I am now back from my Turks and Caicos trip and settled with all my logs uploaded. It was a great vacation with plenty of beach time, exploring, and enjoying a respite from the cold Kansas City winter. While my daily update posts shed a little light on the trip, I thought I’d do a more complete debrief in its own post.
To start, Turks and Caicos Islands is a very easy place to get a reciprocal ham radio license. Jim, K4QPL (also VP5M) owns the Harbour Rock Villa that he rents out on the island. It has a full station that is available for use during the rental as well. Jim also has coordinated with the local government to get ham radio licenses issued for foreign hams, so if you simply email him, he will help get it together without you needing to interact with anyone from the government. Basically it is submit some paperwork to him and send $55 via Paypal. The turnaround time for the license was pretty quick (a few weeks) but probably best to start the process as soon as you book things just in case. We considered renting his place, but between available dates and the fact that there were only two of us on this trip (his villa is beautiful and was much larger than we needed), we decided to rent elsewhere.
We ended up in a one bedroom condo we found on AirBnB in Leeward Settlement. Not known to us at the time, Leeward Settlement is a fairly quiet area on the east end of the island only a short drive from the resorts of Grace Bay. The Leeward Beach was less than a ten minute walk from our condo. I did several satellite passes from there given the wide open western horizon. While it was usually windy on this beach during the day, it was not crowded at all and was convenient, especially for the sunsets. We enjoyed the Sapodilla Bay Beach more for getting in the water, but Leeward was incredible to have so close by our accommodations. Our condo had a porch that faced some brush and the road, and I used this to do HF operations with single tuned wire and radial strung up around the top of the porch and out into the trees nearby. This was sufficient to make numerous FT8 contacts on 20m, 30m, and 40m. I was able to tune up 80m and receive stations, but no one heard me. I was able to make some notable contacts including my brother KK4LWR on 20m and a 30m sked.
HF operating position on the porch of our condo
In the end, I made eight satellite contacts on AO-91 and the ISS. I tried RS-44, but didn’t make any contacts on it. I struggled at first to get into the satellite, but once I did, my CQs went unanswered. I could have done a better job at advertising my activity, but I also didn’t want to get too overwhelmed with a pile up. Next time, I will be better prepared on that front. On HF, I made 57 contacts with 39 on 20m, 16 on 30m, and 2 on 40m, all on FT8. I wanted to do some SSB in there just to say I did, but we had neighbors on porches and balconies all around us in the evenings, and I didn’t want to disturb them.
In terms of lessons learned operating-wise, top of the list has to be that I was a little rusty on my satellite skills and that took a couple passes to get back. While navigating operating satellites in unusual places is not new to me, it has been a few years since I really did extensive roving. Since then, I’ve sold and purchased some different equipment, including some relatively new pieces in anticipation for this trip. I had not gotten much practice in the preceding month before the trip due to the really poor weather in the midwest, so I was getting my feet back under me on the fly. That wasn’t too bad – it is a lot like riding a bike after all – but given that ham radio was not the primary purpose of this trip, it definitely impacted my outcome.
I tried to keep my gear list simple as we were traveling with carry-ons only. I had my Yaesu FT-817 as HF radio and satellite uplink radio, my Kenwood TH-D74 as satellite downlink radio, my custom-drilled Arrow Antenna for satellites, my 4S Tuner for HF, a USB C Power Delivery battery to power the radio equipment, and a variety of wires and cables to connect it all. At the last minute, I brought a dynamic PC microphone and interface box I originally made for my FT-991a on Kansas QSO Party. This proved to be an issue – the microphone audio was awful – so I switched to using the FT-817’s hand mic after a couple attempted passes. All the satellite gear went into the popular Amazon Basics camera bag with a chest strap (affiliate links), and everything could fit in my backpack which made it easy to carry on the plane, to the beach, and on our hike.
I also brought along a Garmin inReach Mini satellite communicator which I used to mainly send messages to two different email distribution lists: one for satellites and one for HF operations. While cell service is available there, it would have cost $10 a day (which isn’t bad) and been a constant distraction on our get-away-from-it-all vacation. Opting to have the inReach for any emergencies, coordinating satellite passes and HF operations while out and about, and checking in with family was great especially because I am able to borrow the inReach Mini totally free from work. The inReach messages for the ham radio distribution lists worked well, but the old Garmin Eartmate app does not let you add additional contacts to a message group once it has started, so some late entries to my distribution lists made it a bit clunky to use. But all in all, I was pleased with how this worked out and will probably do it again on similar future travels. It was nice to not have internet access on my phone at all times and let me really enjoy time reading on the beach and being with my fiancée.
After I uploaded my logs to LoTW, I realized that my two operating locations for satellites were actually in POTA entities as well. I only made four contacts at each spot, so while they did not reach the threshold of an activation, I was at least able to give some hunters some credit. The beach near our condo was in TC-0001 Princess Alexandra National Park, and the trail we hiked was part of TC-0006 Bird Rock Trail Nature Reserve.
My final verdict on this trip was that it was a success for what I set out to do – relax on vacation to celebrate my recent engagement and make some radio contacts as a DX station. In hindsight, I was a bit too ambitious with how much radio time I thought I’d get given the first priority. My fiancée’s mind does not go to ham radio when she thinks of a tropical vacation after all. Satellites can be particularly tough on vacation given their firm schedules and required time to get to an open area and set up. However, with several confirmed contacts in LoTW from FL31, I am one more grid toward reverse VUCC on satellites!
For those that I worked, please remember to send all QSL card requests to my QRZ address for KD8RTT no latter than the end of February 2025. I plan to get some custom cards printed and want to make sure I get enough! 73 de VP5/KD8RTT