Conducted by Bob W1RH
To have your favorite QSL card featured in the Nugget, just email Bob W1RH an electronic copy or trust him with a hard copy and he will scan it and return it to you in the same condition he received it.
Dick, K1RAW, submitted this card for an article I did in the Framingham Circuit newsletter, back when I lived in W1 land. P5, North Korea, is the rarest of the rare. Very few DX’ers have worked North Korea, and that includes me.
Dick worked P5RS7 on Christmas Day, December 25, 1992, on 20-meter sideband. What a holiday gift! This was the first operation from the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. The leader of the DXpedition was Romeo Stepanenko, 3W3RR. The operators were all from the former Soviet republics. The story does not end here, however, read on…..
Romeo has activated several very rare DXCC countries including Myanmar, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Libya. At the time I wrote this article, he lived in Moscow and was rumored to be an arms dealer. As a result, he has many contacts in some of the countries where it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get an amateur radio license. Many Hams have some of Romeo’s treasured QSL’s. 35,000 Hams worked P5RS7.
[2026 edit: It’s been a while since I read anything about 3W3RR, and there is plenty on the internet about Romeo.
If you input that call sign into QRZ, it comes back as it comes back as:
9Q9RR
Roman ‘Romeo’ Vega
Jungle Location W/o Street Address
Mbuji Mayi
Congo, Dem. Republic of
If you input 3W3RR into QRZCQ, it comes back as Romeo Vega Stepanenko, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
If anyone knows which one is correct, let us know!]
Romeo’s P5 North Korea DXpedition, however, was disqualified from DXCC status, in 1996, when the ARRL Awards Committee discovered that Romeo faked the necessary documentation proving he had North Korean authorization to operate in that country. The documentation included the requirement to submit originals of all available documents, licenses, passports, photographs, and even video shots of the location. North Korean military authorities supposedly issued a license. According to Romeo, when asked about getting permission to operate, “Is very long story. I made the submission four years long. I talked with around 200 guys in Northern Korea, in Russia and everywhere and I keep all those guys together, all the information together and I pay some money.” The location of the pictures he submitted of his operation was found not to be in North Korea. Instead, the operation was in Siberia, just across the border from North Korea. It was rumored that the location was verified by Japanese stations using direction finding equipment. The result? Romeo has been banned, forever, from participating in the ARRL’s DXCC program in any way and Dick’s treasured P5 card, along with the P5RS7 cards in the hands of thousands of other amateurs, is worthless.
North Korea continues to ban amateur radio activity with the exception of some small demonstration DXpeditions that have been approved by the ARRL. Dick, thanks for the card and good luck working a real P5.
[2026 edit #2: A note about Dick, K1RAW. I hold the 10-10 number, 6222, although I have not given it out in years. Dick, now a silent key, held the 10-10 number of #1. That’s right, Dick was numero-uno. I did some tower work for Dick, and often saw him at radio club meetings. Great guy EXCEPT that he refused to give out the number. I begged him to have a 10-10 exchange, as did others, and the answer was always, something like, “I’m done with 10-10”. I never could get Dick to tell me why he was so down on the 10-10 program]
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