New QRP Personal Best: E51DWC (South Cook Islands)

I have been working E51DWC (op Milan, OK1DWC) on several bands (10/15/17 CW, and 15 Phone) at 100 watts. I finally heard him calling CQ on 12m phone just past midnight UTC with few takers. Could I have been at the right place at the right time for a change?

Since South Cook Islands is one that I need on 12m, and since everyone knows QRP phone doesn't work when the DX is buried in the noise, I bumped the K3 output power to 100 watts and called about a dozen times. But no love, he was weak and the QSB was pretty bad, so I decided that this wasn't going to happen.

I reset the K3 to 5 watts... and just as I took my fingers off the Power control and was about to switch bands his signal peaked at around S5. I grabbed my Mike, dropped my call after his CQ, and he came back right away with a "Whiskey Whiskey Two, Whisky Whisky Two?" I repeated my call, he returned with a 59 (yeah, sure...), we exchanged signal reports, and in the log he went! At 5 watts. On a "dead" band.

As with all our prior QSOs, Milan uploaded to ClubLog very quickly so I have proof I wasn't imagining it all.

According to Google maps, Rarotonga is a bit over 6,175 miles from Cedar Key, or 1,235 miles per watt. This crushes my previous personal best QRP DX record, TX6G Austral Is. from West, TX (5,093 miles, 1,018 miles per watt) by about 25%.

I'm starting to wonder whether I really need that KPA500 after all.

VOACAP shows that I was indeed at the right place at the right time -- 12m is strong to E51 in our (local) late afternoons and early evenings; my 10m contact with E51DWC was at around 2100 UTC, which fits this model as well. Good to know.

March 2017 and into April... plus some thoughts on QSLing.

So March was pretty good to me. Getting the antenna outside was a big help, naturally. Working 47 countries with an indoor wire was something of a miracle, but they were easy countries - lots of Caribbean and Euro DX, mostly in the CW contest, but nothing I would consider exotic, much less new. Moving the wire out of doors and just outside my window I only added another 35 countries, but that included four ATNOs: VP6EU on Pitcairn, J5UAP in Guinea-Bissau, 5U5R in Niger, and TU7C in Cote d'Ivoire (that's "Ivory Coast" in 'Murican). I was still getting a lot of noise, possibly because of the short (approx. 10 ft.) coax run and close proximity to power lines in the front of the house, so this past Sunday I relocated the antenna to the back of the house, noticeably improving the noise situation.

So we'll see how this works. Bands took a dive for a few days but are coming back following a major solar event on 01/02-April. As of today (04-April), my DXCC count is 226 worked, with 210 confirmed (more on this later), and the DXCC Challenge total on LOTW is 774. My 80m DXCC count took a big jump from single digits to 29 confirmed, and I'm within spitting distance of 100 on 30, 17, 12 and 10.

And while I'm on the subject of confirmations... I've had a bit of a shift in my opinion on the whole concept of "countries confirmed." For the couple of decades as a radio amateur I held the belief that a QSO only "counts" when you have a card in your hand. This made sense at the time because that was the only way of knowing whether the DX didn't blow your call (or vice versa). Then along came Logbook of the World; now we had a second "official" metric for determining whether you had a DXCC entity confirmed. All well and good. At this time these are the only two methods acceptable to the ARRL to qualify for their awards, and since it is their award they get to make the rules. But while you can have a card in hand or an LOTW confirmation in your account, even then it doesn't officially "count" until you pay the ARRL a fee. This is where I call BS.

The fact is, I know that I worked a station if, 1.) The contact is in my log; and 2.) I have a card or an LOTW confirmation. If I decide not to pay the ARRL to get the credit applied to my DXCC account, does that mean I don't have a confirmed contact? Of course not. It only means that I can't use that contact for an award that, for the most part, is meaningless to me. I reject the notion that I need to pay the League (or anyone else) in order to have my achievement validated.

Then comes the matter of other, alternate methods of confirmation. We have several online resources -- eQSL.cc, ClubLog, HRDLog.net, QRZ, and all the online logs of individual stations and DXpeditions -- that can be used to match one's log entries with those of a DX station. These don't count for the ARRL's DXCC award, of course, but if ClubLog, for example, shows a QSO match between my log and the DX station's log, that's all the confirmation I need to know that the QSO was good. Whether or not the ARRL accepts it as a "real" confirmation is irrelevant unless I want their fancy piece of paper to hang on the wall.

At this moment in time, I actually have that fancy piece of paper hanging on my wall. It's there only because I long dreamed of earning DXCC since I was a kid. It took me many years of intermittent operation to achieve it, but sometime in 2013 I finally got 100 entities confirmed on LOTW, I entered my credit card info on the ARRL web site to pay for the 100 credits needed to get the DXCC Mixed award. A few weeks later I received my cardboard tube in the mail, dutifully put the certificate in a nice big frame and hung it on the wall of my shack where it remains to impress all who enter. Meaning, of course, only myself.

Since getting my DXCC Mixed award I have received more LOTW confirmations (a lot more, in fact) and many more paper cards, but I have never paid to apply these credits to my account. I currently have 210 countries "confirmed" to my satisfaction through one or more of the methods listed above. However, even though I can easily qualify for several additional DXCC awards and endorsements for individual modes and bands, according to the ARRL I only have 100 countries confirmed because that's all I paid them for. So who do I believe, the ARRL or my own very meticulous records? Thanks, but my own word is good enough for me. I'll keep the $125 or so bucks and pass on the wallpaper for now.

So while I used to believe "it only counts if you have the card," technology today allows me to revise that opinion to mean "it only counts if you can prove you're in the other station's log." Because, when you boil it all down, that's really all the card did in the first place. Thankfully, we can do that now through several different online systems with far less expense and delay. If someone thinks a QSL doesn't count because I didn't pay the League, tough cookies. I just don't care.

Does this mean I'll never apply for additional DXCC credits again? No... I really want a 5-Band DXCC plaque (also a childhood dream), and the DXCC Challenge appeals to me as well, so when either or both of those requirements are met I'll most likely pony up the dough for those awards, and also catch up with all the other awards and endorsements I qualify for at the same time while I'm at it. But for now if someone asks me how many countries I have confirmed, my answer will be "210," regardless of what anyone else thinks. Because it's true.