Early 2008 season

I arrived at the end of January and left early March 2008. The first weeks, we were really busy working, so that I didn't had much time to get on the air. But at then end, I had some evenings to get the station running, although I had two major problems. Firstly, the batteries used were either not of best quality or very old, because they didn't take a full charge and I was only able to get about 1 hour of operating time out of them, before I had to recharge them. Secondly, the fur seals used the guy wires/ropes as dental floss and I had to take care that the ropes were in good order to keep the antennas upright in the strong winds around South Georgia.

Unfortunately, the wind, fur seals and reindeer took the 20m groundplane antenna nearly down (see photo). But I was able to fix the bend tubing and was on air again.

I also sat up a 7.5m vertical including an auto tuner for the lower bands, but an adult male elephant seal (HUGE!!!) overran the whole set up and left nothing but bits and pieces. Conclusion: Auto tuners are not made to get between pebbles and a couple of tons of blubber...

3Y0E

We work in an international team to look at the elephant seals all around Antarctica. So, at the same time I was down on South Georgia, another team was doing similar research on the island of Bouvet. Of course, we had to share our experiences and so I was talking to Petrus (3Y0E) every other day or so. And signals were pretty good between our two sub-antarctic islands reaching sometimes 55. Despite the uniqueness of such contacts between rare DX destinations, it was great to fight the remoteness and feel a bit of friendship across the Southern Ocean.
Petrus is now working on Marion Island

Propagation

The propagation was really bad, as expected. However, the south of Europe and the eastcoast of North America was workable in the evening. But I think, my 100W output was not enough most of the time.