| |
 |
|
Being fervent awardchasers from our first radioamateur days on, it was inevitable that on a good day we would start with the IOTA program. Our first atempt with this award dates from around the mid seventies. We quikly found out that the award was too difficult to obtain at that moment. There were nearly no publicity or activities, but the bad results were mostly due the poor antenna and rig situtions at our qth hi. The IOTA award project was put aside for a while, but was never completely abandonded. |
|
| |
When on an evening in the beginning of 1985, my xyl, Pam, and myself were wachting on television a documentary about the southwest coast of Ireland with the Dingle peninsula and the Blasket islands particularly, we decided to spend our next holidays in Ireland again and trying to go and activate the Blasket islands. From that moment on we were back on the IOTA track. After our succesfull activation of The Blasket islands, EU-007 in July 1985, we started first with the help of the latest IOTA list, searching trough all of our qsl cards, we ware busy for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile I ( ON5KL) was invited, by Roger, G3KMA to spend some time at the RSGB HF meeting in Oxford, in the fall of 1985. |
|
| |
We stayed overnight in Roger qth, that was the exact place to be, and we dared to bring all our qsl cards with us, to have them checked, hi. During the night we were sleeping, Roger was fully occupied by checking my qsl cards, and at breakfast next morning, Roger anncounced that he found only one qsl that was not meeting the strict IOTA criterium, Roger hard nightlabor gave me my first "100" and "200" IOTA islands award. From that date on we ware rearly started to "collect islands".When the years passed by, we collected the different continental and regional IOTA awards and were happy |
|
 |
|
when we reached the 750 mark and obtained the "honnour plaque". In the beginning it was nearly on daily basis that new islands could be worked, but with the score growing and growing, working a new islands became a very dificult challange, specially when a station was only to hear for a couple of hours in a weeks time. Missing island is quite inevitable, certainly when you like to go also on dx-peditions and IOTA conventions,... and some "new ones" are programmed for that time. So we missed, under this circumstances at least a dozen islands. As been retired in 2005 and so no longer to go to work we can spent even more time on the radio then before , so we hope we can work him all one off this day's. |
|
| |
With the still growing popularity of the IOTA program ,the more dificult located islands are also being activated one by one, this brings our total as today at 1079 islands confirmt for ON5KL and 986 for ON4QP. Thanks to all the operators for there effort.
| |
 
|
