Ham contacts in Cuba or North Korea? ...

[speedmaster]

I just got my General license and no HF radio yet, so no practical experience with HF/DXing.

I've been wondering, are there amateur contacts to be made in places like North Korea and Cuba? I would imagine that even if people there could scare-up the hardware, the govt. would frown-on their radio activity (that of course could be an understatement).

Or what about amateur radio contacts in the USSR before say 1990?

What about amateur radio contacts in some of the more repressive countries in Africa?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[W2IBC]

Cuba you find all over HF

N. Korea you prob have better odds of talking to space aliens then talking to someone in NK

 

[K9WG]

Yep, lot of Cuba. Eastern Europe quite active. Not like the "good ole days" of BOX 88 Moscow....

 

[scannerboy01]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

I've heard that there have been attempts to have a DXpedition to North Korea, but I'm not sure if they were successful. There is a shortwave broadcasting station in North Korea, but the only thing you could do is ask for a QSL card if you happen to listen to then on shortwave.

 

[K9WG]

This is a little dated but here is an ARRL bulletin from 2002

ARRL Letter

==>NORTH KOREA ASKS P5/4L4FN TO QRT

The only Amateur Radio station active from North Korea has been ordered
off the air. Ed Giorgadze, 4L4FN, had been operating for the past year as
P5/4L4FN from Pyongyang. The ARRL subsequently accredited SSB and RTTY
operation of P5/4L4FN for DXCC.

"This really hits the ham community hard," QSL manager Bruce Paige, KK5DO,
said in a news release. "I, for one, was looking forward to a satellite
contact on AO-40. I know that many of you were still awaiting your first
QSO."

Paige said that on Friday, November 22, Giorgadze was called into a
meeting with the "Radio Regulation Board" without any explanation, and he
was politely asked to quit all transmissions and pack all his radio
equipment. "Saturday, he spent all day on the roof disassembling his
antennas and packing boxes." Paige said North Korean government officials
later came by and sealed all of the boxes. When Giorgadze leaves North
Korea on December 10 for two weeks of vacation, "he is to take everything
with him out of the country," Paige indicated.

 

[speedmaster]

Fantastic thread, thanks, guys.