Biography

Manfred Oberhofer
P.O. Box 38
1553 Chatonnaye
SWITZERLAND

Between the 16 and 23 October 2012, the Radio 7 Team, HB9FR, will activate the Island of Rodrigues, a part of the Republic of Mauritius.

Our call sign is granted and will be 3B9SP.

After having run many amateur radio contests and activities form our club station, we now would like to know how it is being on the other side of the world and of the pile up, and talking to our friends at home from a rare country.

For many years we were talking about doing a so called “DX Operation”. As we are all getting older we decided that time has now come to do it! Last year we began to think about possible destinations and it came out that Rodrigues Island could be a possibility. There wasn’t a lot of Amateur Radio activity from Rodrigues these last years. Rodrigues is easily reachable by plane, and as cost is one of our key factors this was important. At the beginning of our plans we decided that the cost of this adventure should be reasonable. So transport should be possible by plane, knowing that we sure will have weight problems as we do have to bring over the complete equipment. Our goal is to set up three amateur radio stations that can be run together on different Amateur Radio bands. Mostly one in CW, morse telegraphy, one in phone and the third running special modes like RTTY and modern phase shift keying modes (PSK31). To produce a good signal we would like to use small 400 Watt solid state amplifiers for the CW and phone stations. Two rotary beam antennas for the frequencies above 14 MHz are also planned to be set up for these two stations. For the digital mode station we are planning to use wire antennas. Vertical antennas will be setup for the low frequency bands. The hopefully good October propagation conditions will allow us to give everybody around the world a chance to have a QSO during the eight operating days (October 16 to October 23). We don’t want to break any record in number of QSO's, we just would like to do an good job with an Amateur Radio equipment that can be easily transported without need of containers and shipping.