For non-hams it may be difficult to understand why hams do this, but collecting "countries" (or rather DXCC entities [1]) is a big deal for many radio amateurs.

For non-hams it may be difficult to understand why hams do this, but collecting "countries" (or rather DXCC entities [1]) is a big deal for many radio amateurs. There are currently 340 countries of which ~250 are "easy", which means that there's a local population of at lease some radio amateurs that make it possible to make a contact with them on a regular basis, but after that it gets "tough". So there are many radio amateurs (or rather groups of amateurs) who love to travel and hand out new countries to the deserving. For some countries the difficulty is purely in getting a permission to operate a radio amateur station from there (e.g. North Korea), others are almost impossible to access for reasons of natural protection (e.g. Crozet Island) and yet others are very difficult to get to. Bouvet is the latter, and you need a professional team and a huge budget to achieve this. There are other places that require some "creativity" to activate - like Scarborough Reef [2], and There have been previous attempts, the last two ones (both in the last few years) failed due to problems with the ships. Whoever makes the race to Bouvet (there's currently the Norwegian group linked here, and a Polish group trying to go there) will make many radio amateurs around the world happy, and probably make something in the order of 100k to 150k radio contacts. I can only wish them good luck! [1] http://www.arrl.org/dxcc-rules http://www.arrl.org/dxcc-rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_operating_award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_operating_award [2] https://www.n4gn.com/sr95/sr09.html https://www.n4gn.com/sr95/sr09.html