Shortly after Trond's Jw trip in January, we started talking about yet another trip. Only a few days passed before we settled on a time frame. It had to be late February. The main reason was to avoid that the expedition collided with 3Y0X. In addition, the sun had started showing up again, something which creates a magical light with the just above the horizon. This time, the team consisted of LA8AJA, LA9DFA and LA9VDA. All experienced operator, who all have been to Svalbard before.

Since LA9DFA caught an earlier plane, he arrived in the middle of the day on Thursday. On our part (LA8AJA and LA9VDA), the trip started not so good. The delay started at Gardermoen. The plane to Tromsø was delayed by an hour and a half. When we arrived in Tromsø, we had to wait even more. Time for departure was set to 0220. This meant another three and a half hours of waiting time. Just after 0500 in the morning, we arrived at the radio cabin. As we were pretty tired, we went to sleep quickly.

Around noon we started assembling the radioes and the gear we brought with us. Soon after, we hit the air. Pile-up's were quite good, and we made several hundred qsoes. But as always when it comes to Svalbard, one can never predict the conditions. Conditions were up and down all the time, making it difficult to work anything.

During one of the quiet periods, we put up a 60M dipole from the tower. The dipole was sloping to North-America. We had big plans to activite 60M for the first time from Svalbard. Shortly after erecting the antenna, LA6YEA was worked from the LA3L clubstation. Signals weren't that good, but we had made our first contact. Later that evening we made another try. Firsts were logged with G, GM, GI and TF. We were also reported in IT9, DL, VE and W on the cluster. Unfortunately, no more contacs were made. The local noise must take some of the blame here. From time to time, it was very strong. And again, stations had to be pretty strong to be worked.

We continued our activities on HF. RTTY was also activated, something which seemed to be very popular, cause it generated big pile-up's. Saturday morning, we discovered that the FT1000 has lost it's receiver. It wasn't much of use anymore. A big problem when it comes to Svalbard, is real ground. Those who have been there, know what we are talking about. Because of the permafrost, it's 300m down to real ground. This can cause big problems. Another factor playing a part, is that all the antennas are very close to each other. This makes it difficult to have several stations on the air at the same time. We heavily recommend the use of bandpassfilters and built-in antennatuners to spare the receiver frontend and minimize qrm between stations.

I am afraid this wasn't the end of our problems. Thanks to our eagerness to work 60M, we managed to kill another receiver. This time it was an IC756 that lost it's receiver.

The only living radio that we brought with us, was now the K2. We tried the three other JW5E rigs with mixed success. They weren't very immune against signals coming from the other rig active, and the filters weren't too good either. We settled with an IC735 as radio number two. Unfortunately, the radio didn't transmit on 60M, but thanks to a phone call to Permo, a Norwegian ham shop, we got the solution. One small modification and we were qrv once again on 60M.

On Tuesday, Mathias picked us up and drove us around on a sightseeing trip. We got the opportunity to take many beautiful pictures. One of the more spectacular views, was when Mathias brought us to Bjørndalen. Here we could see the sun casting a very beautiful light at the edge of the mountain. Take a look at the pictures taken in the pictures section.

In the evening, we got ready for another try on 60M. 20 minutes past midnight, the first station from the US was logged. After a lot of calling, we got a total of 9 US stations. Totally, 25 qsoes was worked on 60M.

Conditions were pretty good the last night. I was up till 0400 working mostly stateside on 40M. LA9DFA and LA9VDA worked a few qsoes in the morning before everything was packed. In the end, we worked around 4500 qsoes.

Mathias drove us to the airport, and we got home without too many delays this time. This was the end of our Svalbard adventure.