WPX SSB will finish in a couple of hours and we will have another crack at SSB on 40, 20, 15, 10. We will also be trying 80 CW again for our last couple of nights here on Raivavae. We will also try to do some more 15m RTTY -  last time we checked, VK9MT was busy on there and our pile-ups would have clashed. We will not be doing RTTY on any other bands (there were a couple of rogue RTTY loggings on 20 when the CAT interface dropped out – those have now been fixed).

Saturday morning our time (Saturday evening GMT we had what we think was a Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance (SID). None of us has experienced anything so dramatic before. We were running Europe on the high bands with big signals and suddenly it was as though someone turned out the lights – from pile-ups to zero signals in about 30 seconds! Fortunately the bands gradually came back although we are still experiencing slow fading on most of the high bands.

About 63,000 QSOs now. While we realise there is unmet demand for specific bands and modes, we believe this is by a long way the largest expedition so far from the Australs (in terms of QSO numbers). The good news is that this is a great expedition location – licensing is easy, there are good operating locations and the people are very welcoming. So we are sure there will be many more operations as the years go by!

As a final aside, we are very pleased to work QRP operators and congratulate you all on your QSOs. However, we don’t log /QRP (or indeed /QRO, /FRED or anything else that isn’t part of the callsign).