If you are a radioamateur and trying to come here Märket secretly from othe radioamateurs, you are totally wrong. Radioamateurs are collecting contacts to different so called DXCC countries and Märket is its own DXCC country for radioamateurs since 1969. First radioamateur group visited Märket in December 1969 and stayed here until January 1970. They used special radiocall given for Märket OJ0MR. In 1970 Märket got it´s official status for DXCC country thanks to many radioamateurs among them were for example Martti Laine OH2BH, Sigurd Mansnerus OH0NI from Mariehamn and Karl Erik Eriksson, better known as Kee OJ0MA who is the last lighthouse keeper before Märket was automated.



When “radioamateur world” heard that we come here, we got many requests for keeping radiocontacts. There is many thousands radioamateurs waiting radiosignal coming out from Märket.
Below is quotation of international bulletin for radioamateurs, where is informed our trip here:

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OJ0 – MARKET REEF
OH6VM/OJ0VM, Harri, and OH6MC/OJ0MC, Pekka, both belong to the Finnish Lighthouse Society (FLS). They arrived on Market Reef on Saturday March 10th and will stay three weeks. Their operating will be sporadic as their main duty is to investigate and fix damages caused by the very hard and stormy winter, which will soon be coming to an end. The windmill-supplied power plant, along with large batteries it charges needs a facelift, while the diesel fuel is low. But you will sporadically hear these guys on a variety of bands
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Many times people are asking why you have to use those oldfashion radios and morse code, isn´t it much easier to use cellphones and internet. Well why someone is fishing, playing football etc? Actually the whole point is not only to get contact to another radioamateur. We are learning for example what are sunspots and solar wind doing for radiowave propagation.
Radio propagation depends on very much which radiofrequency you are using and what kind of antenna you have. Here in Märket at top of old fog horn tower is installed two element direction antenna which have to turn with motor to that direction where we want keep radiocontact.



This antenna at nautofon tower is always here but we installed also our own wire antenna (so called dipole antenna) because with it we can use some other frequencies which does not exist in direction antenna.



Unfortunately we kan keep radiocontacts only one-two hours at one go in same time when we have to charge batteries here.



CUL Harri and Pekka