On the 16th April I read the Daily DX as normal and was excited to see that Marion island was going to be activated just a week later. Not that I’d ever heard of Marion island but the post said that “Prince Edward & Marion Is. are listed as #11 in Clublog’s DXCC Most Wanted List as of April 2025”. This would most definitely be an All Time New One (ATNO) for me so I was very keen to make contact with him.
Activity was due to start on the 21st April but due to various weather conditions, Yuris YL2GM wasn’t able to get on the island and start operating until the 27th April.
He started working on 20m FT8 and the pileup was huge, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was literally wall to wall of stations calling him. At one point, my software showed over 130 stations decoded.
Yes, I’ve had the TS-890 since July 2021 and I still haven’t removed the plastic on the screen.
I didn’t try calling on the 27th but I did call on the 28th. I started calling on 20m FT8 at 16:51z and got through less than 15 minutes later at 17:04z.
On the morning of the 29th, I called on 10m for almost an hour from 15:14z to 16:13z with no joy. He moved to 15m where I started calling at 16:25z and finally got through, nearly an hour and a half later at 17:49z.
After those two slots, band conditions dropped and I didn’t hear Yuris again until the 10th May where I called unsuccessfully from 10:50z to 11:31z on 10m. For all these QSOs and attempts, I had the amplifier on and was running 1 kW.
On the 11th May, I saw a spot showing him on 30m. My SteppIR UrbanBeam is only a folded dipole on 30m and it’s not a great match at around 2.1:1, so I have to use the ATU on the wireless and the output power drops down to only about 80 watts. I’m not keen on using the amplifier on 30m so I wasn’t feeling very confident. I started calling at 18:52z and to my surprise, we worked just seven minutes later at 18:59z.
Two days later on the 13th, I saw him on 10m again and started calling at 08:33z, getting through and completing the QSO twelve minutes later at 08:45z. Again, I was operating without the amplifier on and just running 100 watts this time. Yuris closed down the station at 11:15z on the 13th and left the island sometime after.
Yuris operated mainly FT8 and CW while on Marion Island with only around 50 SSB QSOs out of his [nearly] 32,000 total but he was never a workable signal to me on CW so all my contacts were FT8.
Considering how large the pileups were for ZS8W, I’m very pleased with these four QSOs and this takes me up to 307 DXCC entities worked.
