This year, both my wife Sabine and my daughter and her boyfriend were unable to join me. So, I had the chance to focus more on Amateur Radio.
Once again, I chose KLM for the flight to Aruba. I opted for the Comfort Seats in Economy class, which provided 2 inches more legroom and a slightly larger recline for the seats. This resulted in a noticeable improvement in comfort. On the return flight, I even had the first row with space reserved for a baby basin. Since there was no baby on board, I was able to fully stretch my legs to the wall in front of me.
Normally, the first adventure upon arrival in Aruba is dealing with customs. They are keen to impose taxes on anything that does not look like it belongs to a normal tourist. This year, I was well prepared and even had a proforma invoice available. But surprisingly, nobody was present at the customs point, so I simply walked through without any inspection.
Afterward, I picked up my rental car at AVIS without problems and soon arrived at the cottage. Here, I received a warm welcome from Cris and JP! It was good to see them again.
Connecting the station to all antennas and cables and connecting my laptop to the K3 was quickly done. Initially, I faced some problems with the CW keying/PTT to the new KPA amplifier, but I was able to resolve it after some trying. After some initial QSOs, it was time to sleep.
The next morning, I started the preparations for erecting the 85ft pole. First, I attached all the segment rings and the guying belts to the pole. The still retracted pole was then fastened to the ground support angle. All the guying cords were unwound and loosely connected to the pole and guying connection points on the ground. The coax cable connection to the shack was pulled, and I laid an initial number of radials. I extended the pole only to the 30m band length and temporarily tightened the guyings for this reduced height.
The next day, Cris and JP came to help me complete the installation of the pole for 160m. I had to replace the 30m wire with the one for 160m and additionally connect the four top hat wires. The difficulty in installing the 160m version is avoiding twisting all the guyings and wires and ensuring they are all in the right directions. Sometimes the guyings twist with the vegetation, requiring careful untwisting. While extending the segments, we had to ensure that all guyings had sufficient margin in their lengths to not block the pole extension, but that margin must not be too high to still prevent major potential bending of the pole.
When we were quite close to the end, after trying to tighten one of the upper thin guyings, the guying cord suddenly broke. The cord is made of KEVLAR core and should have a high maximum tensile strength. But obviously, in this case, the force was too high, or a point on the guying was pre-damaged. After inspecting the thinner guying cords, I found some more “suspicious” points that seemed no longer to have full tensile strength. However, there were no issues with the thicker cords, so I assume that the thinner cords are simply not rugged enough, and possibly friction of the cord tighteners or friction if the cord temporarily twists with vegetation may have been the root cause. Next year I’m going to use thick type only.
The potential existence of more weak points in the thin guyings caused some concerns about whether that guying type is good enough for the purpose. So, I decided not to put the pole at risk if one or more thin guyings may crack in strong winds or during installation and install the 60m band version only. For 60m, I did not need the upper thin guyings and the top hat wires. That simplified the setup significantly. We then additionally added some more radials, and the pole was ready for 60m. The quarter wavelength version with the attached radials just ended up with 50 Ohms impedance, so no further matching was required. The vertical worked great on 60m at night without any problems. The days after I change to the 30m lengths. Again roughly 50 Ohms and nice performance.
The next morning, after sunrise, I inspected and maintained the W6/JA beverage antennas in the Cunuco. It is always a hard job to do this along the full length of the antennas, given the thorny and dense vegetation of the Cunuco. On top of that, the vegetation had grown a lot, and in many positions, I had to relieve the beverage wire from trees pushing the wire down. And of course, where necessary, I tried to clear the path along the wire to support easier walking and reduce the risk of getting in contact with the thorny trees and cactuses.
On the consecutive mornings, I inspected the other beverage antennas. At the W1 beverage, I had some major work to clear some areas of fallen big branches, and I even discovered a full wire cut. I did a repair with the dual screw terminal and sealed it properly with tape. (John will later replace it with a soldered connection to further improve the reliability of this splice.) Later, while trying to cut a bigger tree, I broke the lever of the lopper. Huuh, I did not expect to be able to break the lever with manual force! But maybe corrosion had weakened the stability of the lopper. But of course, I didn’t want to leave a broken lopper at the cottage, so I purchased a new one for a new long lopper life. 😊
Readers of the yearly story may remember that last year animals (dogs?) stole one boot of my daughter’s boyfriend from the cottage’s garden. I then attached an Apple AirTag to the second boot and hoped that the dog might try to steal the second boot at the second night. That worked as planned, but we were unable to locate the AirTag on the property or at the nearby neighbourhood. For a long time, there was no message from the AirTag. But on November 23rd, I got a message from my iPhone that the AirTag had connected to a mobile phone nearby, and the position of the AirTag was transmitted. Now, during my stay, I walked to the reported position, but unfortunately, I could not locate the AirTag anymore. Certainly, it had been moved again in between. But it was crazy; there was a sudden sign of life 10 months later!
At night, when I was operating at the station, I suddenly heard some noise from the window behind the curtain. When looking behind the curtain, I saw there was a ½ ft long gecko (or similar) trying to enter the room via a small gap close to the coax from the spider pole. I had sealed all the openings at the cable entry with rugged tape (just to avoid the entry of small animals or vermin), but despite it, the gecko tried to penetrate between the tape. It was hard for him, but he had already managed to pass half of his body length. I tried to push his body back out of the window with a tool, but it was difficult to push him back due to the sticky tape. Finally, I got him out, but the next morning I saw he did not survive this adventure. Well, that’s the way it is.
One more action on my agenda was to visit the DTZ. DTZ this year had requested me to personally appear at the DTZ office to explain to me the new license application procedures. On Monday, I then was at DTZ. Unfortunately, my contact person Juan just on this day was not in the office. But I got some information from another very friendly officer. He explained to me that there is a new e-form on the DTZ website I have to fill out from now on. For 2025, they had translated my old application into this new form on their own (thanks!) to make sure I get my license when I arrive. As he was not sure if Juan still wanted to talk with me, so I gave him my local mobile number, and I was told that Juan would contact me in the next few days. Finally, I was not sure if I still had to do something with the 2025 application or if it was just to make sure that I would do it correctly in 2026. Unfortunately, there was no call from Juan in the next few days. Already at home, I received an email from Juan that he was unable to reach my mobile. Strange, but I will contact him in the next few days to clarify what may is still open.
Regarding propagation, at the time of max Solarflux, of course, 10/15 and 12m had very good and long openings. As usual, I tried to focus on JA and EU / DL as a second priority. The US can be worked at any time; that may be covered by others. Interestingly, also 30m and 60m worked very well. This year I worked many BY, RA9/0, VU, 4S7, HL, and 9V stations.
However, as expected, 40/80m and 160m were not good almost all the time. At least there were two exceptional days. One morning I worked one ZL and two VK stations on 160m, and the next day 5 JA stations, and some more JA finally did not make it into the log. But that was more than expected! 
At the contest, I experienced varying conditions. Generally, US and EU were weak almost all the time. After 1 and 4 UTC, some improvement happened, but at no time I faced true pile-ups. On the second night, approximately after 5 UTC, there was a period with good signals from zone 16 (UA and RA). But on both nights, conditions to the EU more or less ended at the greyline over LZ/YO. At the greyline of central and west EU, just very few stations were audible, and at the same time, it seemed that all US shut down as there was just minor activity on the band. Usually, I work at least 15-20 Q/h after EU sunrise.
My best DX was R9DX. Unfortunately, again this year, no JA, VK/ZL, or RA0 at sunrise.
My final result was 862 QSOs, 53 S/P, 65 DXCC, and 1.01M points. That was exactly as per my target of 1M and slightly better than last year and appears okay for the given conditions. P33W is clearly in front of me (1.3M). It seems he had an upgraded setup; I heard him all night long very loud. Congrats to him! 
LY4A has 1.03M points and is only slightly better than me. But I hope after log checking, is a true chance for me to take second place.
On Monday morning, I uninstalled the spider pole and all the radials and the temporary VK/ZL beverage. While ending up the beverage wire, I made an error which finally caused the thin beverage wire to completely twist. It took me hours to untwist the 590ft of thin wire. Lessons learned!
At evening, I invited JP and Cris to the usual Post-Contest dinner. This year I chose the “Marina Pirata” beach restaurant. We had a nice table very close to the water, and the food was excellent!
The day after, after more than total 16k QSOs I left the cottage late in the afternoon and arrived safely home the next day.
It was again a great stay on Aruba! John & Andy, many thanks for letting me live in your cottage and use your excellent equipment!

Mathias DL4MM