The Little Miracle that Happened

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The VP6R Expedition Team on Pitcairn Island (source)

Last year around this time the worldwide DX ham radio community had its full attention set to the VP6R DXpedition to Pitcairn Island, which took place between October 18th - November 1st, 2019. Now everybody who knows me even the slightest, knows how immensely fascinated I am by Pitcairn. I've been for a long time, and making a contact with Pitcairn Island would be a dream come true! I've written a blog entry about Pitcairn before, about its most famous ham radio operator, Tom Christian, VP6TC (SK), and how my fascination for Pitcairn came about. You can find that blog entry here.

For VP6R my best chance would be working them in FT8 Fox/Hound mode, and with my little pistol station and modest wire antennas, and taking into consideration that we were at the bottom of the solar activity cycle, the most likely and maybe only window of opportunity would be around 07:00 UTC on 40 or 30m. Due to being at work around this time, my chances were narrowed down to just the weekends. And there were only two of them in the period that VP6R was active! The first weekend in the morning I indeed managed to receive the FT8 F/H signals of the DXpedition both on 40m and 30m. Decodes were sporadic, and conditions just weren't good enough for me to make a contact.

So, that left only one weekend remaining, one weekend to make that dream contact with Pitcairn! It was the weekend of October 26/27, the last weekend of October, which traditionally also means it's the weekend of the CQ WW SSB contest. This didn't promise much good, and I was afraid that the 40m FT8 F/H frequency would be congested with SSB splatter from big gun contesters. And much to my horror, when checking on Saturday morning it was indeed! I can't remember if I saw any cluster spots for VP6R FT8 F/H on 40 or 30m that day, but at least I did not catch anything from them that day.
So now there was only one day left, Sunday October 27th, 2019, one day to make my dream come true! The contest would still be in full swing on Sunday, so the only chance left was 30m. Since VP6R was also participating in the contest, I was afraid they would be preoccupied in that and maybe wouldn't do 30m FT8. I needed a little miracle!

I remember waking up that Sunday and immediately checking DX Summit and the excitement seeing spots being made for VP6R on 30m FT8! I hurried to the radio, and my body got filled with adrenaline when the laptop produced numerous VP6R decodes. I started calling them, and then suddenly not much later and without much effort VP6R was in the log! I'd made the contact! I couldn't believe it, the little miracle had happened! It's quite amazing since I was using my HyEndFed 10/20/40m antenna (which isn't resonant at 30m) tuned with the built-in ATU of my Yaesu FT-991. On 30m it definitely isn't the most efficient antenna set up there is! But still it managed to get my signals all the way to that intriguing island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the most remote inhabited island on the planet, inhabited by the descendants of the Bounty Mutineers. Wow!

 

The Little Miracle that Happened! Screenshot from WSJT-X.

To my relief, the contact soon was found in the VP6R online log (ruling out having dealt with a pirate). LotW and the much coveted paper QSL followed some time later. I remember meeting one of my ham friends of our local VERON club at the yearly VERON hamfest in Zwolle later in November, and proudly telling him that I'd made the contact. Like many others, he'd worked VP6R on many bands in various modes. But to me that one FT8 contact on 30m was The Little Miracle that Happened!

QSL card received for my contact with VP6R

Nodir, EY8MM, one of the expedition members, has put together a wonderful photo book of the VP6R expedition. It's for sale here or can be downloaded for free here. You can also take a look at Nodir's website at www.ey8mm.com.

The official VP6R website can be found at pitcairnDX.com.

Meet Tom Christian

Last edited: 05.03.2017

Of all remote places on this planet, to me, one of the most fascinating and most intriguing has always been Pitcairn Island (IOTA OC-044). This tiny island in the southern Pacific Ocean has quite a remarkable history, and probably few places speak to the imagination as much as Pitcairn does. The island was settled in 1790 by the British mutineers of the HMS Bounty and the Polynesian men and women that accompanied them, an event retold in numerous books and films since, and therefore still well known today worldwide as the famous Mutiny on the Bounty.

Pitcairn forms the last remaining British Overseas Territory in the Pacific and actually is a group of four islands; Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno. Pitcairn Island, the second largest of the group, measuring about 4 km from west to east, is the only inhabited one. Adamstown, called after John Adams, one of the Bounty mutineers, is the capital and only settlement on the island. The entire population of Pitcairn lives in the capital and counts about 50. The HMS Bounty was set to fire by the mutineers and its wreckage still can be found today at the bottom of Pitcairn's Bounty Bay, where in 1957 it was discovered by an explorer of National Geographic. Pitcairn Island can only be reached by boat.

Tom Christian (1935-2013) (source)

Most of the residents of Pitcairn are descendants of the Bounty mutineers. So is Tom Christian (1935-2013). To the radio amateur community Tom was probably the most well known Pitcairn Islander, as he was a very active ham operator holding the callsign VR6TC and later VP6TC. Tom was the great-great-great-grandson of the leader of the Bounty mutineers, Fletcher Christian. Tom Christian also was the Chief Radio Officer of the official radio station on Pitcairn with callsign ZBP, and for a while also worked as a radio operator on a freighter ship. In 1952, at age 17, he got a training in Wellington, New Zealand to become radio telegraph operator. Tom's wife Betty Christian also holds a ham licence and was assigned the callsign VP6YL. Both Tom and Betty also regularly used ham radio to contact two of their four daughters, Jacqueline VK2CD and Raelene ZL2RAE, in Australia and New Zealand. Imagine what shortwave radio meant to the isolated Pitcairn Islanders before satellite communications and the internet found its way to the island. Unfortunately, OM Tom Christian in 2013, at the age of 77, became a Silent Key. In 1983 he was appointed the MBE - Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Tom Christian was one of the most sought after operators in ham radio ever.

QSL card from Tom Christian from the collection of Jeff Murray K1NSS. Photo courtesy of Jeff Murray.

My interest in Pitcairn was rekindled by a recent posting of Jeff, Murray K1NSS on the Facebook QSL Chasers group, and of course by the announcement of the upcoming VP6EU 2017 DXpedition to Pitcairn, which will take place from February 16th to March 5th, 2017!

Above you can see a photo of a QSL card from Tom Christian from the collection of Jeff Murray. It's lying on top of a copy of the book The Bounty Trilogy. Jeff did not contact Christian himself but found the QSL card in a collection he purchased at a local flea market. The card is a very interesting piece of ham radio history indeed, and definitely is a wonderful keepsake!

Tom Christian in his shack in 1988 (source)

My fascination for Pitcairn was born back in the 1980s when I was still a teenager and an avid shortwave listener. It was born from a small article in RAM - Radio Amateur Magazine written by Dutch journalist and top shortwave listener and DXer Michiel Schaay. Schaay had a column in the monthly RAM magazine with listening tips for SWLs. There was no internet at the time, and club bulletins and magazines like these were the only source of information in those days. Imagine how I was looking forward every month for the new issue of  "the RAM" to appear at the newsstand. Schaay had picked up Tom Christian's transmissions from radio station ZBP a couple of times on 18.407 MHz with official radiotelephone traffic from Pitcairn to New Zealand. Needless to say that from then on I was monitoring this frequency whenever I could, unfortunately to no avail.

Article by Michiel Schaay in Radio Amateur Magazine nr. 104 of September 1989. If you look closely on the map on the southern part of the island you will find the location of the radio station.

Pitcairn is on top of my list of places I'd still very much like to make contact with one day. I'll have to depend on DXpeditions, as I believe there are no active hams left among the inhabitants of Pitcairn. It's going to be a tough one anyway, as for my "little pistol" station from the Netherlands, the Pacific always has been the most difficult part of the world to reach. But who knows, a couple of months ago I also managed to make a contact with Easter Island, which I also thought would be impossible to work. CW hopefully will do the trick someday. I'm not holding my breath though.

Addendum 05.03.2017
An interesting story dealing with the history of wireless stations on Pitcairn can be found here on the blog of Shortwave Central.


See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamstown,_Pitcairn_Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Christian
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10253305/Tom-Christian.html
http://www.pitcairn2017.de/
http://www.qsl.net/oh2br/
https://theroguephotographer.smugmug.com/keyword/tom;christian