DX Adventure to Montserrat for CQ WW SSB 2025

10/29/2025

I saw a message on the Florida Contest Group mailing list about someone looking for operators for the CQ WW SSB contest as a DX station on the island of Montserrat. I emailed Corey who was organizing the trip and he got back to me right away saying he’d be glad to have me and details about lodging and transportation. I made a reservation for one of the rooms at Gingerbread Hill bed and breakfast. Gingerbread Hill is a bnb type place that some hams from FCG decked out with a ham tower many years ago specifically for doing DX contesting. It has a great location on the side of a hill with an amazing view. I needed to get a Montserrat amatuer license and callsign. This was as easy as filling out a form, emailing it in with a scan of my passport and paying a fee, I think I had the license the next dar. It was like $30 for the week if I remember right. I picked callsign VP2MOO, VP2M is the prefix for Montserrat.

Typical way to get there is to fly to Miami, then Antigua, then to Montserrat. The last flight is 20 minutes and in the smallest plane I’ve been in.

Stan, Corey, Anne, Pat

The airport is very small. There’s a small 2 person customs booth, the agent came out and checked our passports and then went back to wherever they go.

Montserrat is basically a volcano. It erupted in 1995 and destroyed half the island, the half with the city. That side of the island is completely off limits now. It was popular with recording artists in the 70s. The Beatles manager lived there for awhile, his old house is a restaurant now, we ate there one night. The food is not great in Montserrat, this place is the nicest on the island and it was just ok. Currently, it’s mostly curvy island mountain roads, there isn’t really a city. Total population is around 5000, 12000 before Plymouth was destroyed. Unfortunately we didn’t have time for a tour of the exclusion zone. But we did see the volcano from the monitoring station.

We had some work to do to get the station working at Gingerbread Hill. While the host, Clover, was showing us around she said the utility were planning to do some work on island’s power that weekend but she called them and asked them to put it off until Sunday night so we wouldn’t have an outage during the contest.

Corey brought 3 cases of very organized gear and there was quite a bit of equipment there from people doing DX contests for the last 20 years. We had to put together the antenna on the tower and get the stations up and running.

The view was fantastic the entire time.

Antenna was a Mosley tribander and we had the manual. Looking back, it wasn’t too bad getting it together but at the time there were some challenges. It has probably been taken apart 100 times. We had big problems with the rotator. The terminal block had rusted out. We got some connectors at the local electronics/furniture/laundry & bath soap store and soldered it back together to get it going.

Nothing like some vacation soldering. Here’s where I stayed:

There’s frogs that make noise all night and I had to wear earplugs, everyone else said they got used to it but there was one basically 5 feet from my head in that place. That and the 2-hours on-4 hours off schedule of the 48 hours contest really made it difficult to get good rest.

They have goats and one of them had babies while we were there, this is probably the first photo of them.

Also saw this thing

Ralf and I operating during the night. We did a multi-two entry.

Corey and Irina, she’s was in WRTC.

We used VP2MPN in the contest. Yaesu FT-450D radio, Juma 1000 watt amp, bandpass filter, antenna switch (we also had some dipoles).

Six of us ended up doing over 7,000 Q’s and over 10 million points.

More photos:

View from the deck

Beach at the bottom of the hill from the house

Sadly, Stan became a silent key shortly after this trip, I’m glad I was able to meet him and spend some time with him.

Special thanks to Corey’s girlfriend Anne for driving us around the whole time. I’m glad I went. For a first DX experience this is a great option, not too hard to get to and fantastic views.