EU-056 Gossen Island by LA8AJA
 
This was the first time activating an IOTA in Norway for me. I joined LA5UKA and LA9VDA for this trip. Both had been here before, and activated several IOTA's prior to this one. I was not sure how much interest this would generate among the active hams. With my JW trip (2002) and OJ0LA trip (2003) in mind, I remember some nice pile-ups.

Everything was ready for departure on Thursday April 14th. After many hours on the road and 2 ferry's, we arrived at Gossen Feriesenter at 2100 local time. We put up the 30M antenna a little while later, the other antennas had to wait till the next day. LA9VDA hit the air on 30M. Unfortunately, we seemed to have some local noise on the bands, which made it difficult from time to time to hear the weaker stations.

The next day antennas for 15M, 17M, 20M, 40M and 80M were put up. We were supposed to hit the air with 3 stations at the same time, but I had several pc problems. The laptop I borrowed wouldn't key CW in XP even though I tried 3 different drivers. Fortunately, LA5UKA had brought an old laptop. The laptop ran from 12V, which did seem troublesome because of severe hf. After trying ferrits on most of the cables with no luck, LA9VDA and I switched powersupplies. This seemed to cure the problem, and I hit the air and quickly got a pile-up. It was great to be in the other end of the pile-up again. LA5UKA started working SSB and RTTY, and we finally had 3 stations on the air.

Everything seemed fine until we wanted to try 15M. It wasn't possible for me to work on that band because my radio wouldn't stop tx'ing, so I had to turn it off. LA5UKA also tried 15M with his station, but his laptop would crash and at the same time my radio would lock-up in tx.

This meant that we could only work 5 different bands. It was a pity, but conditions weren't all that great. Pile-ups were on and off. Mostly off, but we had a few good runs during our stay. Most of the qso'es were with Europe, but several stations from Japan and North-America also made it into the log.

I used LA9VDA/p when I was operating. That's why some of you probably noticed 2 stations on the air at the same time with the same call. I only ran CW during this stay. LA9VDA ran mostly CW and some SSB. LA5UKA used his own call and ran mostly SSB and a few RTTY qso'es. LA9VDA/p made 3177 qso'es, and LA5UKA made 1003 qso'es. Not bad at all with a simple, but good working setup, like we had.

Stations were dismantled on Monday April 18th., and we were QRT after 4180 qso'es.