Many regards de Fiorino/i3fdz