I applied online via LoTW for the mixed and 20m DXCC awards. It certainly isn’t a very obvious process for someone going through this the first time and I still have some questions, but I took the easier way out by over selecting more contacts then I really needed. I ended up with 160 QSO records selected by selecting all Mixed, RTTY, Phone and 20m contacts in LoTW. In addition, I had 19 QSOs via paper QSL cards checked by our local DXCC card checker. Those 19 QSOs add an additional 17 mixed DXCCs and 14 20m DXCCs if I’m counting right.

The total fee for both the initial application for Mixed and 20m DXCC came to $57.60 which breaks down into $12 for the initial application (and covers the 1st certificate), $33.60 for the individual QSO “credits” plus $12 for the 2nd application certificate.

It’ll be a while before the awards are confirmed and issued. Using http://www.arrl.org/awards/dxcc/appstatus.html as my reference, they are processing applications from mid March with about a 5-6 week turnaround time.  That would put my application approval somewhere between the 8th-19th of June.

The larger number of QSO credits submitted was due to selecting Mixed and 20m (the 2 awards I was applying for) as well as Phone and RTTY since they are getting a bit close to the 100 QSO mark and many that fell into the Mixed/20m QSOs were also RTTY and Phone contacts. Now the part that I’m still not clear on is if I had multiple contacts for a DXCC entity and LoTW auto selects one of the contacts for Mixed (say 40m RTTY) and a different one for 20m (phone), there isn’t always a way to tell (that I can find) LoTW to use the 20m one as the Mixed as well. So if I just selected the 20m QSO, would LoTW and the DXCC process know to also apply that QSO to Mixed? I didn’t know so I just took the easy way out and possibly over applied.

Many thanks to all those extraordinary ops that made a contact with me and just as importantly, confirmed the contacts via LoTW or by returning QSL cards to me.

73,
K2DSL