Catching Up with Bob Schenck, N2OO, INDEXA Vice President

While early winter’s chill is beginning to creep into Ohio’s daily forecast, the folks at OnAllBands are still reminded of warmer days this May at the Greene County Fairgrounds and Expo Center in Xenia, where a host of ham radio luminaries were on hand for Dayton Hamvention® 2026. We talked with a long list of amateur radio’s finest, so we still have some interviews to post.

We were fortunate to spend a few minutes with Bob Schenck, N2OO. Inducted into the CQ DX Hall of Fame in 2008, Bob has been logging QSOs since earning his first license more than 60 years ago. N2OO’s decades of reaching hams from around the globe has earned him #1 Honor Roll and 9-Band DXCC.

Among his many other amateur radio accomplishments, Bob’s operating adventures have taken him to some of the rarest entities on the planet, including Desecheo Island, Navassa Island, Wake Island, and Pratas Island. He is widely recognized for his service as a QSL card manager and for his passionate preservation of old logbooks and QSL cards.

As the former president and current vice president of INDEXA (International DX Association), Bob continues to play an integral role in fulfilling the organization’s mission to “promote the future welfare of amateur radio and the DX community.” Since its founding in 1983, this group of volunteers has provided critical funds for hundreds of DXpeditions to rare and semi-rare countries, along with assistance that has helped change lives in some of the world’s most remote locales.

Bob was kind enough to share with us information about INDEXA and a few stories from a life of DXing.

Many people in the amateur radio community know about the important work INDEXA does to support hams and their activations of locations around the world, but there is a humanitarian component to INDEXA’s efforts that some may not be aware of. Could you talk about that?

“It all began with ‘Zorro,’ JH1AJT (Yasuo Miyazawa), who’s a world-famous DXpeditioner from Japan. He has passed away since, but he reached out to us ten years ago. He wanted to make an annual contribution to us of $10,000 for five years—a total of $50,000. But he wanted that money to be used exclusively for humanitarian reasons.

“From that we started a fund within INDEXA called the Hams with Hearts Fund, otherwise known as our Humanitarian Aid Fund. What we do is when the DXpedition applies for funds from us, one of the things we ask is, ‘Are you planning to do a humanitarian project while you’re there?’ Often, one of the rarer countries is in, say, Africa, Asia, or the Pacific Islands. We will give them some extra money to cover a project. It is a high reward but minimal expense.

“So perhaps that might be, say, $500 to bring in—or buy locally, if it’s available—schoolbooks, notebooks, soccer balls, whatever might be appropriate for the local community there.

“In one case, they had a storm and it ruined their emergency equipment on the island. They needed a new laptop, so we gave them a new laptop. Another island, they needed a 3D printer, an expensive one, so that they could make things and not have to wait six months for it to be delivered to the island. Those are the kinds of things that we do—we will give them a little extra funding to cover that part of the project.

“As a matter of fact, while we generally only contribute to the top 60 on the DXCC Most Wanted List, we will go to 100 if there’s a humanitarian project involved. We don’t usually provide a large grant for the DXpedition itself, but we will offer funding for it if they have a worthy project.”

Learn about the Humanitarian Aid Fund and watch a video about JH1AJT’s role in establishing the fund from INDEXA’s website.

Could you talk about how INDEXA works in terms of funding DXpeditions?

“In general, we take every application and look it over. The executive board looks it over to make sure it fits the criteria that we have set up. Once we make a decision in the executive board, then we’ll pass it on to the directors.

“We all chat about it to make sure if there’s anybody within our group that has a warning flag to put up on this particular group. We discuss it before because we generally try to provide the seed money, which is the hardest money for the DXpedition to get. But that’s risky, so we have to vet them the best we possibly can.

“The other thing we do that’s important to note is that we have a Next Generation Fund for youth. If the expedition has someone under the age of 35, we will try to give them extra consideration.”

Could you tell us about your beginnings in amateur radio and your first DXpedition?

“I started when I was 14 years old, 1965, and got interested in contesting in the beginning because I got my license during the Novice Roundup.

“I was on CW and it came easy to me. Then I started chasing DX. By the end of 1979 I decided I wanted to go on a DXpedition, and I hooked up with some people who were planning a trip to Spratly in 1979. At first, I was just helping them organize it. And then at the end I said, ‘You mind if I go?’ And they said, ‘Sure Bob, come on.’

“So I ended up going. It was myself and Stew, K4SMX (Stewart Woodward); John, KP2A (John Ackley); Bill, K1MM (Bill Poellmitz); Austin, N4WW (Dr. Austin Regal), and Harry, VK2BJL (Harry Meade), who was running it. We all went to Brunei.

“We got on a 35-foot ferro-cement ketch that we contracted—that was the Banyandah, which was, back in the 70s, a fairly famous yacht to take. We sailed out to the island that we expected to be uninhabited, and when we got there it was inhabited. And they fired four mortar rounds at us. It turned out they were Vietnamese. They missed us, and we did a U-turn. We were only less than a mile off the shore. The captain thought maybe they were Filipino fishermen, but they weren’t. We went back to Brunei. So that was my first expedition—I got shot at.

“I stayed in Brunei (on the island of Borneo) and three of the team continued; they found another island to operate from. We maintained communication with them from Brunei, and I operated from Brunei and made 10,000 contacts.”

Anything else you remember about the DXpedition?

“The people of Brunei were just as friendly as could be, and welcoming and willing to do almost anything for you. That left me knowing that even in some of the harshest political divides that are out there, you can still find that the local people are just wonderful people. And that’s what I learned through my ham radio adventures from those places that are different than what we have here.

“I’ve become very good friends with people in Borneo who have had connections with the local population. I actually went there on my honeymoon, and they took my new bride, who’s also a ham, KF2BQ, to a local kampong school and had her teach a class, briefly, and she still talks about it because it was not the kind of school that you would see here.

“One of the things that I love about ham radio, probably you could put it in my top three, is that it opens up people’s eyes to the largeness of the world.”

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