DXpedition to Ibiza, the Story

We are pleased to receive and publish the story of Alessandro, IZ4WNA and his holiday style DXpedition of the Summer. Alessio and his friend Giuliano, IZ4WNP were active from Ibiza Island, IOTA EU-004.

It all started when I asked myself why not use my holiday vacation in Ibiza to play a bit of radio and to activate that island? I obtained my ham radio license in the beginning of 2012 and since then I’ve hear lots of stations from EU-004but none from Ibiza itself. I immediately offered my friend Giuliano, IZ4WNP, my idea and he was eager to be active from there as well.

The day before the departure we were shocked by the news of some OMs that encountered some problems with respect to lincensing. Our CEPT license was reported as “CEPT TR61-02″ instead of the needed TR61-01. After a few initial moments of literal terror, we managed to avoid this problem. The Telecummunication Ministry attached the TR61-01 document but we almost forgot to bring it. Problem fixed and we didn’t have any problem while we were operating in Ibiza.

In order to meet luggage weight policies of the airline services (max 15kg each) we had to split our equipment into three luggage pieces.One with the personal effects, the other two with the ham radio equipment composed of PCs for the logging programme and digital modes, interfaces, coax cables and test equipment such as wattmeters, SWR meters, power suppliers and dipole antennas covering 40, 80, 20, 15 and 10 meters.

Quite a lot of stuff !!!!!

We took off from Bologna at 10 o’clock and landed in Ibiza at midday after about two hours of flight. Our DXpedition QTH was a wonderful house with lots of room. Indeed, the best attraction of such a house was the amazing terrace facing the sea. Such a terrace had enough room to set up our stations and operate from there, enjoying the skyline while operating !

Using both SSB and PSK we managed to collect almost 400 QSOs in somewhat two days of operations. In fact, we started on September 7th and flew back to Italy on September 10th.

We tried to operate as much as we could in this first DXpedition. Our great passion and involvment with this hobby allowed us not to give up even in those moments in which we were tired or we had few time to operate.