2023: CQ World Wide from The Seychelles

This was a contest focussed DXpedition to enter CQ World Wide CW in November 2023. My travel companions were Mike G3WPH, Paul G4PVM and Martin GW4XUM.

We booked an Air BnB on the north side of the island, 'Les Rocher de Machabee' (House by the sea) which was basic but provided everything we needed.  Our arrival on Mahé was on Tuesday 21st November but being travel weary we didn't start on antennas until the following day. Space for antennas was tight; we placed a combined 80/160m vertical in the middle of the garden, a 40m elevated ground-plane on a 12m Spiderpole on some rocks just over the rear garden wall, the 20m and 15m VDAs were right at the back of the garden against the wall and the 10m VDA was on the beach, surrounded by sea water when the tide was in.  All antennas were within half a wavelength of the high tide watermark to keep the take-off angle as low as possible. There were a couple of big rocks out at sea, around 30ft tall which may have blocked our 10m path to the east a little (JA/VK/ZL). We also had a LF receive loop antenna in a wooden area to the side of our QTH.  

Placing the 10m VDA on the beach was challenging. Luckily, we managed to borrow some ladders and were able to climb down onto and across the rocks down to sea level, however there was very little flat beach available. The masts supporting the two VDA elements were planted between the rocks and guyed to sand-bags - light-weight builders' rubble bags make great anchors when filled with sand at the DX location.

We managed to iron out most of the station bugs prior to the contest, the worst of which was the 10m VDA feed-point going up in smoke.  Mike was running a CW pile-up ahead of the contest; I was shooting  the breeze with Martin at the time, overlooking the beach and I noticed a large puff of smoke emanating from the antenna feed point. It turned out that unbeknown to us, the self-amalgamating tape we had used was 'semi-conducting' - coupled with saltwater splashing over the joint, there was an arc between the antenna connections. Although theantenna feed-point was damaged, fortunately we were able to find a work-around for the issue fairly quicky.  Lesson learned:  Semi-conducting tape exists and is labelled as such - always check the label.

It took three full days to get the antennas ready so unfortunately, we didn't get any time to see the island, however we did however visit members of SARA (Seychelles Amateur Radio Association) at their station QTH one evening and all became paid-up members. 

We had set out to do a Multi/2 entry but as we listened on the bands and operated with our personal licenses in the days preceding the contest, we realised there probably wasn't enough propagation to keep two RUN stations fully employed.  After a group discussion we decided to do a Multi/Single entry - probably a good choice in retrospect since we never did experience great conditions through the contest, a 160 QSO/hour was the best we could achieve.  During the contest we used the SARA contest call-sign S77HQ - this unusual prefix caused problems for many stations, their brain was wanting to hear S5, SZ or even LZ in some cases, however many smart ops got it first time.

The LF bands and particularly 160m were extremely noisy, we had no chance of productively running on these bands and instead chose to work everything we could hear on S&P.

Before and after the contest we left the radio going on 50.313MHz FT8 - absolutely nothing was heard. The 4 element Yagi we brought has been left with SARA.

Contest Call:     S77HQ

Personal Calls:     S79/  ..... G3WPH; G4IRN; G4PVM; G4XUM.

Operating  QRA:    Li75rk

QTH coordinates:   -4.564596,  55.446819