Very interesting... sent to me by a friend.
Bob W5UQ
P5DX what could have been…
Posted about 19 hours ago | 1 comment
<http://www.dxcoffee.com/eng/2016/p5dx-what-could-have-been/#comments>
from N6PSE <https://n6pse.wordpress.com/>blog
P5DX-what could have been….
As a Blogger, my blog represents my thoughts and my views only. The
content of this Blog does not represent anyone else but me.
This morning, I had to cancel a DXpedition. It was one of the
hardest decisions of my life. It was not for lack of permission, it
was not for lack of a team and equipment willing to go.
The prospect of a P5 activation brings out the worst in this hobby.
The posers, the nuts, the ill-informed and the opinionated. But in
the end, it mostly came down to a surprising lack of support and
lack of funding from some of the world’s paramount DX foundations
when asked to fund grants to the world’s #1 Most Wanted Entity.
This is the story of P5DX.
Throughout several years of ongoing negotiations, the North Koreans
have told us that they have never before given permission for an
amateur radio activity within the DPRK. Of course we don’t know if
this is true or not as others have gone before us and have been
approved for DXCC, but this is what we were told. We had hoped to
be the first large DXpedition with clear and unambiguous proof that
we were active within the country and with real evidence of
permission. After tireless efforts, we finally had a letter of
invitation in hand from DPRK authorities inviting us into the
country as the first-ever large scale amateur radio event.
In April, 2013, we informed the world of our “P5 Project”. We were
making numerous visits to the DPRK and establishing real contacts.
We were spending thousands of dollars of our family’s money
shuttling back and forth from our homes to Pyongyang, and we wanted
to give hope to the DX Community that an operation might actually
take place.
All told, we made nine visits to the DPRK. Despite several false
leads, for the most part our efforts seemed pointless, unproductive
and futile.
Until recently, when we finally got our big break.
As part of our P5 Project, we retained an expert in all things North
Korea to work and lobby on our behalf. Our “Emissary” was very
interested in our project and asked for no money from us. Our
“Emissary” has strong relationships within the DPRK and regularly
travels there.
In February 2016, our Emissary contacted us while we were on the
VP8STI/VP8SGI DXpedition. Our Emissary had been communicating with
relevant DPRK officials and sensed a new willingness to consider our
proposal.
We renewed our proposal and the talks continued. When we returned
home, we learned that we were very close to having complete
permission. After a couple more months of back and forth
negotiations, the DPRK agreed to a ten day amateur radio activity
with three radios and up to 20 team members. A venue was
investigated and approved.
Like the 2012 7O6T Dxpedition, the DPRK officials wanted to showcase
a new resort and offered it as a DXpedition location. Within a span
of a few weeks our Emissary and one of our team leaders made a visit
to Pyongyang to have face to face meetings with high level
officials. These officials had been involved in Dennis Rodman’s
visit as well as the just-completed Pyongyang marathon race. Now
that the marathon was over, we had their full attention and
cooperation. Things were moving fast.
The DPRK officials stipulated that only three Americans could be on
the team and no Japanese, but beyond that we were given the green
light to begin assembling a team of varying nationalities from
Europe, South America, and Oceania.
The DPRK officials insisted on no publicity in advance of us going
on the air, so everyone joining our team was sworn to secrecy. A
website was developed but would not be launched until we were live
and on the air within the DPRK. It was agreed that we would use the
call sign P5DX.
Our last major hurdle was that the DPRK was asking for a very large
fee to be paid for the permissions at various government levels and
ministries to operate from within the DPRK. It is a very common
practice for various governments throughout the world to request a
fee to be paid for DXpedition permission and licensing. These fees
are typically several thousand dollars in many Third World
countries. As we would see, the DPRK fee would be considerably more.
While still trying to keep everything a secret, the largeness of
this fee required that we approach several of the biggest amateur
radio foundations for financial grants to help us with our
tremendous up-front costs.
We also consulted with an international attorney who counseled us
how to avoid becoming entangled in violations of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act. Essentially, it is a serious crime for Americans to
bribe foreign government officials. However, it is not a crime for
Americans to be charged extra fees to visit a foreign country. All
of our fees would be paid directly to a China-based tour company and
no direct exchange would take place with the North Koreans.
Given the outpouring of support that these amateur radio consortia
had given to lesser-needed entities in the past, it never occurred
to us that they would resist supporting a trip to P5. One
organization actually said that we didn’t need their funding because
we could charge whatever we wanted for the QSLs! It was a
disheartening revelation that they seemed more interested in our
ability to raise funds by charging high fees later for confirmation
“because we can” rather than in assisting a major DXpedition that
was in dire need of immediate pre-departure funding to pull it off.
We later proposed that they merely pledge an amount to be donated if
we were successful and our operation was accredited by the DXCC
staff, thus giving them an easy way out if they were not pleased
with our performance. This still did not sway them. Here we were,
just a couple of weeks away from the first authorized multinational
DXpedition from the world’s most needed country, and we were told we
were on our own. I never thought it would come to this.
I have tremendous respect for these organizations and I am deeply
disappointed that they could not find a way to support our plans.
This left my Co-Leader, David-K3LP and I no other recourse but to
drain our own personal retirement savings to provide the bulk of our
funding. In addition to our upfront license fees, we needed to buy
radios, power supplies, coax, antennas and many more items. We
purchased roughly $16,000 in equipment and we spent almost $4000 to
ship it FedEx to Beijing to our staging area, where it still sits as
I write this Blog.
We continued to discreetly build our team. Many potential team
members were not able to travel to the DPRK with such short notice,
which was understandable. We worked very hard and we were glad that
we were able to complete a final team of 14 very able operators by
the time the deadline to apply for our DPRK visas was upon us. Our
plans continued to come together and everyone booked their flights
to Beijing. A hotel in China was secured for our pre-DXpedition
briefings. Reservations with Air Koryo, the DPRK’s national
airline, were made. Less than two weeks to go now. We were
delighted that everyone seemed to respect our need for
confidentiality. Nothing had been leaked.
But that euphoria would not last. Much to our disappointment, April
19 featured the first of many betrayals of our trust when a blogger
opined that he was “hearing rumblings of a P5 activation by 10 US/EU
Ops planned for May 2016”. Someone talked. These leaks came
almost immediately after our attempts to recruit our team and to get
grant funds, despite our repeated insistence that our plans not be
made public. And soon the repercussions of that would unravel our
plans and cost tens of thousands of DXers a possible contact with P5.
Within a short time, we were contacted by numerous other amateur
radio websites and bloggers asking if we were the ones involved in
these rumors. We tried not to comment at all, but the rumors would
not go away. Finally we admitted we might be making progress but
begged for discretion, saying that negotiations were still ongoing
and that one of the conditions of the trip was that we not go public
until we were ready to go on the air. But in pursuit of their own
interests in having a “scoop”, most re-published the unsubstantiated
rumors and, as expected, this brought out the crazies and every
armchair DXer with an opinion chimed in.
One eHam commenter posted that if all, or some of us were to wind up
in a North Korean gulag, that none of us would have his sympathy.
We were powerless to act or respond and we kept our heads down and
focused on moving forward. Within days, all four Web and Email
based DX news sources ran with the rumors, providing links to the
original Blogger. All of this was in defiance of the directive of
the DPRK officials that we make no pre-event publicity. All of this
was working against our efforts.
The Internet ramblings continued and more and more information was
shared. Things began to spiral out of control. Impostors pirated
my call sign and made numerous posts on DX Summit revealing more of
our plans. I had to ask DX Summit to block the use of my call sign
after that.
On April 23, just a week before our departure to Beijing and then
into Pyongyang, our Emissary traveled to Pyongyang to make final
arrangements and obtain our visas. On April 24, our
Emissary alerted us that all of the visas were approved with a
couple notable exceptions, myself included.
I will never know why my DPRK visa request was refused. I had been
to the DPRK on two previous visits and everything was quite
positive. It is possible that my pirated call-sign on DX Summit was
seen by the DPRK authorities who may have viewed it as a violation
of their trust and me not keeping quiet. But i feel I know where
the real blame lies.
As I was one of the team members bringing a significant amount of
equipment to Beijing with me as well as providing a major portion of
the upfront funding from my own personal savings, this proved to be
an insurmountable problem. I could not devote a sizable chunk of my
life savings for a project that I could no longer participate in.
And since we received absolutely no financial support from the DX
foundations we courted for funding despite our desperate pleas for
assistance, we decided we had no choice but to cancel the P5DX
DXpedition. We waited another 24 hours hoping for a miracle that
would never come before finally sending word to Pyongyang to ask our
Emissary to inform the DPRK officials of our decision to terminate
the project.
At this time, we have a significant amount of equipment waiting for
us in Beijing that we shipped a few weeks ago and that would consume
another several thousand dollars to ship back. We all have
full-fare non-refundable flights that we have to cancel at
considerable expense. The financial losses suffered by Intrepid DX
and all of our team members are substantial.
I can’t help but feel a tremendous sense of frustration that someone
felt the need to betray our request for confidentiality by blabbing
about our plans to others, and by those who published these rumors
despite being told this would be counterproductive. I am also
certain that if some of the large foundations that we had approached
had funded our grant request, the remaining team members who already
had visas cleared would have been able to continue on to the DPRK
and conduct a successful CW/SSB/RTTY activation.
Let me reiterate. We had permission. We had a team. We had all
necessary equipment staged in Beijing. We had a venue in North
Korea. We had flights and hotels to China and the DPRK confirmed.
What we did not have was the support of those we asked to remain
quiet, nor the support of anyone we asked for help with funding.
This could have been a DXpedition for the record books.
But now we will never know.
What do you think?
Paul N6PSE
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