For quite some time I was considering to organize a trip to the Pacific and have spend a lot of time searching for the destination, suitable accommodation, airline connections, etc. Once I had found a combination that made a good fit, I started to make concrete some theree months ago as this is at least the time you need for preparation.

I decided to visit Tuvalu (T2) and West Kiribati (T30) and wanted to stay for about a week on each island. The best airline connection with both islands was provided by AirPacific, flying from Fiji. So my initial flight is from Amsterdam to Nadi on Fiji. I planned not to have the connecting flights to tight which avoids having immediate problems when flights are delayed. At the same time, it gives me the opportunity to operate also from Fiji (3D2). On the calendar on the left you can lookup the exact travel schedule (move the calendar to September).

As this is a solo DXpedition, I have to take the weight of all the equipment and personal stuff seriously in consideration in order not to pay a premium for eccess lugage. For already more than a year I started a few projects with the aim of reducing the weight of my lugage. The first project was a T-Match tuner that should replace my small MFJ tuner. In this particular case, I wanted to have a tuner with a higher efficiency and this resulted not directly in a tuner that has less weight. However, I will now have the capability to match a wide range of antenna situations.

For the antenna part, I first wanted to bring a doublet antenna with open feed line but later decided to stick with my ECO R7+ vertical for 40-10m. All my locations a directly at the beach and I can located the vertical very close to the water line. Last year I made already a carrying case for this antenna which was made of carton and fitting in a ski-bag which I bought for just 5 Euro. The bag was 207 cm long and 12 by 12 cm square. There was also space for a fiber glass pole and some coax cable. After viewing some web sites and picture of other DXpeditions I found that in some cases the lugage was loaded in the passenger area of a small plane where space was limited. Realizing that long boxes could cause problems in small planes, I decided to make a new packing.

I collected a large piece of thick carton (packing material for a big fridge) from a retail shop. I cut and folded it so it formed a box that could contain the antenna elements of the R7+ and the 15m DX-Wire fiber glass pole. My wife made a bag of very stong fibre sheet with two handles. Now the box measures 135x16x16 cm. As a side effect, it was also more than a kilo lighter than the long box.

I really like the Bencher paddle as it has a very heavy base plate to avoid moving around on the table. This is very practical at home but not for flying around the globe. Therefore I used the paddle of an old ETM keyer and mounted on a strip of PCB material which I can fix to the Elecraft K3 radio. During operation, the K3 with power supply are heavy enough to serve as a base for the paddle. This saved me about 1.2 kilo. The paddle will only be used for some occasional messages as during a normal pileup, I will only use the keyboard. Furthermore, I can also use the paddle in case of PC failure as the keyer is built into the K3 radio.

For this trip I have also replace my old Dell laptop with a modern mini notebook which was about half the weight of the Dell. This notebook has a 10.2" screen which is good enough for a logging screen.