Craig Edwards was born in South Australia in 1972 and gain his Foundation Licence in 2008 and upgraded to the Standard in 2009 and then Advanced in 2012. He is married and is about to build a house where he and his wife will settle down and build a small antenna farm on 2.5 acres in the countryside of VK5. Craig is the Oceania Checkpoint for IOTA (https://iota-world.org/) and the webmaster for the Island Radio Expedition Foundation IREF (https://irefradio.com/).
Craig’s passion is activating islands around Australia for the Islands on the Air IOTA program. This involves mega pile-ups, incredible propagation, exhilarating adventures, breathtaking scenery, fatigue, sunburn, stings, bites and bloodshed. Unfortunately, Australia has a reputation for many creatures that can kill you. The more remote you go, the likelihood of encountering deadly creatures seems to increase. The spiders, sand flies, fire ants, Irukandji stingers, jellyfish and sharks are an ever-present threat. The two things that concern him the most are poisonous snakes and crocodiles, these reptiles seem to constantly be a risk factor in the remote one-man DXpeditions that he conducts.
Craig conducted his first IOTA DXpedition in 2010 and by the end of 2018 will have done 22 IOTA activations. Activations have been VK4LDX/P OC-172, OC-171 and OC-138 in 2010 and 2011. He then upgraded to the Advanced licence meaning 400W instead of 100W and in 2012 he did VK8BI OC-185 followed by 2013 with VK5CE/P OC-261 and VK5CE/4 OC-255. A highlight in 2014 was doing VK5CE/8 OC-173 and the last NEW IOTA left in VK, VK6ISL OC-294NEW. 2015 brought VK5CE/P OC-220 and he was a member of the S79C AF-119 NEW team. 2016 was a busy year with another NEW IOTA to ZL9A OC-286NEW and then VK5CE/6 OC-243 and VK5CE/P OC-228.
Last year was Craig’s biggest commitment to IOTA by activating VK5CE/3 OC-196, VK5CE/7 OC-233, VK5CE/P OC-228, VK5CE/8 OC-198 and VK9AR OC-216. In 2018 Craig will be conducting a VK6 IOTA tour as VK5CE/6 in June 2018 to OC-140, OC-170, OC-193 and OC-199. Craig loves the adventure of island DXpeditioning and receives great joy when giving people new islands. All stories about Craig’s IOTA DXpeditions are available at https://vkiota.wordpress.com/.