In 2001, I was busy building a house in Kampala. My plan was to settle there, even though my work kept me constantly on the move. I had found the perfect location to build what I envisioned as a super QTH—ready to break records, or so I thought. I even had two C4XL’s, verticals for 80 and 160 meters shipped down, thinking I’d have the ultimate setup for radio operation. But as is often the case, life had other plans.
September 11, 2001: A Turning Point
On September 11, 2001, I was in our tech operations center in Kampala, where we were glued to the TV, watching live coverage of the unfolding events. We had a real-time map showing where our team members were in the field, spread across 10 countries at any given moment. If a crisis happened, we were either already there or on the way.
When the news broke that the Twin Towers had been bombed, our Country Director came to inform us. He had received a call from his family in the U.S., but the phone lines were immediately cut. In a strange twist, all communication networks in Uganda crashed due to the sheer overload of people trying to make calls. However, our group chat on Messenger remained live, and for some reason, that connection held steady even as the rest of the internet collapsed.
We quickly set up multiple satellite phones on the balcony for communication, and the big satellite dish on the roof allowed us to stay connected through various means. Over the next five days, Peter, who was still in Kosovo, told me to drop everything. “Africa is covered well enough,” he said. He was preparing to head to Islamabad, anticipating that another conflict was on the horizon.
A New Mission: Assessing Communication Needs Across Latin America
Peter’s instructions were clear: head to Central and South America to assess communications infrastructure in the 11 countries where we had operations. He also mentioned that Nicaragua was holding elections, and there were concerns it could go awry.
I flew from Kampala via Belgium, Madrid, and Miami to Nicaragua. I had six weeks to assess communications across 11 countries, but I ended up visiting 15, racking up 46 different airline tickets in the process. Countries I visited included Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia (including Medellín and FARC-controlled areas), Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, and Costa Rica.
During my travels, I was fortunate to meet some local hams, including TG9AJR in Guatemala, where I had a memorable dinner with a few operators. I also visited a ham club located in an old air traffic control tower, but for the life of me, I can’t recall which country it was in.
Border Crossings and Intense Travel
One of the more memorable experiences occurred while traveling between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There was no direct flight between the two, so I had to travel by road. After sitting at the border for two hours, I looked across into Haiti and felt like I had stepped into a time warp—back to some of the most underdeveloped regions of Africa that I had seen. Haiti had recently been devastated by a major hurricane and had barely started to recover.
In Medellín, I flew into one airport, then drove three hours across town to another airport to access the FARC-controlled areas. The pace of the work was grueling, but the stakes were high. Budgets were increasing, and I had gone from organizing DX-peditions with budgets of $15,000 to $22,000, to now managing projects with budgets in the range of $500,000 to $1 million. I was no longer organizing small radio operations; I was overseeing the setup of large, multi-location communications networks in multiple countries.
The Adrenaline Rush of Humanitarian Work
Despite the growing scale of the work, it didn’t feel like work. Peter and I thrived on the intensity and the challenges. No two days were ever the same, and we loved the adrenaline rush. But the strange thing was, as much as we had once craved the excitement of a DX-pedition, we found that the adrenaline we got from these large-scale operations satisfied us in the same way.
In the past, setting up a station for 5 to 20 operators in remote locations for 10 to 20 days was an intense experience. Now, we were setting up the same types of operations, but for 100 people across 20 locations in five to 10 countries simultaneously. As the team grew, we were constantly pushing the boundaries of what we could do. New technical advancements came along, but at the core of it all was the need for reliable HF/VHF communications for staff safety.
The Last Thing on Our Minds: DX-Peditions
As we became more entrenched in this high-stakes work, the idea of organizing a DX-pedition—or even getting on the air—seemed like a distant memory. The work was so fulfilling, so all-consuming, that taking time off to set up an amateur radio station or participate in a contest just didn’t appeal to us anymore. We had found a new mission: supporting people and operations in some of the most challenging and dangerous places in the world, and that became our true passion.
Looking back, those days of intense global operations, shifting from country to country, from crisis to crisis, were some of the most rewarding of my life. And while the world of DX-peditions faded into the background, the impact we made in the field of humanitarian communications has been the true legacy of our work.