Maritime operation

Maritime mobile

Amateur radio stations have been installed on ships at sea, both for conventional HF operation and for digital modes such as Winlink. In some countries, a specific block of callsigns is reserved for ocean-going vessels (for instance, VE0 is a Canadian ship at sea).

In contesting, operation from a ship at anchor off the shores of a distant island typically does not qualify a station as being on the island; all or some key part of the station (such as the transmitter or antenna) must be deployed ashore

Islands

While many of the most rare entities in contests such as DXCC tend to be remote or uninhabited islands, there are also a number of specialised awards in which all of the available entities represent individual islands or island groups.

IOTA

Islands On The Air (IOTA) is a DX award programme created 30 years ago by Geoff Watts and administered since 1985 by RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain. Entities to be collected normally represent groups of islands (for instance, EU-005 is Great Britain) in sea or ocean locations. Islands on inland waterways (such as Montréal or the 1000 Islands in the freshwater St. Lawrence Seaway region) do not qualify. IOTA nominally operates worldwide.^[1]

National island awards

While individual national awards may differ from one country to another, common characteristics distinguishing national awards from the IOTA programme include:

• Entities for national awards tend to be individual islands, instead of the island groups used by IOTA. While IOTA's numbering is continent + sequential number (such as NA001 for the first group listed in North America), national awards typically number with a state or province abbreviation + sequential number (such as QC001, Québec - Anticosti) for each island.
• Contacts (QSO's) to two islands in the same IOTA group typically count as two separate entities for national contesting, but as just one entity for the IOTA awards.
• Inland islands (on lakes or freshwater rivers) are not listed and do not qualify for IOTA; national awards will normally allow named islands in both freshwater and saltwater environments.
• IOTA's list of island groups, while worldwide in scope, is a closed list in that one cannot easily request a missing island or group be added; national programs such as CIsA (Canada) or USI (United States) often allow additional islands to be readily qualified upon meeting specific criteria (such as size, number of contacts made, identification by name on local maps)

A few examples include:

Canada

Canadian Islands Award (CIsA) a national island awards program begun in 1973 by Garry V. Hammond VE3GCO and administered by the Maple Leaf Radio Society.^[2]

Italy

Italian Islands Award^[3]

Japan

Japanese IOTA Islands Award (JIAA)^[4] for QSO's with more than 10 Japanese Islands, additional levels awarded for 100, 200, 300 or 400 contacts.

Portugal

Portuguese Islands Plaque (Placa Ilhas Portuguesas)^[5] is awarded by the OESTE DX GANG association for HF contacts to at least 25 radio amateurs on different Portuguese islands

United Kingdom

English Islands Award^[6] currently recognises 408 islands in 21 UK counties; Worked All Britain also offers an Islands Award^[7]

United States

United States Islands awards programme (USi) started in summer of 1994 by John KL7JR to cover saltwater and inland fresh water river or lake islands of the fifty US states and US territories or protectorates (including Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands).^[8] An annual US Islands W/VE QSO Party invites amateurs to make contacts from (or to) the various USI or CIsA islands; both are "open-ended" in that individual islands are added to the US or Canadian lists when a minimum of twenty-five contacts have been made from the island with amateur radio stations in at least two countries.^[9]

Many additional national islands DX award programmes are listed here.

Operating procedures
Operation	Callsigns and ITU prefixes * Codes and Alphabets * Modes * Morse code * Nets * UK licensing * Terminology
DX and Contesting	Awards and Certificates * DXCC * DX cluster * Field day * Gridsquares * Logging * QSL and QSL Bureaus * Records - Distance
Emergencies	Emergency Frequencies * ARES * IRESC * SATERN * Weather spotting
QRP	Trail-Friendly Radio
Utilities	Beacons (/B) and Time Beacons