3B9C - The Five Star DXers Association DXpedition to Rodrigues

(The following is an article about my second DXpedition experience edited by my pal Don G3XTT and myself for the Italian ARI Journal)

DXpeditions take on many flavours, from small holiday operations to major feats of endurance, setting up and operating from remote Antarctic islands. Each has its place in the enjoyment of our hobby. The UK-based Five Star DXers Association, established after the successful 9M0C Spratly Islands DXpedition of 1998, recognized a need for large-scale operations from moderately-rare (Top 100 Most Wanted) DXCC entities. These are the sort of places that get activated from time to time, and may even have one or two resident amateurs, but are difficult to work on more than a few bands or modes. Usually this is because expedition groups are limited in what they take, often as a result of airline baggage restrictions, and have to compromise on antennas and/or equipment. We felt that, by shipping equipment ahead by sea, we could cater for all those needed band/mode combinations. Of course, shipping a 6 Metre container with several tonnes of equipment is expensive, and this dictates to a large extent the overall size of the expedition in terms of participants (needed for assembling all that kit on site, and then operating it!) and, almost inevitably, means that sponsorship will be required to help defray the high costs. 

This approach worked well again in 2001, with our D68C Comoros expedition, where we made a record 168,000 QSOs. Not wanting to spoil a successful formula, we set out to do something similar in 2004, from Rodrigues Island in the Indian Ocean (3B9). Politically, Rodrigues is part of Mauritius (3B8), but unfamiliar to most holidaymakers to Mauritius, as it lies about 600km and one and a half flying hours to the northeast. For DXCC purposes and for IOTA (Islands on the Air), it counts separately from Mauritius.

 The location 

Rodrigues is volcanic, rising to almost 400m at its highest point. Vegetation is sparse, but cattle and sheep populate the hillsides and provide meat for export. The island is just 11 miles long and 5 miles wide. Its population is around 35,000 of whom 5,000 live in Port Mathurin, the island’s capital and major port. The main sources of income are agriculture, fishing and handicrafts. Unemployment runs around 25% and the government is keen to develop tourism to help increase employment and to generate the funds necessary to maintain and improve the island’s infrastructure. Mauritius subsidizes Rodrigues quite heavily. The roads are good, facilities such as schooling and health are excellent, and the whole island exudes an air of prosperity. Not everyone on Rodrigues welcomes the idea of more tourism, but economic necessity suggests there is no alternative. Right now there are just four hotels, and the majority of visitors come from La Reunion or from France. The foundation stones have already been laid for a few new hotels, but care is being taken to avoid overdevelopment. The local inhabitants speak competent French and English, their local language being a French-derived Creole, but schooling being in English. 

The foregoing gives you some of the facts and figures about Rodrigues, but doesn’t really do justice to the experience of being there. This really is a wonderful place, with a genuine welcome from everyone, without the jaded cynicism which seems to pervade many tourist destinations. The island is free from Malaria and so no malarial prophylaxis was needed to be taken by the team. Furthermore, there were no venomous snakes on the island although there were many lizards and some very large spiders! The island is still an attraction to scientists studying the Rodriguan Fruit Bat which we saw living in the forest areas. Despite the islands small size, there is plenty to see and do. Not so much in the way of nightclubs and discos, but if you enjoy exploring a truly unspoilt island, with its own unique flora and fauna, or snorkeling or diving on one of the most extensive reefs in the Indian Ocean, then Rodrigues is truly a tropical paradise. Many people we spoke to said it was like Mauritius 20 years ago, before the advent of mass tourism.

Getting Started 

30 of us flew into Rodrigues on 16 March, which involved a long-haul flight to Mauritius, followed almost immediately by the onward hop in a small turboprop aircraft. We were 23 operators, plus wives, partners and children (some of us would fly out after two and a half weeks, with a further group flying in). Robert 3B9FR was waiting for us at the airport, along with Maury W3EF who had flown in earlier. We were staying at the Cotton Bay Hotel at Point Cotton. It is on the north coast of the island, with an uninterrupted sea take-off to Japan, Europe and most of North America. This was an excellent choice. Throughout our visit the staff were happy to cater to our every need (for example, they installed extra power lines to our operating rooms prior to our arrival), and many of them came to visit our stations and follow our progress. A chalkboard in the bar area was kept up-to-date with the QSO totals so that guests and staff alike could follow our progress! 

The following morning half the team went to Port Mathurin to empty the shipping container and supervise the loading of our equipment onto trucks (there were no facilities to transport the container directly to the hotel) while the remainder started preparing the shacks and marking antenna locations. The container team encountered our first problem at this stage, in that the local customs staff were unfamiliar with the carnet de passage documentation routinely used for shipping international freight, but this was quickly solved and unpacking began in earnest in the hot sun.  By early afternoon most of the equipment had arrived at the hotel, and we could start collecting together what was needed for each individual antenna, mast, cable run, etc. One team set up the stations (some sixteen in all), one set up the computer network (one per station, plus server machine, and additional PCs in the team room, making 20 PCs in all), and three antenna teams set to work outside. 

QRV 

Station build went reasonably smoothly with small project teams working simultaneously on different project areas. Station building, Computer systems, antenna teams, primary power systems and after three long days getting set up, we were ready to go! Although we had to relocate some of the antennas, in some cases because it became clear that we would suffer from interactions, in the case of the 160m Titanex vertical because we were warned that that the seafront location we had chosen would probably result in it being washed away! We were very fortunate in the weather, which remained dry and not too hot for almost all of our stay.

We had told the waiting world that we hoped to become active at midnight local time on the Friday, which we did. Every HF band was open, and we started simultaneously on all of them. It wasn’t long before the Cluster system was alive with spots, and the pile-ups were quite incredible.   

If you have never been on the sharp end of a DXpedition, it is hard to imagine how things must be. A successful DXpedition is like a good film or play, entertaining its audience while hiding all the legwork that goes on behind the scenes. At the daily meetings, for example, we usually managed to draw up a list of several antenna projects, which often involved taking down one of the antennas to fix a feed point problem or maybe a loose clamp. We also had to re-stake many of the guy ropes, as the force of the wind plus the effect of rain in softening the ground meant that the pegs we had originally used started to work free. We got some longer stakes made up locally, from angle-iron. Indoors, the technical team were faced with continual problems of interactions between stations, requiring them to make up stub filters, reroute coaxial feeders, and whatever else might help to effect a cure. It seemed that whenever such a problem was solved, a change of operating frequency or antenna heading could easily bring a whole new set of headaches. We also had to abandon plans to operate simultaneously on SSB and CW on 80 and 20m, inter-station interference being too much of a problem,  though we did manage this on 10 and 15m with reduced transmit power. On the computer side, although the Star Software suite of programs had been beta tested before heading out to Rodrigues, it is only when software is used in a live situation that some of the bugs come to light and G3WGV, its developer, was kept busy, at least in the early days, in tracking them down and recompiling the code. This never interfered with station logging and the production of management statistics though. However, our network became infected at one stage with a virus, finding its way in via our Internet connection. This took the best part of a day to isolate and fix, and could easily have had major implications. Truly a modern-day problem. There were occasional non-radio problems to be solved, too, such as keeping cows and horses out of the antenna field! 

The Bands 

As expected, 10 and 12m propagation was well down on what we had experienced three years earlier from the Comoros. However, the north-south path to Europe was very reliable and there were some great US openings at times, including a 10m long-path to the West Coast. We managed plenty of contacts on 10m FM, too. Perhaps even more surprising was our success on 6m. We had a daily path to Japan, Central Asia and Southern Europe. Of course, the fact that we had been able to set up a stack of two 6-element Yagis right on the water’s edge obviously did us no harm. 

Operating from close to the equator, the pattern is for high absorption in the middle of the day, with only the highest bands open, but the LF bands start to open around local dusk and stay open right through the night, dropping out quickly around dawn (of course, there is really no such thing as twilight at those latitudes). As expected, 15 and 17m proved to be the mainstay, with good worldwide propagation, while 30m again showed its solid nature, to the extent that by the end of our expedition we really had “worked it dry” with continuing good propagation but few callers.  

Fortunately, the noise level on the LF bands was lower than we had expected. On 80m we had set up two pairs of phased quarter-wave verticals, one optimized for the top (SSB) end of the band and one for the bottom (CW) end. This proved to be a good idea, as swapping them around showed a big difference in sent and received signal strengths.  We were pleased with our LF QSO totals, although we know that not everyone made it into the log. The good news is that many stations worked 3B9C on all nine HF bands. 160m propagation was especially remarkable, extending almost daily to the US West Coast, both long- and short-path. One heartening tale is of the Midwestern amateur, a keen 160m operator who, when he realized we were actually seeing 160m openings to his area, rigged up a two-element wire Yagi between the walls of a local canyon and worked us with his station set up in his pickup truck. If you think about the size of a 160m beam, and the height required for it to work, the effort he put in to achieve that one contact takes on monumental proportions! At the other end of the scale, at least one European amateur worked us on HF using an FT-817 on battery power and a Miracle Whip antenna. 

In total 3938 QSO’s were made with Italian stations and the first Italian station in the 3B9C log was I0MWI on 30m. Many stations made it on 9 bands. Another pleasing statistic was that 50 Italian stations were in the 160m log, probably all of these were new countries for them. 

We did manage one 6m moonbounce contact, and several on 70cm. AO-40 remained out of commission, but we did manage some satellite contacts via FO-29. On HF, we made Rodrigues available on SSTV for the first time. The other datamodes (RTTY and PSK31) proved immensely popular, reflecting the ease of activating these modes nowadays using PC sound card and software. 

As well as the huge QSO total (see table), we worked 214 DXCC entities and comfortably managed DXCC on 80 through 10, as well as 88 entities on topband and 27 on 6m.  

In the space of an article like this it isn’t possible to give more than a flavour of how things went, but many hams took advantage of our Web pages to follow the story. At its peak, we were seeing over 50,000 page hits a day. The Web pages are still up and you can read the story if you didn’t do so at the time. They also have some fascinating history about previous ham activity from Rodrigues, going right back to 1957 and including the 1967 Don Miller operation.    

Non-radio activities 

DXpedition write-ups almost invariably manage to give the impression that life is one long round of eating, sleeping and running pile-ups. Some of the hotel staff and visitors certainly found it hard to comprehend why we would come all that way to do something we could equally well do at home! But we enjoyed ourselves in other ways, too. The ladies managed many excursions, and were frequently joined by other members of the team, whether to ramble to the next bay, take a boat trip, or catch the local bus into town for some shopping.   

For those who had been largely confined to barracks, we organized a minibus tour in the third week, taking in the major sights, leaving a few volunteers to keep the radios manned. At the hotel, there was music and dancing most evenings, and GU4YOX our “Entertainment King” took his role seriously enough to be; Master of Ceremonies, sing and even spend some time on the drums! After the second group had flown in, but before the first leavers flew out, the hotel laid on an excellent buffet supper, and we closed down the station for a few hours so that we could all enjoy this together. There was champagne, great local food and, of course, musical accompaniment. Those who stayed until the end of the trip enjoyed a similar, farewell banquet. Indeed, throughout the whole expedition the Cotton Bay Hotel staff treated us royally. 

Our expedition generated a high level of local interest. Local press and TV came to cover our activities, and we were also visited by local dignitaries including the island Chief Commissioner, its Chief Executive, and others in high office. They were all delighted to hear that tens of thousands of people around the world now knew of Rodrigues and many would be receiving a commemorative QSL card with more information about the island.   

Thanks 

The team extend their thanks to all made this expedition possible. This includes our major sponsors, headed up by Yaesu but including many others, some of whom are listed in the table. Thanks are also due to all the clubs and individuals, too numerous to mention here, but listed in full on our Web page and recognized on the QSL card. Naturally, all the participants paid for their travel and accommodation, as well as making a contribution to shared expenses. Our thanks also to the management and staff of the Cotton Bay hotel, to Robert 3B9FR, to Jacky 3B8CF, to the various officials who were involved in arranging permits, custom carnets, etc. and, of course, to our families who allowed us to take part in this unique experience. The team also wish to thank Neville G3NUG, Don G3BJ and John G3WGV, our co-leaders, who collectively put in a huge amount of effort to make Project Star Reach a reality.

3B9C Web site: www.fsdxa.com/3b9c

About Rodrigues: www.eng.uct.ac.za/~chnste010/rodrigues.html

 Corporate Sponsors (Amateur Radio)

 Afreet Software, Inc

 Array Solutions

 ARRL Colvin Award Committee

 CQ Ham Radio, Japan

 Daily DX

 FUNKAMATEUR

 GARANT-Funk

 Heil Sound

 Linear Amp UK

 ML&S Martin Lynch & Sons

 Nevada

 SCS Spezielle Communications Systeme

 SOTA Beams

 Titanex

 Trident Antennas

 Yaesu UK

Non-Amateur Corporate Sponsors

 ABB

 Air Mauritius

 ALBA Metallwarenfabrik GmbH

 Carl Zeiss

 Cotton Bay Hotel, Rodrigues

 Elektronik Service Dathe

 Hertfordshire Display plc

 Höhne

 Möbel Grollmus KG

 MTPA Mauritian Tourism Promotion Authority

 Rohde & Schwarz

Some statistics (numbers in bold are new all-time records as at 2004)