With the focus of this month’s DX column on last year’s VU4W DXpedition to the Andaman Islands off the coast of India, we thought it would be appropriate to look back to the first relatively recent DXpedition there, in late 2004, which turned on a dime to disaster response after the islands were ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, and the only communications off the islands were via the ham radio stations that were reluctantly allowed by the Indian government to set up and operate there. Our first-hand report, by Bharati Prasad, VU2RBI/VU4RBI, appeared in our April 2005 issue.
How do you explain a DXpedition to someone who is not familiar with amateur radio? That was one of our early challenges in planning last year’s trip to operate from the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal that are part of India but actually closer to Indonesia and Burma than to the Indian mainland. Access to these islands is restricted for a variety of reasons.
When we approached government officials seeking permission to operate amateur radio there, we explained that a DXpedition is a radio sport activity for ham radio operators worldwide that involve hams traveling to a remote location with the aim to contact more distant countries. One favorite type of expedition is to various islands around the world. These expeditions generally feature continuous operations, which help in
