On 8/4/2013 1:23 PM, Larry Loen wrote:
Many operating awards are, realistically, life time achievements and are meant
to be.
That's certainly true of DXCC and IOTA, where 10-15% of all entities are
on the air for a week or so every 10-20 years (more like 40% for the
IOTAS!). I'm chasing CQ Fields, and you can only work about 170 of them
with land-based stations. You've got to get the rest with /MMs and some
IOTAs, and about 70 of them are in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. .
A lot of us do_not_ move voluntarily. We move to where the work is. I
had 185 zones in Minnesota and then I ended up having to leave for "the
next job" and ended up in Arizona.
Of course. So why we get to keep your credits when we move nearly 2,000
miles, while a ham who has to move only 200 miles from Detroit to
Toronto loses his?
185 zones took me 20 years.
I don't know how you're counting your zones, but since moving to CA in
2006, I have 224 confirmed zones on 160, 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10, and
another 108 on 30/17/12. I'm missing 10 zones on 160, 3 on 80, 1 on 40,
and 2 on 10. I've never done anything special to chase them other than
working contests and randomly chasing DX. :)
I'm very happy not to start over (and the remaining zones are mostly harder
from here anyway than before).
I'm not so sure that zones are harder from Zone 3, but maybe. The thing
about WAZ that makes it a bit more fair than some awards is that they
take ham population density into account when drawing the zone
boundaries. So a zone with relatively low ham population density
includes a lot more area. But I can say for certain that DXCC is a LOT
harder from out here, and there's a recent piece in QST by a VK ham
talking about how tough it is for them.
73, Jim K9YC
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