[Today’s run: 2.0 miles with wife and dog]<\/p>\n
I’m getting pretty close to DXCC on LoTW.<\/p>\n
I thought you would like to know that.<\/p>\n
DXCC means: 100 confirmed countries (DX: other ham radio stations in other countries, CC: Century Club). There are about 300 “countries” on the list. A lot of them are not really separate countries. They might be islands or protectorates or territories, whatever. Guam is not a country, it is a territory of the US, but it is a country in the DXCC world.<\/p>\n
The idea of what is a “country” actually is kind of complicated and evolved over time.\u00a0 The official DXCC rules call them “entities”. You can read the rules and the history of the DXCC at http:\/\/www.arrl.org\/dxcc.<\/p>\n
LoTW means: Logbook of The World.<\/p>\n
Some of my earliest postings on this blog included QSL cards, postcards which hams send to each other sometimes as a confirmation that contact was made.\u00a0 Back when radio was a tenuous thing, it was probably a neverending surprise when a real contact actually happened.\u00a0 And it might not last long enough to exchange all of the information of interest, like what kind of equipment was being used.\u00a0 So they would “confirm” the contact with a post card.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not surprising that they then collected the postcards and used them as “proof” that the contact happened.\u00a0 Otherwise, I guess you would have to have both hams present to testify that it actually happened.<\/p>\n
The rarer or more difficult the contact was, the more important that postcard was.<\/p>\n
People would work hard to get that guy in Botswanna to send back a postcard.\u00a0 You might have to send him a couple of “green stamps” to help things along.\u00a0 And the local postal officials in that far away place might get clued in to the idea that letters addressed to a ham radio operator were likely to have cash in them.\u00a0 Maybe some of the cards got “lost” and the money diverted.\u00a0 Complications! \u00a0 When you had the postcards for 100 countries you could take them to a card checker for official OK.<\/p>\n
With the internet coming along there was\u00a0 a desire to save the postage and costs of printing actual cards.\u00a0 After quite a long gestation, the ARRL produced LoTW.<\/p>\n
I upload my contacts to the LoTW system.\u00a0 They have to be encrypted and I have to have a special password proving that I am me (so no one can pretend to have a contact with me by putting in data from “both ends”.)\u00a0 After I put in mine, I hope that the other hams put in theirs.\u00a0 When things match up as to time and frequency and callsigns, then we have a confirmed contact.\u00a0 (I have all of my contacts since 2001 uploaded to\u00a0 LoTW, more than 3000.\u00a0 And I have about 1\/3 matched up as confirmed contacts.)<\/p>\n
I have 97 “countries” confirmed on LoTW so far.\u00a0 I still need to enter my logsheets for September through November in the LoTW system.\u00a0 I know I have at least two unconfirmed countries in that pile (China and S. Korea are two that I remember).\u00a0 If I get three more confirmed I can apply for a DXCC plaque if I want to.<\/p>\n
I think I have postcards from two or three countries that I don’t have in LoTW.\u00a0 Not all hams in the world use LoTW.\u00a0 (Some of them really like green stamps!)\u00a0 There is a procedure for combining card-check with LoTW, but I don’t want to work that hard!<\/p>\n
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[Today’s run: 2.0 miles with wife and dog] I’m getting pretty close to DXCC on LoTW. I thought you would like to know that. DXCC means: 100 confirmed countries (DX: other ham radio stations in other countries, CC: Century Club). There are about 300 “countries” on the list. A lot of them are not really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-operating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1872,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions\/1872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}