The idea:

In a very limited period, work as many DXCC possible in the northern part of West Indies. Due to flights from Guadeloupe. Sint-Marteen is the most well deserved island in the area  and it’s a 2 DXCC island that wasn’t be activated on GreenCube. What about PJ and PJ6 also. The have short flights from Juliana and Grand Case airports. At this period, finding hosting is more easy and I used AirBnb to find location with sea view to the North or North/East direction. And I can tell it was a good idea!

Saint-Barthelemy
Saba
Saint-Martin

The journey:

After ordered flights from Guadeloupe to Saint-Barth and return from Saint-Martin to Guadeloupe, I learned that the company was in receivership and that flights were no longer operated… Great start! I need to buy new tickets on a other company and still don’t know if I will be able to use this tickets in the future… $450 lost?

The idea was to visit the 3 islands but now I needed to go to Saint-Barth via Saint-Martin. After booking 6 tickets, I could start to prepare my bags. My Arrow antenna and tripod was staying on my checked baggage so I need to be enough lucky to not loosing this baggage during my flights but… I was lucky 🙂

Unfortunately, due to luggage limit, I couldn’t able to take with my HF portable antenna. I only bring a end fed random wire antenna.

The flights were part of the adventure: I had the pleasure of landing and taking off on the Saint-Barth runway (one of the most dangerous in the Caribbean) and Saba (the shortest commercial runway in the world).

During Saint-Barth stay, I was lucky to be able to deploy the end fed antenna and to make FT8 qsos with my 10W IC-705. It wasn’t possible to deploy this long end fed on other islands unfortunately. The Satellite crowd was of course present at my first pass and it was almost impossible for me to get digipeated but I least I could give this DXCC to 120 stations on GreenCube during 7 passes.

During Saba stay, I was located in North side and my south view was 22° elevation (yes, Saba is a real mountain island) and I needed to go to South part to try some activation for South Africa that I did and I was also happy to work Martin PJ4MM in VHF.

I could work 173 different stations from Saba on Satellite! I was certain that Saba (PJ5/PJ6 count for the same DXCC) was the less activated DXCC of my tour but passes was really crazy! Thank you guys for this hunting during 3 days!

Funny fact: my Airbnb host was very interested about amateur radio because they where licensed in VP6 island 30 year ago! Maybe you will hear them on the air again but I am sure I will be back on the island one day. People are really nice and scuba dives was the most incredible I made.

From Saint-Martin, I have worked from multiples location as I need to activate 2 DXCC. I already worked from a lot of places and know  well the good spots on the island. I could also work on 2m some EA8 stations located at 4000km away due to heavy tropospheric conditions. from heavy Sahara dust. 131 stations contacted from FS and 124 from PJ7. Not bad for a not new activation for me.

I was happy to meet Marco FS4WBS and Brett PJ2BR on 2 different passes to make them discover this special amateur radio activity. Thank you very much to this two buddies to help me and support me!

In Saint-Martin, I could also have a diner with local operators for my last evening before leaving in Guadeloupe.

The Results :

I am very happy with this results. I could work more that 100 different stations from each DXCC on Satellite. That was more than expected! Many thanks for all this friends that I could give this DXCC who have to waked up on the middle of the night!

My only regrets was to not be able to work Japan but my “little” Arrow can’t reach 12000km. My ODX was 4J6D from PJ6 with 10,603 km. I already ordered a 15 elements Diamond antenna to reach more distant stations on my next roving in other islands on the Lesser Antilles islands. See you for a new adventure!

My Setup:

Transceiver : Icom IC-705
HF : mAT-705 Plus V2 MAT-TUNER + end fed antenna
Satellite : Alaskan Arrow + Tripod + Microset VUR 30 amplifier + preamplifier
Computer: Lenovo Linux 11.3″ + Virtualbox Windows VM for GreenCube

I found a perfect sun/rain cover for my laptop. By chance it was a pack of beers that I get freely and didn’t have to drink 🙂

Caribbean Award:

Why an award? Because it was a joke on Twitter but I promised it because few friends was waked during night to make qso with me during the 4 DXCC. That’s a little gift for the 56th have contacted me on satellites from at least 5 locations (DXCC or grids). My goal is to add a silver category as well but I need to add more roving in my schedule…