3Y0E - Bouvet Island - Expedition to the most isolated island on Earth.

Working 3Y0E

In December I learnt that Petrus ZS6GCM would be visiting Bouvet Island with a scientific expedition and would be operating as 3Y0E. Of course I was keen to add this rare DXCC entity to my logbook. His pilot station Rhynhardt ZS6DXB advised me that Petrus would be operating on 14.200 MHz from 1600-1700 Z whenever possible, so I made a point of checking the frequency around these times. I tried several times without success.

 

On 3 January the weather in Johannesburg was hot and unpleasantly humid, so I had a cold beer in one hand as I turned my C-31XR tri-band beam southwest and tuned my faithful TS-850S to 14.200 MHz. At about 1715Z I heard several stations calling 3Y0E, apparently without getting any response. In the background, right at the noise floor, I could hear someone calling “3Y0E”, but wasn’t sure whether this was just a weak DX chaser, or Petrus himself. I quickly tuned up 10 kHz to set my mic gain, then listened again with my Proset Plus headset.

Now I could also hear the pilot station ZS6DXB trying to contact 3Y0E, also without hearing any response – but still, right down in the background noise, I could hear the other station calling “3Y0E”. I switched in my 1.8 kHz filter, and now was sure that the weak station had a South African accent. This made it likely that it was Petrus, as local South African stations would have been much stronger. ZS6DXB stopped calling and announced to the assembled DXers that there was no response, so he would try to contact Petrus by satellite phone to arrange for him to be on frequency the following day.

With the frequency clear except for a couple of weak stations in the background, I took my chance:

“Three Yankee Zero Echo this is Zulu Sierra Six Alpha Alpha, Zulu Sierra Six Alpha Alpha standing by…”

My station is optimized for low power contesting, and the band-pass filters that I use for SO2R are only rated 200W, so I was running about 100W PEP, using the Heil HC-4 DX microphone element but with the rig’s speech processor switched out.

Much to my amazement, I received an immediate response, at Readability 2/3 (barely readable/readable with considerable difficulty) and about S2 (very weak signals). He gave me a 57 report. We then had the opportunity to have a brief conversation, with Petrus reporting a wind speed of 30 knots. I enquired whether their Weather Haven tent had survived the storm that destroyed their other tents, and he said that fortunately it had. Then I heard HS0ZCW calling 3Y0E so I cleared with Petrus to give the other station a chance to work him. I logged the QSO at 17:31.

Thanks to Petrus and Rhynhardt for making the contact possible!

Andrew ZS6AA