The KØNR Radio Site

KBØCY/C6A Operation - The Bahamas

During December 2000, I did a "beach plus amateur radio" vacation in The Bahamas, where I operated as KBØCY/C6A, contacting hundreds of other radio amateurs all over the world on the 14 MHz, 21 MHz and 28 MHz bands.

QSL Information
I had a custom QSL card made using the photo shown above and will be happy to confirm a contact with anyone that I worked from The Bahamas. Please QSL to my home callsign, KBØCY (either direct with a return envelope and postage, or via the QSL bureau). As of 20 April 2001, all QSL cards have been sent out to stations that have sent me a card. I've also responded to all cards received via the QSL bureau, but they may still be enroute. (U.S. QSL cards sent to me without a return envelope and postage will be ignored.)

The Story
Our family was looking for a warm place to spend the holidays, enjoy the beach and play with amateur radio. (Well, I guess the amateur radio part was mostly my idea.) After looking around, we settled in on going to The Bahamas. We rented a beachhouse with an existing ham shack (shown below). This property is owned by Ken, C6AHN / KC4SZE.  Email: kennethh@HiWAAY.net  Update 2006: Ken has sold this property to a non-ham and the status of the ham station is unknown.

The beach house is located on Abaco Island, at Treasure Cay (TC). Abaco is kind of a quiet place, away from the larger cities of The Bahamas. If you are looking for lots of night life, this is not the place to be. It is a great place to get away from it all and enjoy some quiet time. A photo of the beach, with the beach house in the background.

The beach house has a pretty sweet amateur station for HF operation with tower, beam antenna and amplifier. Here's the amateur radio operating position. I took some of my own equipment along but mostly just used the gear that was there. There is a 2M FM repeater in TC on 145.21 MHz (- offset), operated by C6AFP / N4JQQ.  I had my dualband HT along and chatted with some of the locals on that repeater.

Most of the operation was on HF, on my favorite bands: 20M, 15M and 10M. Mostly I operated SSB but I did switch over to 10 FM phone and made a bunch of contacts there. Usually, I had a pretty good pileup of stations wanting to work me. (The Bahamas is not that rare of a country but it is DX.) Here's a shot of the tower (looking upward):

The wonderful girls (my family) that were with me on the trip: Rachel (KC0ETU), Joyce (KA0DEH) and Sara (KC0AMO).

Treasure Cay is a small resort area with a few small stores, a few restaurants and a decent marina.

The people are very friendly on Abaco. With the close proximity to the US, there are many Americans that come down for vacations. We enjoyed a wonderful Christmas Eve church service held in the local community hall. Overall, the weather was cooler than normal, so we often wore light jackets. It got very windy on Christmas Day.

The airport at Treasure Cay is small and the planes that fly in and out are also small but get the job done.

We all had a great time and are ready to go back again!

  - Bob KB0CY