[HN Gopher] 3Y0J: The Bouvet Island Amateur Radio DXpedition
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       3Y0J: The Bouvet Island Amateur Radio DXpedition
        
       Author : wglb
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2021-10-28 01:15 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.3y0j.no)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.3y0j.no)
        
       | SOMA_BOFH wrote:
       | wow that looks like a lot of fun! nice work on the project and
       | securing funding, congrats!
        
       | curiousfab wrote:
       | For non-hams it may be difficult to understand why hams do this,
       | but collecting "countries" (or rather DXCC entities [1]) is a big
       | deal for many radio amateurs. There are currently 340 countries
       | of which ~250 are "easy", which means that there's a local
       | population of at lease some radio amateurs that make it possible
       | to make a contact with them on a regular basis, but after that it
       | gets "tough".
       | 
       | So there are many radio amateurs (or rather groups of amateurs)
       | who love to travel and hand out new countries to the deserving.
       | For some countries the difficulty is purely in getting a
       | permission to operate a radio amateur station from there (e.g.
       | North Korea), others are almost impossible to access for reasons
       | of natural protection (e.g. Crozet Island) and yet others are
       | very difficult to get to.
       | 
       | Bouvet is the latter, and you need a professional team and a huge
       | budget to achieve this.
       | 
       | There are other places that require some "creativity" to activate
       | - like Scarborough Reef [2], and
       | 
       | There have been previous attempts, the last two ones (both in the
       | last few years) failed due to problems with the ships.
       | 
       | Whoever makes the race to Bouvet (there's currently the Norwegian
       | group linked here, and a Polish group trying to go there) will
       | make many radio amateurs around the world happy, and probably
       | make something in the order of 100k to 150k radio contacts.
       | 
       | I can only wish them good luck!
       | 
       | [1] http://www.arrl.org/dxcc-rules
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_operating_award
       | 
       | [2] https://www.n4gn.com/sr95/sr09.html
        
       | rmason wrote:
       | There is a long history of hams going to put rare countries on
       | the air. In the fifties through the seventies it was mostly solo
       | adventurers. I got to know the most famous of them all, Gus
       | Browning, in the early seventies. He had been around the world
       | multiple times and I worked him in different countries all though
       | high school and college.
       | 
       | He wasn't a rich man unlike others and depended solely on
       | donations. I remember being in his hotel room at the Dayton
       | Hamvention where he pitched where he was headed in the next year.
       | People gave him stacks of fifty or hundred dollar bills along
       | with either their business cards clipped to the money or QSL
       | cards.
       | 
       | I vividly remember tens of thousands of dollars laying on his
       | bed. I've never before or since seen that much cash in one place.
       | Being a poor college kid I felt so badly that I bought him lunch
       | the next day. The tales that man could tell, he'd ridden on river
       | boats with peasants and partied with Kings.
        
         | curiousfab wrote:
         | DokuFunk from Austria has collected a lot of material about
         | well known ham radio personalities, including
         | 
         | Gus Browning:
         | https://dokufunk.org/amateur_radio/personalities/index.php?C...
         | 
         | and
         | 
         | Danny Weil:
         | https://dokufunk.org/amateur_radio/personalities/index.php?C...
         | 
         | and other interesting figures like
         | 
         | Roman Stepanenko:
         | https://dokufunk.org/amateur_radio/personalities/index.php?C...
         | 
         | Lots of interesting biographies!
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-29 23:02 UTC)