After taking some time to reflect on our experience, I thought it’d be a good idea to do a full recap and debrief of the 2025 British Virgin Islands DXpedition that my brother Andy, KK4LWR, and I undertook back in August. If you followed along with our daily updates, the last you heard was our plans for the final day of the trip and return back home. Funny enough, that last morning proved to be the most exciting period of the whole trip; but we’ll get there in a moment.
As I outlined in my announcement post, my brother and I decided to go to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) as my bachelor party of sorts, as I was getting married in October. After throwing around a few ideas, we settled on the BVI as it is: 1) reasonably easy to access for a long weekend with regular commercial air travel, 2) full of rental home options for a modest cost that we could operate from, and 3) actually a relatively needed DX entity given its ease of access (before we went, it was 139 on the ClubLog Most Wanted List). The only potential showstopper was that it was hurricane season; we were prepared to cancel up to about a week out and could get nearly all our money back if something came through, but luckily that wasn’t needed (Hurricane Erin did pass nearby a week later, though!).
After arriving in Tortola the afternoon of Friday, August 8th, picking up the rental car, and getting access to our house—which was quite high up on the island with an incredible ocean view to the south—we started preparing for operation. While we had hoped to be on the air Friday evening, by the time we got stuff put away, grabbed dinner and supplies, and made it back, it was late, and getting the antennas set up in the dark wasn’t in the cards. We decided to go to bed early to hit the ground running in the morning.
Saturday morning was spent getting the SuperAntenna, DX Commander, and 6m Yagi in the air before organizing our operating positions inside. We were able to make use of the dining table and a desk in the rental as two operating positions and ran coax out through an open window that we covered up with gaffer’s tape. While we had planned this configuration using pictures of the rental online, you never quite know how well this will work out until you get into it! For radios, I used my Yaesu FT-991a in an LDG autotuner and Andy used a Yaesu FT-857D with it’s sibling autotuner.
I had planned to focus on 6m SSB as much as possible with the Yagi and jump to 12m SSB on the SuperAntenna as conditions warranted. Andy was aiming to use 15m and 17m, with a preference for SSB as well. I also had planned for an RS-44 satellite pass in the evening. We quickly found that propagation was going to throw a wrench in our optimistic plans. After trying our best to make SSB contacts, we had to move to FT8 to get any significant number of contacts in the log. Andy had a good run of 17m FT8 throughout the day, and 20m was always open to somewhere, it seemed.
The RS-44 satellite pass I got on Saturday was absolutely nuts. It was some of the poorest operator behavior I have ever encountered on satellites (worse than typical FM satellite madness involving much rarer grids), with a never-ending pile-up that made it so I couldn’t even try to reply to anyone with my meager 5W from my FT-817 for much of the pass. I eked out a handful of contacts, mostly to people who had reached out before the trip letting me know they were going to try. That sort of heads-up made it much easier for me to pick out call signs, and in my experience, these sorts of “on-the-ball” operators tend to be a step above in their professionalism. In my post-pass Twitter discussion, I found a very sympathetic and equally frustrated group of hams, given the bad behavior of some on the pass. While I was glad to get FK78 on the air from BVI, it did make me glad I didn’t commit to a large number of satellite passes for this trip. That sort of craziness just is not fun and is a lot of work to manage.
Later in the day, I decided to put some of the backup wire we brought to use by throwing up a random wire antenna into a tree so that Andy and I could both work 20–40m that evening. This actually worked quite well for me, and I was very glad we brought the gear to try it out. I made quite a few 30m FT8 contacts with that antenna and was even able to work some folks on 80m SSB. By the end of our first day on the air, we had amassed over 400 QSOs (including one on 6m), which wasn’t too bad!
Our plan for Sunday was to stay flexible and follow propagation, although our 6m and WARC band focus was still there. I also had another RS-44 pass on the docket in the evening. We slept in a bit and awoke to the bands still being relatively quiet. FT8 was the mode of the morning for us.
By Sunday afternoon, propagation started to improve quite a bit. For a while, Andy ran a pile-up on 17m, and I was able to do the same on 12m. We continued to bounce around bands in the afternoon, maximizing contacts wherever we could. Since this was our final evening, we decided to go out for dinner again. While we were out, I thought this was a good opportunity to put my feet in the water (we couldn’t come all this way and not go to the beach) and work the RS-44 pass with a better northern horizon. Luckily, this pass went much, much smoother in terms of operator behavior. I was able to make a number of contacts, and while the terrain made it difficult at the start and end of the pass, it was definitely a more enjoyable pass.
After coming back from dinner, I found 6m was open (and had been for some time). I caught the tail end of the opening and made around a dozen FT8 contacts, but SSB was dead quiet. I spent most of the evening on 30m FT8 racking up QSOs but still disappointed in my 6m experience so far. The next morning was our last one—we had to pack up by around 1 p.m. to make our flight home—so I didn’t hold out much hope for 6m improving. We were actually planning to get up very early to participate in the Meteor Scatter QSO Party, with me on 6m and Andy on 10m with MSK144.
We awoke about 4 a.m. to configure our radios for automatic reporting of those bands; we decided not to be live operators that early because we were so dang tired. However, we knew even just having our stations reporting received CQs would be beneficial. We each heard a few stations but unfortunately were not as active as we originally hoped and did not make any two-way contacts.
However, as we wrapped up that portion of things and switched to HF, things were starting to look up for our logs. I was bouncing back and forth between 6m and 30m on FT8 and doing quite well on the latter band. Then, late in the morning, 6m finally came alive thanks to some late-season sporadic-E. FT8 became extremely active, with a nearly non-stop stream of stations calling me. I almost got totally caught up in that before remembering to see what was going on with SSB, but I’m glad I finally did! Although I could only hear a couple of stations on the band, calling CQ did yield me some SSB contacts. I was able to make contacts into the southern U.S., up toward the mid-Atlantic states, and to the Midwest. In the end, I made 216 QSOs on 6m, which I was pleased with—I just wish there were more on SSB! Even when FT8 had steady activity, calling CQ on 6m SSB only got me 24 contacts. However, with this effort, I ended the 12+ year drought of 6m SSB confirmed from the BVI according to Club Log!
Since 6m was open, I stayed on the band as long as possible, trying to maximize our contacts. Andy started tearing his station down while I kept at it, staying on the air until almost 1:30 p.m. to make every possible contact.
In the end, we made 1,270 contacts between the two of us. Andy had 730 contacts, and I had 540, including 18 on satellite and 216 on 6m. Our goal was 1,000 contacts, so we were pleased with how it turned out for such a short DXpedition. While we certainly learned some things and will tweak some plans on our next trip like this, we both felt that we did a fairly good job in preparation for this trip. I attribute a lot of that success to the fact that he and I have led numerous Field Day preparations over the years, and my Kansas QSO Party and satellite roving experience have given me a good footing in field operations. It was a ton of fun, and I hope a ham radio trip like this becomes somewhat of an annual thing (even if it is not outside the USA).
Recapping my key takeaways:
- Overall, I think we did a pretty good job with planning this, especially in terms of the equipment we brought and the redundancy we designed into our plans. The radios, PCs, and antennas more or less operated as expected without major issues.
- While not a great-performing antenna compared to many other options, a tuned longwire antenna proved to be a great option for an operation like this. With two stations, we really needed to maximize contacts on any open bands. As we quickly found, it was great that we had two very flexible antennas when propagation was less than desirable. The DX Commander was a great antenna for this sort of operation and was constantly in use, so the longwire run off my autotuner was a great option to fill in the other bands. The SuperAntenna I brought worked OK on 12m (where we initially set it up) and is usable on the other bands; however, once I tried the longwire, I never really went back to that antenna
- Building in more time for satellites would have been helpful. The two passes I got on were totally nuts—the first one was nothing I’ve ever experienced on a linear satellite before, with the poor operating behavior often found on the FM birds—and this was because so many people wanted this grid and DX entity on satellites. Since I wanted to mostly focus on 6m, I was upfront that satellites were going to be a minor part of this trip despite my love for them. In terms of impact, though, doing more satellite operations may have been worthwhile.
- Don’t forget this is supposed to be fun! I must admit that by Sunday evening, I wasn’t feeling great due to the lack of 6m activity we were able to make happen. When the band opened up Monday morning, it totally redeemed the trip for me. But in any event, our goal was to have fun and do something a bit different than normal ham radio ops, and even if 6m never opened, we were successful in that. We were also able to make contacts with numerous friends throughout the weekend, which again makes it feel all worthwhile. When a lot of call signs fly at you in a pile-up, hearing a familiar voice always puts a smile on your face!
Thank you to everyone who worked us! As of this blog post, all logs are on LoTW, and received QSL cards have been responded to. We do have some QSL cards left, so if you haven’t sent one, feel free to drop one in the mail with a SASE to my QRZ address.
If you’re interested in looking back, check out the daily update posts I made during the trip and the original information page here:
- 2025 Milluzzi Brothers DXpedition to British Virgin Islands (VP2V/KD8RTT and VP2V/KK4LWR)
- Day One Update – 2025 VP2V Milluzzi Brothers DXpedition
- Day Two Update – 2025 VP2V Milluzzi Brothers DXpedition
- Day Three Update – 2025 VP2V Milluzzi Brothers DXpedition
- Day Four Update – 2025 VP2V Milluzzi Brothers DXpedition