Thursday, September 6, 2012

French nature park FFF-049 and castle in dept. 37

Activating Langeais on four bands

On a short holiday trip to the Loire region I ended up near the town of Langeais. This town is situated within the nature park Loire Anjou Touraine. This town also features a nice medieval castle. I could not find the castle on the DFCF (national French castle program) list nor on the WCA list. Checking with the DFCF coordinator F6FNA I learned the castle had not been activated before. Jean Pierre gave me a new reference number as did Andrew RN1CW for the WCA program.

Castle of Langeais (F-05272 and DFCF 37-095)

Thursday afternoon / early evening turned out to be the time slot I could spend some time on the radio. I went over to Langeais and found a nice spot along the Loire river, less than 500m from the castle. This is an important distance as I was planning to activate the castle both under the WCA rules as well as under the DFCF rules. The latter states that one needs to be within 500m from the castle.
View from the operating spot towards the castle of Langeais

The conditions were rather peculiar. QSB was strong and there was not a lot of activity on the bands. There were some stations from the east that came in rather strong though, from Japan and all the way from Indonesia.

I started out on 15m, went down to 17m, 20m and 40m, to end on 20m again. I logged 154 calls, 105 of them on 20m. 40m was quieter than I expected it to be with only 25 calls logged. This might have been due to strong QRM/QRN that went up to S7.

Operating spot @ Langeais

DX came in from 4Z, EA8, W1, JA, UA9 and YB. YB1HK set the max QRB to 11900km - a new record during a WFF/WCA activation for me.
Alexander UR7ET came by on three different bands, Alexander RV9UCN on two.

Thanks all for stopping by.

Lars, F/PH0NO/P

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