9L5MS DXpedition with Mercy Ships

[IK0ZCW]

Spring 2011 the third MercyShips dxpedition was held. This film gives you an impression of the dxpeditionteams work on board the hospitalship Africa Mercy and how the dxpedition in Sierra Leone was done. Antennas were mostly light weight from Spiderbeam or plain fishing rods. The team worked from topband 160m to the magic band 50MHz 6m. With a 17m high vertical the team was able to work Japan (9000 miles) on topband in the greyline several times without the help of a seawater ground. A good antenna with 3toploadwires, inductive loading at 13m height and 16 x 20m radials. Simple and efective. Matching was done by a quarter wave transformer of 2 50ohm cables in parallel.
We wanted to take the Elecraft KPA500, a KX3 and mayby the KAT500 but that equipment was not ready at that time. But we took a Kenwood TS2000, an Elecraft K3 and an ICOM IC7400 and 3 linears of which one was the SPE-1K. No room or shippingweight left for ACOM-2000, Alpha-9800 or other linears. Instead of that we had two HLA-300 linears with 60A switching powersupplies.
The DXpediton made 23500 QSO's in two weeks despite the problems the team had to overcome, mentioned in this film. The location of de dxpedition was a remote place in the peninsula mountains near Freetown, Sierra Leone. Would be a nice spot for a K3 with a K3/0 at home, hi