Volcano with abandoned houses in foreground

The VP2MUW DXpedition – Montserrat 2018

I’ve spent the last week with Rob M0VFC and Dan M0WUT on a DXpedition to Montserrat as VP2MUW. This post is part-diary, part-informative for anyone who wishes to follow in our footsteps. Travelling to Montserrat Montserrat’s main airport was destroyed by the volcano eruptions in 1997 and 2010. Today, there is just a small airstrip…

SOTA trip to the West Pyrenees

In August 2017, I spent a few days doing some of the Summits on the Air summits in the Pyrenees. Monday 31st July Trône du Roi (F/PO-187): Attempt 1 After flying into Toulouse and getting a hire car (which took an unexpectedly long time), I drove to the Trône du Roi (King’s Throne) to operate,…

Radio activity from Chile

As some of you might be aware, I’m going travelling in Chile for most of November and December. This isn’t a radio DXpedition as I can only take one 23kg suitcase to last 6 weeks and clothes and camping stuff have to take priority! That said, I do have a Chilean licence, and I am taking…

That’s all folks…

That’s it. At 01:30 UTC on 17th July, we finished our DXpedition to Svalbard. So, how did we do? The raw numbers On the face of it, this wasn’t our most successful DXpedition in terms of QSO count. During the six full days we were QRV, we only made 6305 contacts between the six of us.…

Staying at JW5E

While we’re in Svalbard, we’re operating from the JW5E shack, the local radio club cabin. I’m also sleeping here, so I thought I’d give a quick introduction to what’ it’s like to stay at the station, which can be rented by other radio amateurs. For official information on the station, see jw5e.com Before going any further, I…

An excursion to Pyramiden

After our trip to Barentsberg a couple days previously, yesterday we went to Pyramiden, named after the Pyramid-shaped mountain above the town. Like Barentsberg, this is a Russian coal-mining settlement. Unlike Barentsberg, however, Pyramiden is a ghost town. Or almost a ghost town. The mine closed in 1997. Under the Svalbard Treaty, if a settlement…

An excursion to Barentsberg

Yesterday, Rob M0VFC, Steve M1ACB and I left the rest of the group in the shack while we took a trip to the Russian settlement of Barentsberg here on Svalbard. The excursion was organised by Svalbard Travel and is moderately expensive, but well worth the cost for a long day on a boat with an…

Hello from Svalbard

After two flights (London – Oslo, then Oslo – Longyearbyen), we’ve arrived in Svalbard. This is the view from the shack, taken just after we arrived (about 00:30 local time). The midnight sun is very real! The first surprise, we have mobile phone signals and the shack has internet. So, our fears about lack of…

DXpedition Announcement: Svalbard, July 2015

From 10th-17th July 2015, I will be one of six operators activating the JW5E shack on Svalbard. We’ll be operating on 40m-10m (and maybe some 6m if conditions allow), mainly on SSB and CW, using JW/{homecall}. We won’t arrive in Longyearbyen until late in the evening of Friday 10th, and we depart very early in the morning on…

VP9/M0BLF: Log analysis

One of the things I like to do shortly after a DXpedition is to do some fairly detailed statistical analysis on my log. This helps highlight openings or areas of the world I might have missed, and helps me consider improvements for the next trip. It can also help identify where propagation predictions did, and…