Gertjan, PA3CPG and his wife are living (and working) in Africa for over 20 years now, currently in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Gertjan has been active as PA3CPG, 9J2GS, 3D6CW, Z2/PA3CPG, C30BBP and now Z21DX. His most active period was as 3D6CW: he made several tens of thousands QSO’s from Swaziland.
Lately, Gertjan hasn’t been too active due to the fact that there are no QSL facilities and the post is very unreliable: during his 20 years in Africa only a few QSL’s arrived.
Every year Gertjan participates in the Dutch PACC contest. In his active years he had a QSL manager but that service stopped – that’s the main reason Gertjan slowed down his DXing: he feels sorry he cannot provide a QSL to the ones that need one. However, new QSL info will soon be provided.
Gertjan is working with a Yaesu 847 and has a Heathkit amplifier providing him some extra dBs. Antenna is an 8-band Butternut vertical (main picture). He says with the current set-up it’s hard for him to work stations outside of Africa, but conditions are improving: recently he heard an OE8 station and that was the reason he started to call CQ and worked several stations in EU.
Many thanks to Gert, PA2LO for this news item for DX-World readers.
