I have 19 different contacts with stations in Estonia but none confirmed until today. ES5RW confirmed our 2 contacts via LoTW today with the first contacting being in March 2009 and the 2nd contact being March 2010.  If my count is correct, that is 153 DXCC’s confirmed via LoTW or paper QSL cards.  It appears I have 11 DXCCs logged but not yet confirmed yet with the oddest one being Chile as I have 27 contacts with ops in Chile.

73 & good DX,
K2DSL

Looks like the TX4T DXpedition team that was in the French Polynesia have uploaded their logs and my 15m and 20m contacts with them during the ARRL DX CW contest are now confirmed. Thanks for the 2 contacts and confirming a new DXCC for me. That puts me at 152 confirmed DXCCs.

Maybe there’ll be some new DXCC out there waiting for me this weekend during the ARRL DX SSB contest. I have 2 big commitments this weekend with a competition for 1 of my daughters on Saturday and our club’s ham radio auction on Sunday so I’ll be operating around those. Saturday’s competition with my daughter will probably take somewhere between 8 & 10 hours of time and the ham radio auction probably another 5 or 6 hours.

Happy DXing,
K2DSL

During the CQ WPX RTTY Contest I was able to, for the first time to make contact with an operator in India. It happened to be on 15m.

I had posted about it and received an email direct from Lakshman aka “Lucky” about the contact. We had a very nice email exchange and he indicated the log would be upload to LoTW shortly. We were both glad to know conditions might be improving.

Thanks for the contact “Lucky” and the emails as well. I hope to work you again soon.

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend I received a QSL card direct in the mail for the one I sent back in Oct/Nov for the SSB contact made with the DXPedition.

If I’m counting correctly, I now have 149 DXCCs confirmed out of a total of 164 162 DXCCs logged.

73 & Good DX!
K2DSL

In November’s CQ WW CW contest I worked 9J3A located in the Kalue National Park in Zambia. This was my first contact with Zambia and I sent off for a QSL via S57S in Solvenia with $2 US and today I received the reply QSL. Thanks S53A for the contact as 9J3A and the new DXCC.

73 & Good DX,
K2DSL

Monday was a holiday for some in the US so I was off of work for the day.  I got on the air late in the day and worked ZS2Y in South Africa on 20m RTTY and then on 20m CW Z21BB in Zimbabwe and 5N50K from Nigeria. Z21BB in Zimbabwe was my first contact with that DXCC entity.  After the contact I looked and saw Fernando was a LoTW user and overnight he uploaded his logs and in less then 24 hours I had a new DXCC worked and confirmed.

I had a good copy on all the stations and especially the RTTY contact with ZS2Y was booming in.  Thanks for the contacts from Africa!

73 & good DX,
K2DSL

This past week I received a QSL card via the bureau from HB0/HB9AON from a contact made in the 2008 CQ WW SSB contest for my first QSL for Liechenstein.

Overnight I also received a LoTW QSL for Madagascar for a CQ WW DX CW contact made in November 2009 with 5R8ZO. N5ZO was the operator.

These 2 new DXCCs put me at 145 total confirmed DXCCs.

73,
K2DSL

A very quick turnaround from a QSL card I sent direct to Johan, OY2J, on Faroe Islands. I was tuning around 20m and heard OY2J calling CQ before any pileup started back at the end of November. This is my only contact with a station on Faroe and obviously a new DXCC confirmed for me. The Faroe Islands are located in the center of a triangle between Iceland, the UK and Norway.

Happy Holidays and good DX in 2010!
K2DSL

I’m running the latest v5 of Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) using MS Access as the backend database. I wanted to know what was the earliest QSL confirmation either via a paper QSL or a LoTW QSL for each DXCC. This will help with making sure I keep things as up to date with what is new since my last DXCC application update.

Here’s a snippet of the results.

The only real caveat I see is if other stations re-upload their records to LoTW as LoTW currently treats it as “new” and depending on what you use to update the LoTW QSL date (I use HRD Utilities from WD5EAE), it would show the last update by the other op and not the first. But that is out of our control and LoTW should really prevent that, as well as the other op not doing it in the first place.

I have MS Access 2007 and here’s the SQL to run. I don’t know if it works with older versions of Access.

SELECT t.COL_CALL, t.COL_TIME_ON, t.COL_COUNTRY,
 IIF(t.COL_QSL_RCVD="Y" And COL_QSLRDATE = t3.FirstConfirmation, "Paper", "Electronic") As COL_METHOD,
 t3.FirstConfirmation As COL_QSLDATE
 FROM TABLE_HRD_CONTACTS_V01 t
 INNER JOIN (
 SELECT t1.COL_COUNTRY, MIN(t1.COL_TIME_ON) As FirstContact, MIN(t2.MinDate) As FirstConfirmation
 FROM TABLE_HRD_CONTACTS_V01 t1
 INNER JOIN (
 SELECT COL_COUNTRY, Min(IIf((COL_QSLRDATE<COL_LOTW_QSLRDATE AND COL_QSL_RCVD="Y" And COL_LOTW_QSL_RCVD="Y") Or
COL_LOTW_QSL_RCVD<>"Y", COL_QSLRDATE, COL_LOTW_QSLRDATE)) AS MinDate
 FROM TABLE_HRD_CONTACTS_V01
 WHERE COL_QSL_RCVD="Y" OR COL_LOTW_QSL_RCVD="Y"
 GROUP BY COL_COUNTRY) t2
 ON t1.COL_COUNTRY = t2.COL_COUNTRY AND (t1.COL_QSLRDATE = t2.Mindate OR t1.COL_LOTW_QSLRDATE = t2.Mindate)
 GROUP BY t1.COL_COUNTRY) t3
 ON t.COL_COUNTRY = t3.COL_COUNTRY AND t.COL_TIME_ON = t3.FirstContact
ORDER BY t3.FirstConfirmation DESC;

73,
K2DSL