Today we received passports back from France with visas for 15 days to enter the Congo. The preparation for obtaining the documents took almost 12 months. We missed the initially scheduled September 2022, and the tickets had to book for January 2023. Fortunately, in October, the Ministry of Health of the Republic of the Congo cancelled the obligation to test for covid with an RT-PCR test before leaving the country, after arriving in the country and before flying home from the Congo. Thus, after long months of preparations, all the legislative requirements for the start of the expedition were finally met.

We managed to secure the QTH in the flat terrain within sight of the ocean. We will have an area of approx. 6000m2 at our disposal, which is fenced, so we should feel safe. The view in all directions is unobstructed so we can point our antennas without problems to all continents. There is also enough space around for installing beverage antennas; the only complication can be grazing herds of cows

QTH is not connected to public electricity. A diesel generator must power the entire QTH on a 24/7 basis. We have managed to secure two diesel generators that regularly alternate in operation, so we can expect minor outages needed to switch the entire local network to the second generator. In addition to the expedition’s equipment, the entire house, including all its electrical appliances, is powered from the generator. Estimated consumption is approximately 4 l per hour, which is about 1400 l of diesel in a 14-day operation. The price of one liter of diesel is roughly +0.8USD per liter plus delivery costs to the QTH.
Based on the comments, we have modified the planned frequency table, which we will try to respect as much as possible.

Currently, the finalization of the material list and the packing and weighing of individual items are underway. We bought extra checked baggage to take more antennas with us. In total, we will carry 17 pieces of checked baggage of 23 kg and eight pieces of cabin baggage of 12 kg. That’s a total of 487 kilograms of material.
To make the operation of the TN8K expedition more attractive, we decided to announce a competition for the official expedition T-Shirt.
The first station with the most slots with TN8K on Clublog will receive a free official expedition T-shirt from us as a thank-you. We will evaluate stations from EU, NA+SA, Asia and VK/ZL+Oceania. So there are four pieces of official TN8K T-shirts in the game. Only the first station from a given area with the maximum number of slots can win. It is not only the number of places that matters but also the speed of who reaches this number first.

If you like our expedition, please support us. It is the most expensive project implemented by the CDXP team to date.
How you can support us is shown on the website www.cdxp.cz

14.12.2022 CDXP Team