2020-11-25
New "country" in amateur radio: Jan Mayen
I still have a (short) list of European "countries" that I not yet have an amateur radio contact with. Jan Mayen was on that list and I set a specific alert in HamAlert to let me know when signals are seen from that part of the world. Today the alert fired and I had time to operate the radio. JX2US was active on 20 meter FT8. I joined the load of stations calling him and got an answer and a valid contact after trying for a while. Jan Mayen is a very northern island belonging to Norway, but for amateur radio it is a separate entity. Jan Mayen has no permanent residents. According to the JX2US qrz page he does amateur radio in his spare time outside work in shifts. Update 2020-12-04: And the contact is confirmed too on ARRL Logbook of the World. I did not expect that so soon, I read on the qrz page that the upload to LoTW was scheduled for April 2021.