To The Mountains of the Moon

Part 10. The last QSOs

After seeing again an old friend in Kampala, the last QSOs were made from camp Narwa. The contract ended on July 12, and ended an adventure which cannot be forgotten.

Back to camp Narwa

The trip back to Kampala, on Sunday went on without problems, a room at hotel Imperial in Kampala was booked by cable. That night in Kampala, Bill Snyder barged into the hotelroom. He was in Kampala with Arch Oboler (the famous radio man) and his wife, on their way to Belgian Congo. Of course they had a long talk about old times etc. Next day they had lunch with Bill and the Oboler family. Bob made some QSOs from VQ5PBD. The truck had to be repaired, the wheels still had only few bolts to hold them in place, and there was no spare tyre available. Bob and Jim had to stay in Kampala for 3 days, before the truck was repaired. Bob helped Peter Dodd, VQ5PBD with putting up a 6 element beam for 10 meters, and he made some QSOs with only 20 watts. A cable to Gatti was necessary to get Jim and Bob out of money problems, the money arrived just in time before they left Kampala on July 1, 1948. They spent the night at the Kenya/Uganda border at Tororo. Both wondered that they could find again a very nice place in the middle of wild Africa.

The last QSOs

Back in camp Narwa, it was clear to Bob that the plans from Gatti, to go on a lion hunt, had been a fizzle, as he expected it would. The equipment was still in the back of the little truck, and Bob operated from the little truck already the next day, using VQ3HGE for more than 8 hours a day. During the last day lots of hams wanted to say thank you to the hams who made their QSO(s) possible. Friday night, on July 9, 1948, Bob pulled the switch for the last time VQ3HGE was off, silence returned to the HF bands again. The expedition had logged 3822 QSOs, the country-counter stopped at 122. The logs of the Gatti Hallicrafters Expedition 1947-1948 has been lost, pity. In one of his own old logs (the one marked with nr. 7), Bob found a summary of his activities from British East Africa. From VQ3HGE they worked 122 countries and 39 CQ zones, only zone 23, Tibet was missing. And for WAS Montana was still needed. They worked Montana only from VQ4EHG, Kenya, but here (kwale camp) they did not work Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Rhode Island and Wyoming. From notes made by Bob, W6PBV, some QSO-data could be reproduced. Some data was unreadable, and therefore QSO-data is not complete. Watch in the table the different way the QSO-time was given.