The pressure to work K1N on Navassa Island continues. The DXpedition has topped 100,000 contacts as it enters final few days, but demand seems insatiable. The pileups continue to be fierce with little letup, K1N team member Glenn Johnson, W0GJ, said in a February 10 media release. A day earlier, during a satellite telephone interview with Wolf Harranth, OE1WHC, Johnson advised phone operators to turn off their speech processors when trying to break the pileups. He said the splatter generated when phone ops max out their speech processors in an effort to be heard “makes it almost impossible” to pick out individual callers.

“If we could somehow magically eliminate all speech processors, we could probably double or triple our rate, particularly in working Europeans,” Johnson told OE1WHC.

Johnson said the distribution of K1N contacts forms “almost a bell-shaped curve centered on 20 and 30 meters,” although, he added, 40 meters has been “very productive” as well. On the outer edges, K1N had logged more than 2500 contacts on 160 as of February 9 and has been working stations in Oceania and Europe on 6 meters, where K1N has been maintaining a beacon on 50.103 MHz.

Johnson said the team will continue to operate full bore into the early weekend but will start closing down on Friday, February 13, sending unneeded supplies back to Jamaica.

“We’ll probably be in full swing through Friday evening (local time),” Johnson explained. Operations will proceed through Saturday, but “at the break of dawn” on Sunday, February 15, the team will have to depart Navassa, and it could be another decade before anyone is able to activate Navassa Island.

“Everyone is still health and in good spirits,” Johnson said in the team’s February 10 news release. “We really thank everyone for standing by while we work our propagation windows, especially to Japan.”

The K1N logs have been posted.