This story is about my trip to Tuva Republic that happened from August 25 till September 10, 1999. Actually it was a business trip with a goal to install the HF communication system. Therefor all my activity on HF bands was in a spare time.   

Fortunately local communication authorities were very welcome and gave me 5 year license for using RK3BY/0 callsign quite fast. License fee is about $3.
First of all it was made the antenna in Kyzyl city. It was a wide band 32 meter long dipole constructed as the “inverted V”, that was installed over the roof of the 20 m high building. This antenna has quite acceptable characteristics from 10 meters band to 40 meters band with omnidirectional radiation pattern. The transceiver that was used had 100 W’s output and unfortunately had not CW filter.

Tuva  Republic is in central Asia near Mongolian border. It is a very good place from the point of view of propagation. JA’s are very loud always on all bands, States are workable during the morning and evening hours on HF and propagation to Europe is open from 12 hours local time. The least activity is from 8 to 12 hours local time (0 to 4 Z).

Thanks to good propagation I’ve managed to make many contacts on 12 and 17 meters bands where were many Europeans. It was harder to work North Americans and almost all contacts with them were on 20 meters. Despite of mentioned  disadvantage with CW operation most of QSOs were made in CW.
Finally about 2000 QSOs for 40 hours of operation were logged. 

Currently there are 8 licensed HAMs in Tuva. The most known of them is Pavel, UA0YAY, who is very active in contests and in IOTA hunting. I was very pleased also to meet Alex, UA0YO, who has good 40 meters band antenna and sometimes appear on this band.  

It was  very pleasent time, full of  treveling through the wild nature forests, meeting many interesting people and spending some time on the air. Hope many hams managed to find 23 zone on needed bands.