Europe is Hard – we will be trying our best!

This map explains well the difficulties faced by stations in Europe working Tonga. Paths into Germany for example pass straight over either the North or South pole. That is why we are planning directional antennas and amplifiers for our activities targeting Europe. We are planning on establishing pilot stations in Europe to help us identify the best times for openings to that part of the world too. More on this soon.

Please respect our directed calls to specific regions!

We will always be working split frequencies and will use directed calling. We please ask stations in Asia and Japan to please stand by as we call for the much weaker European (EU) signals over the pole. We are hoping to arrange things so that only one of the two stations will be doing directed calling at a time so that if say 20m is open to Europe, we will provide a 30m signal at the same time to satisfy demand from Japan.

On FT8 we will also carry out directed calling – and will only answer stations from targeted areas when we have announced a particular call area. Note our FT8 operations will either be using the WSJT-X Fox and Hound mode or FT8 standard mode exclusively (not the other multi-thread variant that has recently appeared). We will announce our frequency plan closer to the expedition, as we need to coordinate with the ZK3 expedition on band usage.

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Please note our QSO policy – we will accept calls from Oceania (VK/ZL/YB etc), Africa and South America at any time regardless of which region we are specifically calling, due to the relatively low numbers of stations active in those regions.

Stations in other regions, please understand – this is not to be taken as an opportunity to ignore the directed calling we are making for other regions at the same time.

 

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Depending on the unique QSO counts, we may also call for ATNO (All Time New One) only. This is intended to give the small stations a chance to secure at least one contact with us.