South African team member Jan, ZS6BMN has been monitoring the team’s WSPR beacon:

and has spotted it on several bands now:

The satellite based tracker has the team almost half way to Marion Island (they will pass but not stop):

Its is 2168 km (1347 miles) from Cape Town to Marion Island. It is 4777 km (2968 miles) from Cape Town to Heard Island. This means it is almost like driving across the US at 12 mph! It also means that they are the equivalent of driving from San Francisco to the Los Angeles area at this point in time. They are almost 25% of the way to Heard Island, which does match the projected time of 10 days to get there.

The weather on Marion Island is breezy, cool and a bit rainy. They have been on the air with a last spot in the last hour or so (I use DX Heat as my DX Cluster tool):

Here are the QSO’s by continent:

And by band:

It looks like they might be getting close to a storm of some sort – but if you compare this with yesterday, the weather sure changes quite a bit over the course of a day in that part of the world. It seems the “level” of storm matches the weather report on Marion Island – and its actually similar to the storm we are having in the San Francisco Bay Area recently – 20 mph winds, rain and about 50 degrees. Quite interesting that fact!

You can see the wave action as well. It will be interesting to see how this looks by later today or tomorrow.

73, Rich, KY6R