DX-pedition to Lista, January 6-9, 2011

I should have written this blog posting a long time ago: It is now more than a year since this DX-pedition took place. On January 6-9, 2011, I was back at my usual DX-pedition site at Lista on the Southwestern tip of Norway. Leaving family behind concentrating on DX only for 4 days is always intriguing and highly recommended for all DX-ers! 🙂  This time I was accompanied with Torgeir Nyen and Tore Johnny Bråtveit for the entire 4 days and for Jan Alvestad (of Solar Terrestrial Activity Report fame) for the last 3 days.

The antennas were the usual 800 metre beverage antenna pointing towards the East Coast of North America / Florida / Cuba and a 500 metre long beverage antenna towards the West Coast. We used the East Coast antenna 95% of the time as conditions were very poor and almost useless towards the West Coast. I was equipped with software defined radios only: 2 SDR-IQ receivers and 1 Perseus receiver.

We had fairly good conditions during most of the DX-pedition. Conditions were most interesting on the first and on the last morning (Jan. 6 and Jan. 9 respectively) of the DX-pedition when we had good conditions towards the U.S. East Coast.  The other 2 mornings were more of a mixed bag with poorer signals and more stations from the Caribbean.  All 4 evenings were a big disappointment with hardly any interesting signals at all. Strangely, the paths towards South America were more or less closed during the entire DX-pedition with only the most common Colombians and Venezuelans making it to our radios.

To our surprise, we also logged quite a number of Mexicans. We were also quite pleased about logging our first Alaskan station ever, 680 KBRW, we had tried to hear Alaska many times previously without success.

After reviewing most of my recordings, I have now published my log from this DX-pedition as a Google Docs spreadsheet. This log in a “work-in-progress” as there are still recordings left to check. Even though I have been to Lista many times before, it is still possible to catch new stations here. I am actually quite surprised (and pleased) to find that more than 40 new stations made it into my log during this DX-pedition.

Best loggings (in my opinion, that is): 570 CKGL Kitchener ON, 590 XEPH Sabrosita 590, 920 WURA Quantico VA, 960 XEROO La Guadalupana, 1020 WURN Kendall FL, 1230 WEEX Easton PA, 1330 WSPQ Springville NY, 1370 KDTH Dubuque IA, 1600 KGYM Cedar Rapids IA, 1660 KRZI Waco TX and 1680 KRJO Monroe LA.