Winter 2005 Issue

The PJ7M 6-Meter Expedition

This past summer, K4BI and K2ZD went on a DXpedition to Dutch Sint Maarten to take advantage of 6-meter sporadic-E propagation.
Read all about it . . .

By Jim Holt,* K4BI

Jim, K4BI, and Mario, K2ZD, on the villa balcony in Dutch Sint Maarten. (Photos courtesy the author)

Once one enters the main portal of amateur radio as a hobby interest, the number and variety of specialty interests within it are numerous and varied. One of these is described as 6-meter DXing, which enjoys a relatively small but active number of individuals. An even smaller subgroup within this specialty interest is those who enjoy and actively make trips to entities around the globe in order to activate them for the express purpose of making them available for 6-meter QSOs.
Mario Karcich, K2ZD, and I are members of this subgroup, and while attending the Jimmy Treybig,W6JKV, annual 6-meter Bar-B-Que party in September of 2003, we talked about and basically committed to going to Dutch Sint Maarten in the Caribbean during early July of 2004 for this purpose, providing a suitable site could be located and arranged. Early July has become the preferred time frame for efforts such as ours, because the growing body of experience with 6-meter propagation during this period suggests that it is a “prime time” for long-haul openings that don’t relate to the 11-year solar cycle.

We had observed this during our very first trip together back in July 1988 (PJØM on Saba Island). Region 1 had, for the most part, permitted 6 meters just a few years earlier, and no one had any serious expectations that non-F2 long-haul contacts would take place. We made lots of contacts with North America while there, but the real surprise was that 48-MHz video carriers from Europe were heard every day and for hours at a time. It was during these periods of video-carrier reception that we completed three QSOs with two stations in the U.K. and one station in Portugal on 6 meters—a real harbinger of things to come.

Dutch Sint Maarten
This was our third trip together (the second was to Barbados in 2000), and use of the internet for the purpose of searching out a proper site and then completing arrangements has made this part of the job considerably easier in terms of time and effort required.
 

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