Antarctica has eluded me for years. I'd see cluster spots for various Antarctic operations but never heard anything other than the pileups of stations calling and working them. Blame it on poor propagation or crappy antennas or both, it just never happened for me. Until last night.
I noticed a lot of spots by stateside ops for DP1POL at Neumayer Station on the DXWatch.com web cluster while surfing the web (do people still say that?) in the living room around 0300. He was QRV on 40m CW where I've had a lot of success these past few months working and hearing southern South America in the evenings, so I thought it might be a good idea to check it out.
As soon as I clicked the spot on the shack PC, I heard him 57 to 59. Found where he was listening, tuned the K3's XIT up about 1.4 kHz, got him on my second call, and proceeded to do the happy dance (thank you, Felix!). Eight hours later I woke up to find his QSL in my LOTW account -- DXCC #122 in the books!
ClubLog's Geographic Propagation Wizard suggests I stumbled upon DP1POL at the best possible time:
Neumayer Station II is not quite due south from my QTH, about 155° beam heading (which means little to me as I have no beam). Just interesting that I heard little other DX on the band other than ZS1JX in South Africa after working DP1POL; WWV propagation report for 07-Jan-2014 at 0300 was SFI-204, A=4, K=1, Minor w/S1 -> Minor w/S1 R1.
(From 1978 WRTH)
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