News from the antenna team in Kinshasa.
Yesterday we put up all antennas except the Hexbeam wich will be put up today.
Frequent thunderstorms and pouring rain prevented us from fine tuning our low band receiving antennas.
When a thunderstorm passes right overhead there is heavy static current accumulating on the 160 meter vertical causing a discharge to the three where the antenna is attached. We need to built a static drain coil today to prevent our radio’s from getting damaged.
Dispite the lack of good receive antennas we wanted to be on the lowbands right from the start. As expected the lowband verticals, a 1/4 wave for both 40 and 80 and an Inverted L supported by a 26 meter tall spiderpole, all three sitting on an extensive radial field put out loud signals.
We managed to put quite a number of North American stations in our 80 meter log but signals are just at the noise level wich makes it very difficult to keep up a good rate.
Today we will be putting up one additional receive antenna and fine tune the others.
So we hope to have better ears tonight.

Stay tuned !

9Q50ON