Caribbean DX vacation # 1 Dec'03-Jan'04

To activate this semi-rare entitiy especially on WARC bands and RTTY,
I took an advantage of family vacation to St. Thomas & St. John, USVI.

QRV Location: 12/25-26 & 12/30-1/1 St. Thomas, 12/27-30 St. John.

The QRV location will be mentioned in the QSL card even these two Islands
belong to the same IOTA # NA-106 (USVI) together with St. Croix

1. Equipment

Pieces of equipment were limited to hand carry items for travel convenience.

Yaesu's field tranceiver FT-100 and MFJ's recent compact gears just fit
into a suitecase. The compact HF-6m 2 ele yagi Super Antenna's YP-2
and B&W's folded dipole were put into a snowboard bag together with
MFJ's telscopic fiberglass mast convenient for ant adjustment.

Rig	Yaesu FT-100 (100W)
Power Supply	MFJ-4125 (25A Switching Power Supply)
Tuner	MFJ-902 Travel Tuner (80-10m)
Antenna	1. Super Antenna YP-2 (20-6m 2ele) 2. B&W BWD-45 (7-30MHz Folded Dipole)
Mast	MFJ-1910

2. Location

There are many nice hotels and villas on both islands.

This time I looked for seaside cottage and high rise hotel with balcony.
Thus we stayed at Grand Beach Palace and Frenchman's Reef on St. Thomas
and Gallows Point Resort on St. John.

After all, this Gallows Point offered the best location for easy antenna setting
on the unroofed balcony and spacey room for midnight operation.

Frenchman's Reef was also nice with outstanding view from 7th floor balcony.
Even the space was limited for YP-2 minimum dipole setting for 15/12m,
I could work JAs on 15m and RTTY for EUs on 12m.

I would not rather recommend Grand Beach due to antenna setting difficulty.

Courtesy of: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/vq.html

3. Operation

I concentrated on 40, 30 & 12m as the operation was limited during spare time
for vacation. The 12m opening to EU was nice every morning and 40/30m was
very stable late at night.

BWD-45 folded dipole worked very fine without any tuning.
Even with less than 5m feed point like sloper style from the 2nd floor balcony,
I could work a couple of JAs on 40/30m in the morning.

YP-2 also worked fine on all bands. Although this antenna requires to change
element/coils for each band, I arranged special setting which worked both on
12 & 10m without loading coils.

4. Results

One week spare time operation resulted in total 1,120 QSOs.
The highlights are 40 some QSO with Asia (mainly JA) and around 90 RTTY
contacts mainly on 12m.

These numbers may not be enough for a DX pedition but I call it a success
considering limited equipments and compromised setting of antennas in resort
hotels.

I will try for more serious operation from other semi-rare Caribbean entities
in the near future.

5. Activity from KP2

There were so many EU stations calling on 12 & 30/40m as well as on RTTY.
This seems to reflect the demand for KP2 still existing.
Now more than 10 resident stations in KP2 are listed in FCC database and
a couple of them are operating from time to time.
So we would like to expect their activity for low bands, WARC bands & RTTY.

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