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Category: Iceland

QSL NDB 340-GJ Gjögur Airport

During the CLE-321 event I heard 5 new beacons from the north coast of Iceland. Beacons from the south and south-west are heard more often here in the Netherlands. My guess is that they benefit from transmission over water. This time there were excellent conditions to the Arctic regions allowing me to pick up these beacons including NDB 340-GJ Gjogur Airport.

Gjogur –. .— on 340 kHz as registered with Pskov software

Earlier I wrote about the two beacons serving Akureyri Airport, a bigger international airport. This post is about 340-GJ for Gjogur Airport, or Gjögurflugvöllur.

Gjogur is one of the airports that is purely there for the benefit of the local population, most likely sponsored by the Icelandic government. It is staffed part-time by an AFIS controller, and only opens for Norlandair flights, which are twice a week in the winter and once a week in the summer. In the winter, the airport is the only means of access to the entire district, as the access road is impassable.

There is a very nice slideshow “Descent into the Fjord” by Rajan Parrikar available on the internet that gives a nice impression of a flight to Gjogur Airport.

QSL NDB 387-NB and 415-OE Akureyri Airport

The weekend of September 27th I participated in a Collective Listening Event (CLE 321) of the NDB-list group. I just fitted my make shift antenna in the garden (5x5x5 delta with NTi Megaloop FX box). And stations came booming in… Not only did I receive 6 beacons from Nunavut (I will write about that later), but I also received 5 new beacons from Iceland. In hindsight I guess that exceptional conditions were more important than my antenna… but judging my other medium wave receptions my antenna is working well! Hjalti Guðmundsson from Isavia was so kind to confirm my reception.

eQSL for 5 NDBs from Iceland

The first two beacons I’d like to comment on in my blog are NB on 387 kHz and OE on 415 kHz. Both are serving as navigation beacons for Akureyri Ariport. Akureyri Airport – or Akureyrarflugvöllur in Icelandic – was established in 1954. Already in 1928 there were flights to Akureyri, but those were seaplanes from Reykjavik landing on the fjord of Eyjafjörður. Today there are seasonal international flights from the UK, Switzerland and The Netherlands serving tourism.

I struggled a bit to find the location of both beacons, but I guess the map below is correct. I tried GoogleMaps to find a picture of the beacons… but so far I wasn’t successful. If you are… please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: Patrick ON4CDJ informed me that by using the coordinates provided by several sources for NDB OE you end up on an industrial parking lot. Between the light poles there is one strange mast – occupied by a seagull. Is this NDB OE?

QSL NDB HN-330 Hornafjördur

Hornafjördur Airport Terminal

NDB HN on 330 kHz serves Hornafjördur or Hornafjörður Airport, located on the south east coast of Iceland. It serves the community of Höfn (about 2500 people) with scheduled flights to Reykjavik. The terminal building looks slightly bigger than that of Thorshofn, but not by much.

QSL for NDB HN-330 Hornafjordur (and TN, VM as well)

It is my 6th beacon from Iceland confirmed. Mr. Guðmundsson from Isavia was so kind to send a scan of the QSL letter.

QSL NDB TN-373 Thorshofn

A QSL for NDB TN-373 Thorshofn, an Icelandic beacon that I don’t hear as often as some of the ones earlier posted in this blog.
Thorshofn Airport, or properly spelled in Icelandic, Þórshöfn Airport is a small airport on the Langanes peninsula in northeast Iceland. There are flights to the bigger Akureyri airport 5 days a week by a plane that does a round trip Akureyri – Vopnafjörður – Þórshöfn – Akureyri.

ccording to Wikipedia the terminal building is only 12×9 meters as domestic flights in Iceland don’t need security checks and the 19-seat Twin Otter aircraft used does not need large terminals.

The Þórshöfn Airport control tower with the terminal wing to the right.

QSL NDB VM-375 Vestmannaeyjar

A QSL for NDB VM Vestmannaeyjar on 375 kHz (together with two other Icelandic beacons which I will discuss in upcoming posts). VM is one of the beacons heard most often at my QTH, even during summer.

Vestmannaeyjar is an archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. It has a small airport and two longwave beacons: VM-375 and HL-345 Vestmannaeyjar/Helgafjell. You can read more about the airport in my post on the QSL for HL-345.

NDB HL and NDB VM on Vestmannaeyjar
The antenna for VM Vestmannaeyar

QSL NDB HA-348 Vopnafjörður/Hofsa

The other beacon verified on the QSL I recently got from Isavia is NDB HA Vopnafjörður Airport. Vopnafjörður is a small village in the north east of Iceland. Its Airport has slightly over 500 movements per year. Regular flights are carried out by Norlandair to Akureyri Airport in the north of Iceland 5 times a week. From there people can connect to other airports on Iceland including Reykjavik and seasonally to a number of Airports in mainland Europe.

QSL for NDB HL Vestmannaeyjar and NBD HA Vopnafjörður

The NDB HA is located in Hof (or Hofsa), a little hamlet about 15 kilometers SW of the airport.

Vopnafjörður Airport and Terminal Building

QSL NDB HL-345 Vestmannaeyjar/Helgafjell

Vestmannaeyjar Airport is the first airport in Iceland constructed without foreign or military assistance. It is located on the main island of the Vestmannaeyjar Archipelago (the Westman Islands). With the construction of a nearby ferry terminal at Landeyjahöfn sailing times to the mainland reduced from 3 hours to 30 minutes. This resulted in a drop in demand for scheduled flights. Today there are only government sponsored flights to Reykjavik in winter (probably because shipping and road conditions might not be optimal).

My reception of NDB HL serving this airport on 345 kHz was confirmed (together with NDB-HA which is for another post) by Hjalti Geir Guðmundsson from Isavia, the operators of the airports in Iceland

Vestmannaeyjar Airport

There is a second beacon NDB VM on 375 kHz serving the airport as well. In hindsight I should have added that one to this report as it is one of the most regular received beacons from Iceland here in The Netherlands.

QSL NDB KF-392 Keflavik

Apologies for not posting for a while but I was busy with a) some admin stuff for the Benelux DX Club, and more importantly: b) the finalization of the documents to be sent to the potential builders of our new house… From a DX perspective I see it as an investment in a low QRM future!

But I still owed you this one: an e-QSL for NDB KF Keflavik on 392 kHz. My first QSL for an NDB on Iceland. An e-QSL but it is scanned. And as everything I post on this site has to be scanned anyway… you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference!

Keflavik is the largest airpot in Iceland. And the government tries to promote it as a transfer hub with the option to explore a bit of Iceland on your journey.

“SQUEEZE 100” NDB Event

Last weekend I participated in the “SQUEEZE 100” NDB event, organized by the NDBlist group. Aim was to log 100 NDBs (Non Directional Beacons) in an as small frequency range possible. Hence the name “SQUEEZE 100”.

I had participated in two earlier events this year in which I logged only 4 and 13 stations respectively. So I decided that I needed a bit of help and installed Pskov NDB software. The result was impressive. Not knowing what to expect I started monitoring between 300 and 500 kHz. After I had 100 NDBs logged I could start to zoom in a bit, trying to squeeze the frequency range.

In total I logged over 183 NDBs. Between 350 and 403 kHz I had exactly 100 NDBs, close to 2 per kHz! The picture above shows the most distant ones I heard. With 3033 km OZN from Prins Christian Sund in Greenland was on top of my list. I was also very happy to catch three beacons from Iceland (KF-392; VM-375 and HN-330) and two from Algeria (ON-415; BJA-423).

Below the Pskov screenshot of my OZN-372 log:

Signal from NDB OZN, Prins Christiansund, Greenland on 372 kHz

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