Aeronautical Mobile Contact from the Dominican Republic

767

On the morning of January 9, 2020, I was up early, sitting alone out in my open-air tropical hamshack on Bahia Rincon on the Samana peninsula of the Dominican Republic. I had been looking at the stars. As the sky brightened I was listening to band noise from a still-dead 20 meter band on my uBITX.

Skies were partly cloudy. The Big Dipper hung upside down in front of me. I had also seen Corvus, Scorpio, Andromeda, and Leo. There were a few meteors and one bright satellite.

But 20 was quiet… until, suddenly, BOOM! A very loud and clear SSB signal came through. It was KX4WE/Aeronautical Mobile. Mike was in a 767. I called him and he came back right away, giving me a 57 report. He gave his position as 170 miles Northwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was heading to Port-o-Spain, Trinidad from Miami. We had a quick QSO — it reminded me a lot of my contacts with the MIR space station from Santo Domingo in the mid-1990s. Suddenly Mike’s signal dropped very significantly. I figured that he had moved further south and was no longer line-of-site with me. I had some hills to my south and they were now attenuating Mike’s signal. I could hear him working M0NKL. We were Mike’s only two contacts on 20.

I realized later that had I looked up, I might have seen the lights of the plane. Below is the track of the aircraft. He was at 35,000 feet when he passed over the DR.