3Y0J: The Bouvet Island Amateur Radio DXpedition

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.

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

wow that looks like a lot of fun! nice work on the project and securing funding, congrats!