Muhos 2005

Well, at least it was totally different from our first experience last January '05. The second Italian DX mission to Muhos - Oulu, housed in Jari Ruhomaaki 's finely equipped cottage (an indoor restroom facilities in the sauna annex will likely replace the external hut cum underseat container which *can* be tough at 15 below for solid wastes) didn't start for once under that peculiar proton rain which plagued the very first attempt. But it wasn't exactly top conditions either. These actually predated our only useful period (winter DX is hardly compatible with working hours...) and followed some 30 days after our come back. Slightly detached from the Arctic averages, propagation was more or less fair to good. Which for us means unbelievable, anyway. We finally experienced almost all-day DXing opportunities and logged interesting stations practically every night and morning. Often, it was possible to get new (for us) stations from a wide geographic spectrum, from La Plata to Prairies. We even enjoyed an eery, albeit faint, greenish aurora in the Northern sky during our last night!

Only Renato Bruni and Andy Lawendel managed to take a week off their respective daily routines to once again fly from Milan to Oulu. Jari Ruhomaaki dream location, in the meantime, underwent some useful mods, with two new Beverages directed 320 and 70 degrees to the previous collection of seven. The former proved to be quite effective with stations from the NA West Coast (as far as Sacramento), but Alaska was apparently almost out of our reach, with a nice ID only from the super-regular Barrow 680 and a tentative from 720. The new antenna toward Asia wasn't very productive, but not for its faultiness. Conditions weren't simply at their best in those late autumn afternoons. We're already considering a temporary antenna addition in our future plans: if and when we're visiting Muhos for a third time, we'll try mounting up a shorter 350 degreess or so wire. Jari tells us a 500 meters Beverage is a piece of cake to install, provided there's not much snow (there wasn't, at least at the beginning of December).

<>In spite of some flying schedule glitches on the first leg of our itinerary, Oulu appeared once again as the ideal compromise between
"getting there" and "deep North-like" DXing. A group of fellow Italian DXers is trying the true Arctic location of Parkalompolo while we're writing this report and will later tell about logistics. But leaving aside two DXing Shangri-lahs like Lemmenjoki and Kongsfjord, which would both require more than 24 hours traveling, Muhos is conveniently located less than 45 minutes of taxi ride from a small but internationally serviced airport and its sun never rise much above the horizont line in December. Weren't it for adverse weather conditions (fog) in Milan Malpensa, which delayed the arrival of our aircraft, we'd have reached Oulu in less than 6 hours flight with a single stop in Copenhagen (so it happened on our way back). As it went, we had to wait for a while in Denmark before being able to jump first on flight to Stockholm and from there on that day's last flight to Oulu. Better than what the connecting flights counter at Copenhagen prospected us at first: another three-legged journey via Goteborg, AND Stockholm. A stoical Jari was kindly waiting to pick us up at the airport, but we were some nine hours late: we only started listening around 01 UTC, the next day.

Apart from the utter pleasure of listening to West Coast stations at armchair level, we learned a hell of a lot from this DXped, operating

wise. As Southern DXers we are used to highly geographically directed openings, with stations usually coming from a single main direction, often in a narrow portion of the MW band and always strongly correlated to local and distant graylines. Also, we normally don't expect, for each channel, more than a single dominating station plus one or two background usable signals at best. Finally, continental Europe QRM means that you simply have to give many MW channels up, so that fewer windows of opportunity remain. Well, forget all this in the North, in what would amount for us to an "unearthly" QRM and light environment. In Muhos you can easily tune from 540 to 1700 for hours and stations manage to pop up on a single frequency with a casuality which made us crazy at first. To resist jumping histerically from channel to channel, you either have to use at least multiple receivers and recorders to continously monitor several frequencies concurrently (like Arctic DXped crews do thanks to very effective antenna splitters) or simply be forced to miss several opportunities, like we've done out of better training. Next time there will hopefully be three of us.

Some notes about the following tips. Muhos was confirmed as a prime location for both North and South America, thanks to its wide range of antennas. Several highlights came from Spanish speaking stations, included very rare Cuban station on 870. X-Band was conspicously absent, while lower frequencies yielded nice results generally. Especially from NA, conditions usually allowed only for one dominant station on each channel. Graveyard or local channels went relatively underexploited, more out of unexceptional propagation than our own inexperience. Stronger Alaskan stations were absent in the evening (Jari tells us there are a few common catches wich we never noticed). Mexico kept out of our way, alas. Even considering our respective, radically different settings, a practical death sentence emerges as a conclusion for serious DXing at Italian latitudes. Solar minimum and gradual decommissioning of many MW frequencies (but what about DRM, or increasing pests form nearby France?) not withstanding, we'll likely be increasingly forced to hunt for new DX preys in places like Muhos, and only during carefully organized DXpeditions. It doesn't help that most (Renato Edit: but not all!) of us are now closely seeing the 50 years age line. Both in front and behind us. Still, DXing is an all too valuable hobby to give it up, isn't it?