• [QRT] – J38DX summary report by Eric, GM5RDX:

My J38DX station finally went QRT at 12:00 UTC today, 13th July. I guess every trip like this faces it’s challenges, I certainly had mine. It turned out to be another solo trip for me, when my DXpedition partner, Graham 2M0IJU (J38LD), had to call off at the last minute. A lot of what we had planned to achieve became impossible. There were other difficulties to deal with too. A flight connection issue outbound lost me a day operating. A PC clock constantly drifting out of sync for FT8, meant I had to run manually for much of the time, taking me away from me operating on SSB. Another issue was a failure of my headset mic, forcing me to operate SSB pileups with a hand mike.

I had some successes, there were several 60m SSB contacts between Grenada and the UK, that according to ClubLog, had never been achieved before. The first direct contact was with Bob MM0XNC in Scotland. The QSOs were made on Tuesday 8th July around 22:30 UTC, on 5.404MHz. I made transmissions on every ham band from 40 to 6m. I tried 80m several times but never heard any reply to my CQ calls. I was pleased to work stations in Singapore, Hawaii, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, the Philippines and Guatemala for the first time, and no doubt some hams were happy to a work a J3 station for the first time too.

Very surprisingly, I was actually most effective on FT8 with a backup antenna, a 5m vertical telescopic whip with ground spike and 8 x 5m radials. It outperformed any other antenna that I took and was responsible for around 70% of all of the QSOs made on 20m to 10m. However this was sited right at the edge of a sea cliff, no doubt that helped greatly.

There was much less SSB transmission than I had hoped for. Working split "listening up five to ten” was something that as a relative novice I’d never experienced before, but it was a lot of fun. There were times I just couldn’t go split as the frequencies around me were occupied, but I coped as best I could. Some of the pileups were huge and frequently difficult to manage. The vast majority of the stations calling me tried to help me out by calling only once, but the operating standards of a few didn’t make it easy. I worked hard to get as many QSOs completed as I could, the final total is 3242 in six days of operating.

The last time I looked at my J38DX QRZ.com page it had over 45,000 page views. This may explain why the pileups were so big. Being on a trip like this, with that much interest was a little daunting for a ham that only got is first licence three years ago.

It was a great experience, and plenty of lessons were learned for sure. I will return to Scotland and take stock, and then consider how to be more effective next time.

Thanks to everybody who took the time and effort to contact my station, my apologies to those who tried but were unsuccessful.

Where to next – who knows, but perhaps I should just be a team member and not the whole team. I’m sorry that Graham couldn’t make the trip, he would have loved it, a more enthusiastic radio amateur it would be difficult to find.

  • [QRV, JULY 7] – J38DX has been QRV since the early hours of July 7th, mainly on 15, 17, 20 & 30m FT8. Today, SSB is also in use, but Eric mentions that conditions are poor at the moment for that mode.  Picture courtesy of Eric. Audio recording by DX-WORLD.

[JULY 4] – Eric’s flight from Glasgow was delayed this morning preventing him getting onto the Grenada flight from London. British Airways have now booked him on tomorrow’s flight so the activity from J3 will be one day shorter because of this delay.

[JULY 3] – by Eric GM5RDX

It’s almost time to depart for Grenada and disaster strikes our well worked plan. Graham 2M0IJU (J38LD) is now required to stay in the UK due to a small crisis at his business. So he will not be making the trip and unfortunately he will not be operating as J38LD.

So it’s become another solo DXpedition this year for Eric GM5RDX, operating as J38DX. Some last minute changes to the equipment list have become essential, as it’s now a single operator setup, albeit with two transceivers.

I expect to have an FT8 station operational soon after my arrival on Saturday evening with the SSB station being setup on Sunday morning. Band conditions permitting I expect to be fully operational with two stations by around 11am Sunday (16:00 GMT). One FT8 station and one SSB – still maintaining the capability to work across 80-6m.

[MAY 1] – Eric GM5RDX & Graham 2M0IJU will be operating from Grenada during early July 2025. Eric has been issued J38DX and Graham will operate as J38LD. Mostly QRV on SSB but also some FT8 data transmissions too. They will be operating from a location at a sea cliff cottage on the south of the island from 5th July – 13th July 2025. More details here. 

Eric GM5RDX (left) & Graham 2M0IJU (right)