The team arrived in good shape. 2 stations are constantly QRV on 20 and 40 meter band. One suitcase is missing with HP filters, so other bands not active yet. The suitcase will arrive later today. We had one person who had minor ingurees. He had taken a fall from a slippery underground while errecting a sub antenna. He’s doing fine today. More news later on.

We try to respect this band plan as much as possible. Everything depends on the local situation and QRM situation.

Due to the Covid pandemic, SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) is in a difficult financial situation and is saving where they can.

Last week we received an email from SAS that two of our 6 flights were cancelled and we had to find a solution. It was quite a strange feeling, it seemed like 15 months of hard work with one email was completely swept off the table…

Unfortunately a good proposal was not made so we had to stay a total of 3 extra days in Norway.

We had a plan and so many questions, but was our plan achievable? It took weeks of searching on Google and many emails to find the right person or company. With some we communicated for weeks and finally received a negative answer. The disappointment was often great and we had to start our search again from scratch.

We always held out hope that there had to be someone somewhere who was willing to put their shoulders under our project, someone who believed in our plans and wanted to go for it one hundred percent.

I came into contact with Stefano Poli who started his own company “Poliarctici” in 1999 on Svalbard. Someone with more than 20 years of experience in this region and gave us a good feeling very quickly.

After a few email messages Stefano sent: “My dream is, that your dreams come true and lets go for it together”. It felt good and we noticed very quickly that Stefano had a lot of experience and was very driven to reach our goal together.

Stefano emphasized that we needed to be aware that in the month of April it is still winter in Svalbard and the weather can be very inclement. We have to travel 100 km on a snowmobile in temperatures of -20° to -25° (wind chill may be even lower). In good weather this trip will take five hours, in bad weather we will quickly take more than 7 hours.

During this trip we will need for our own safety three guides, three snowmobiles with sled to transport the equipment, weapons, extra security etc. At our location we are not allowed to go outside to place antennas without extra security because we are in a “Wildlife area”.

Six months later we can finally say that we have a good plan and we are actually going to realize it. We have good agreements, contracts and the first advances have already been paid.

Today we received good news from SAS | Scandinavion Airlines that all airline tickets and luggage are in order. It was a bit of nail-biting and hoping that there were still enough seats for the whole group, because a group cannot buy its tickets more than 300 days before departure. It took us a lot of effort, many e-mails and numerous international phone calls but with the help of Marios Anthimou Georgiou everything turned out fine. Thank you Marios for all your help.

We currently have 345 kg of extra luggage for DX-pedition equipment and extra ski bags for carrying antennas and poles.

Alex ON6AJ knew all along that we were planning a QO-100 DX-pedition to Svalbard. We still had so many things to get done and that in itself was quite a challenge. But Alex was confident that in terms of organization, things would turn out just fine. He discussed this with his friends from SG Laboratory in Bulgaria. They were immediately willing to support us in this new challenge.

Thanks to Alex ON6AJ for negotiating and SG Laboratory from Bulgaria for their trust in our JW0X QO-100 DX-pedition.

The application for our Svalbard license was submitted to the NKOM in Norway. Nancy Sangvik from the “Spectrum Department Norwegian Communications Authority” confirmed today that we have the callsign JW0X available. All our official documents, passports, licenses were handed over to the NKOM, we are quietly waiting for the official JW0X license.