VK9WA: Now it's Over.

VK9WA, the much-heralded DXpedition to Willis Island, has just come to an end.

The team on Willis were meant to be using - and were apparently sponsored by - the fairly new Crank-IR folded vertical antenna, something that many ops will find useful for portable work.

To be fair, the team put up a pretty good signal, at least as heard with my 3-ele monobander, on 12m.  That said, you could clearly detect the advancing day, as their signal went from 51 to, briefly, 59, before plunging after a mere couple of minutes back to 51 or worse.

Inevitably, the team were very busy with people desperate to be the one to be heard on the other side of the world. 

I regret to say VK9WA slipped into that pretty bad habit of using increasingly wide sections of an already narrow 12m band.  Comments on the 17m cluster reflected this concern.  Specifically, on the morning of 23 November, the team were working "5-30 up" - an astonishingly wide range for 12m, and one that, at it's upper limit, would be out of band on the USB mode then in use.