Editor’s Note: Every month, DX Engineering features QSL cards from our team members’ personal collections. To highlight upcoming DXpeditions, we’ll be displaying a few of our favorite cards along with details about what it took to make these contacts. We’re excited to share some of the special cards pulled from the thousands we’ve received over the years. We look forward to seeing your cards as well!
Niger QRV in June
The arrival of June offers opportunities for hams to snag two African DXCC entities in the upper regions of the Most Wanted List: Somalia (ranked 61st), which we’ll highlight later this month, and the Republic of Niger (ranked 89th), which is scheduled to be active until June 27.
Operating from Niger’s capital of Niamey, the 5UAIHM DXpedition, by Adrien, F4IHM, will be active on 40 and 20 meters CW/SSB.
Named after the Niger River, this largest country in West Africa (490,000 square miles, or almost twice the size of Texas) has a population of 22 million, mostly clustered in the west and far south, where Niamey (population around one million) is located. More than four-fifths of the landlocked country is made up of the Sahara Desert. Radio is the country’s most prominent information medium, as television sets are too costly for much of the country’s poor rural population and high illiteracy rates diminish the role of print journalism. Through FM repeaters, the BBC’s Hausa service is available to large portions of the country. Hausa is a Chadic language spoken mainly in Niger, northern Nigeria, and a handful of other African countries.
Here are a few of the QSL cards from Niger collected by the active operators at DX Engineering over the years:
Tom, KB8UUZ, DX Engineering technical writer, contacted the 5U0T, 5U1A, 5U4R DXpedition in February 2002 on 20M SSB. The seven-operator team, pictured below astride camels, recorded 57,106 QSOs during 12 days of activity.
Dave, K8DV, DX Engineering customer/technical support specialist, reached 5U5U on 17M SSB in September 2008, and 5U5R on 80/20/15M CW; 40/20M SSB; and 30/20/17M RTTY in March 2017.
Dave, N8NB, DX Engineering technical support specialist, earned the below QSL card in March 2004 by contacting Jim “Bull” Bullington, 5U7JB (then-director of the U.S. Peace Corps program in Niger) on 15M SSB.
Want to upgrade your DXing capabilities? The Elmers at DX Engineering are here to lend an ear. Reach out to them at Elmer@DXEngineering.com. Find everything you need at DX Engineering.com to up your game, including transceivers, antennas, amplifiers, headsets, and more.
