I’ve been casually looking for N5J on Jarvis Island for the past week or so. I heard them once on 12m CW early on, and have seen many spots. Since my operating time has mostly been between local noon and 6 PM, that simply wasn’t an optimal time.
This morning I happened to be awake right around sunrise (about 6 AM local time), and figured grey-line propagation might help. So I checked the spotting network, and sure enough saw a number of spots on 18.095 FT8. I didn’t want to wake the house stumbling downstairs to the basement, so I used my phone to connect to my FelxRadio 6600M. That tiny display certainly wasn’t optimal, but I did see that N5J was on the air and quite strong, so I gave them a call. A few minutes later, I had an answer
Data screen of SmartSDR on my iPhone showing NJ5 Contact
Waterfall display from SmartSDR showing strong N5J signal at RX frequency, and my TX offset
Solar position showing N5J location. The contact was made 26 minutes after local sunrise
About 10 hours later, N5J uploaded their log, and sure enough my contact was confirmed! Jarvis happens to be an ATNO (All Time New One) for me. and should bring my DXCC count to 280.
{ED} A couple of days later I worked N5J on 20 and 15m CW. Never heard them on SSB.
Thanks to the DXpedition for their hard work. I understand they finished with over 100,000 QSOs, which is outstanding.
