In my experience, June can some years be a bit dead for DX with only some local contacts, usually on the lower bands. This year seems to follow that trend. On 60m the first few contacts were; G0WSJ, on EU-005. EI8KN on EU-115. OJ0L on EU-053 and 7 other European mainland contacts.
Following on from my May edition, the postman had another surprise for me. I mentioned I had worked 9M6NA in East Malaysia on the 25th of May, well on the morning of the 9th of June the card arrived having been posted in Japan on the 4th. In the 'good old days' it took a year or more!
Illustrated is an example of the new electronic QSLs, however at the present time they are not accepted for the major awards schemes. But, they are still good to show friends and family who you have been contacting. In this case, Namibia in southern Africa.
On the 8th I managed to work Madagascar, a new one for the year, but try as I may, I couldn’t get a confirmed FT8 contact with T88TJ on Palau island.
It took until the 27th before I worked another new one for the year. Out of a dead band, a rising signal from JX appeared. Jan Mayen island is well north of Iceland and not heard too often in the UK. The only population is a team of Norwegians who run and maintain a metrological station and the airfield. This is good for IOTA as EU-022, and grid square IQ50.
Image credit: Gernot Hecker, 21.08.2005, licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (image scaled).
With not much to work on the bands, I have been looking back through the logbook. It is noticeable that The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which used to be quite rare has been a hot bed of new calls who seem to want to work everyone. Ukraine, likewise, is still very active in spite of their troubles. Islands appear regularly and this month I worked 6 EU, 3 AF, 2 AS and 3 NA.
Hopefully July will produce a better score and some real DX, as it is coming up to the DXpedition season.
Cheers
Chris G4ZCS
