G3KMA, Roger The IOTA Manager

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HAM RADIO

G3KMA, Roger The IOTA Manager

Roger is of course well known among everyone interested in IOTA, and he has also worked all 40 zones and 280 countries on 160! He can be on several photos among other hams on the CD.

The caption comes from Roger´s wife, Gill: "Not 50 years old. Not 50 years married.

Just 50 years as a licensed amateur!"

My career in Amateur Radio began in 1949 when at the age of 11 I got my hands on my elder brother's crystal set. I seem to remember graduating fairly quickly through to a home-made 1-V-2. Engrained on my heart from those days is the spectre of Calamity, when a valve blew and I had to save up my pocket money over several weeks for an ex-military replacement bought at the local war-surplus dealer's Aladdin's Cave. Living in a semi-detached house with a small garden near Watford, Hertfordshire, I had all of a 66 foot length of wire end-fed for an antenna. By age 14 I was using it for listening on Top Band, a real passion even then, with the dawn path producing a handful of Trans-Atlantic signals, Stew Perry W1BB prominent among them.

(I prize my SWL QSL card received from him in those days), and a couple of Puerto Rican regulars KP4CC and KP4KD, and even, I remember, an EL4 husband and wife duo in Liberia. All this of course was on CW which I had learnt at the age of 13. It is perhaps not a surprise that I set a priority while still at school of getting my transmitting licence. This I managed in 1955 at the age of 17. 

What was the catalyst for this? Well, my brother, who was three years older, was into amateur radio and by 1952 had got his licence as G3IQB. It was he rather than I (too young for such an august group!) who was a regular attendee at the Watford Radio Society. Even so G2QB, G2VD, G5PS and G8CK are calls that I remember as stalwarts of the Watford area. And I remember the very active CW operator G3KP who lived but half a mile away whom I myself finally met for the first time 40 years later at an RSGB HF Convention. 

From those early days I had the DX bug which was to stay with me until the present day. I progressed like many others from the most modest of home-made equipment, through the low cost end of professional equipment, to the black boxes that so many of us now own. It was far from easy in the early days as my set-up was quite uncompetitive, relying mainly on dipoles. I currently have the FT-2000 and accompanying Yaesu linear. The antennas are a Fritzel FB-DX 706 for 30 through 10M, a 402BA for 40 M, a full size but rather flat delta loop for 80 M and an inverted L for Top Band. 

I mention that I had the DX bug. That is not an exaggeration. I remember whistling in morse the rarest of callsigns in my bath at the age of 14. What else could one think about? QSLing started immediately. If there was a DX gene, I must have got it. My parents were not that enthused about the disease that had gripped their younger son (their elder son had a much milder dose and was more moderate in his pursuit of the hobby). Anyway decade after decade passed and the DX score grew and grew. Sacrifices there were, not least of sleep, in the chase. In 1963 I married my wife Gill who had to put up with all this and who, to show that she is the top wife for an amateur, regularly accompanies me to most conventions. She has never taken out a licence (she feared her husband's reaction if she ever had that much- wanted contact while her husband was at work) but knows so many of the crowd. We have three grown up children, two daughters and a son, and two grandchildren. 

From the earliest days DX-chasing was my overriding interest. As the bands became available, first 15 M in the 50s and then 30, 17 and 12 M in the 80s, the challenge was always there. In recent years IOTA and the ARRL's Challenge have been the two programmes that have constantly held my interest. With IOTA the score currently (January 2009) is 1072 groups worked (1070 confirmed) and in the Challenge 3073 confirmed.

I have worked all 40 CQ zones on 9 bands including 160 M - still working on getting the rarest ITU zones on LF - and all US states on the five traditional bands, just needing Idaho and North Dakota to complete on Top Band. 

Geoff Watts' IOTA Programme attracted me from the outset in 1964 although for the first three years a tour of duty in Tehran made participation impossible. In those early years contacts with islands that were not heavily populated were difficult and in fact as rare as gold nuggets. There was no Cluster or instant DX information service and such information as was available was at least several days old. However Geoff's DX News Sheet, started in the early 60s, was the best thing we had and that was a great boon. 

In March 1985, following a period of poor health, Geoff asked the RSGB's HF Committee if it would be prepared to take over the management of the IOTA Programme. I offered, as a member of the Committee, to do whatever was necessary to keep the programme going and subsequently visited Geoff to take over the existing records. At that stage 172 IOTA-CC-100 starter certificates had been issued (the first in 1966), the IOTA Directory listed about 575 groups, more than a third of which had never been activated, and there were about 50-60 participants in the regular Honour Roll. It soon became evident that the participants, few though they were, were all devoted to the island programme. That was when the telephone started ringing ... 

My involvement as the RSGB IOTA manager has continued from 1985 to the present day. In the early days most effort was paid to restructuring the programme in a way that gave it a robustness to withstand the pressures that were soon to develop. This included the reformulation of Geoff's island list from a purely geographical listing into one based on geopolitical lines and the inclusion of rules that enabled the inclusion of coastal islands that were previously excluded. These measures led to considerable expansion in the number of groups, often requiring the redefinition or splitting of them, up to a point when it became necessary to cap the list at 1200 groups. In year 2000 with considerable help from Martin Atherton G3ZAY we were able to complete a definitive listing of 15,000 islands valid for IOTA groups. Over the years we have built up a group of hardworking helpers who have contributed so much to IOTA - software developers, checkpoints, country assistants, Committee Members, and of course the RSGB organisation.

It has been a matter of considerable personal satisfaction that IOTA has taken off to the point where now it must be regarded as the second most popular activity programme after DXCC. The evidence for this can be seen almost daily in the size of the pile ups that greet IOTA DXpeditions whenever they appear on the bands. Whatever the contribution from management, it is the DXpeditioners who are responsible for the programme's success and they and the amateurs who stop by and work them are the real owners of the spirit of IOTA. I can only be thankful that I was in the right place at the right time and was entrusted with looking after the programme's development for them for so long. 

Amateur radio has changed a lot since the early 50s and not all for the better. What does concern me is the lack of activity on the bands for long periods of each day. While some responsibility for this can be laid at the door of propagation, most is due to the change in personal operating practice, following the introduction over the last two decades of alternative non-radio communication technologies. We are increasingly faced with the stark truth that the future of amateur radio depends on use of our bands and that this requires, in fact necessitates, the creation of mechanisms to encourage increased activity. For long the ARRL's DXCC Programme has carried the major load in providing incentives, and it has done this very successfully, particularly with its introduction of individual band awards in the 80s and 90s and now the Challenge Award. Contesting has also played a major part in stimulating activity, albeit mainly at weekends. The new digimodes have in recent years also contributed by attracting a strong following. However not everyone is into each of these activities and for some folk there is a need for something else, something different, perhaps something more challenging. Awards of various types are issued by national societies and clubs and these can provide the answer. But relatively few are international by nature and designed to stimulate operations outside their own country. If for its part IOTA has, by meeting this need, managed to light that spark of enthusiasm that makes life on the bands more enjoyable for thousands of fellow amateurs, then for me, as I approach the end of my stewardship of the programme, the effort has been worthwhile. 73 Roger