I guess I consider myself slightly above a casual DXer. I’ve already got some nice wallpaper like 9BDXCC, but I’m nowhere near DXCC Honor Roll, having just 284 confirmed countries. In the past four years I have only added 8 new ones.
I knew Bouvet Island was coming up this year, and used KP5/NP3VI to dust off my rusty skills. Man, that lulled me into a false sense of security because they had been on the air for about 40 days by the time I worked them. So the pileups were small.
So I went hunting for Bouvet with false hopes. On the first two days, the signals were weak and the pileups were massive. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it in 15 years of DXing. I spent about 5 hours one day trying to work them on 40m CW – a fools errand on their first or second day. Then I discovered that 40m FT8 was producing good signals between 11 PM and 3 AM local time. I spend another 6 hours or so without luck, watching many stations that I had heard in the nights before work them over and over again.
Finally at 1:16AM local time this morning, I was lucky enough to complete a contact with them. Signal levels were decent (about -15 for both of us), proving yet again that 100 watts and a wire can work the world.
My thanks to the DXpedition crew for 3Y0K. I can’t believe any group of people are willing to spend $1.7 million making a tiny frozen island near Antarctica radio active!
