goes back about a decade.
I was spinning the dial and stopped when I heard a droning voice calling out A3AR...A3AR...A3AR so I stopped and instantly looked up the call. The call itself didn't exist but the prefix said it was a Tongan station.
It sounded to me like some Tongan had a missionary outside sitting in a huge black cast iron pot with a fire under it and was playing with his radio as the missionary was stewing in the pot.
A3AR...A3AR...A3AR....When he took a break I threw out my callsign and he repeated about half of it and I gave him the other half which he repeated, mumbled some vague thing I took as a signal report and went back to his cocoanut juice fired drone, A3AR...A3AR...A3AR.
A few hours later I wondered if the guy had stewed missionary for dinner or if he was going to slow cook him all night so the meat would fall off the bones.
I logged him with a question mark in front of the entry.
I instantly started looking for him on line and found that a few people has worked him and were looking for him also. I searched off and on for years and had no luck until someone told me it might of been a partial callsign of an overseas ham that said he was using ham radio to learn to talk all over again after some kind of medical problem. If so I truly respect that.
Anyway, finding Tonga on the air became something that wasn't beneath the surface too deeply. I kept an eye open for Tongan radio activity. My research found little to no activity among native Tongans.
Over the years there were a couple of vacationers that got a Tongan callsign and worked the island but no luck here. I worked one and sent him for a card only to get it back marked 'not in log'. There were a couple of medium sized DXpeditions but it always seemed they were on the air when I was at work. It was frustrating.
A couple of nights ago I bagged a Tongan DXpedition and managed to work them on 2 different bands. They had an online log and updated it every day at 0001Z, give or take and last night I found I was in the log on two bands so I sent for my card.
It's been a long chase but I finally put Tonga in the log.
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