2020-11-03
New countries in amateur radio: Cuba and the Seychelles islands 10 months ago
For most Dutch amateurs the first countries they have HF contacts with outside Europe are in North and South America. For some reason my DX from home has a slant to the east, so a lot of the Americas is still on my 'wanted' list. This weekend I was active on the remote radio which has a 10-12-15-17-20 meter band antenna and I heard a Cuban station on 15 meters phone. After a number of tries I had the contact so that was my first contact with a Cuban station. I also heard a station from Vatican City (for radio this is a separate entity) making contacts but it had so many stations responding I did not get through even with trying for almost 20 minutes. Update 2020-11-04: Another new country in the log: the Seychelles islands. A country name that I usually associate with bad corners of the Internet at work is now a positive development as I got S79KW in the log with a very marginal FT8 contact on the 20 meter band, but I saw his final '73' report so it should have been logged on the other side.