On 8/4/2013 8:30 AM, Jorge Diez - CX6VM wrote:
Hi Jim
"Yep, the best DXCC and contest scores that money can buy!" Are you talking
about the big and expensive contest stations around the world, included in
USA?
Yes, and also those at various DX destinations. There's a really dumb
DXCC rule that you can count QSOs you made from any station using your
callsign within the same DXCC country. That allows someone in the US to
work EU and AF from a QTH in the northern Atlantic states, South America
from a QTH in FL or along the Gulf Coast, and the Pacific Basin from a
QTH anywhere from CA to WA, locations that are more than 2,500 miles
apart! When I moved 2,000 miles from Chicago to near San Francisco, I
started over on all of my awards.
How much cost your station?.
Good question. I haven't "done the sums," but I'd guess less than $30K,
including equipment, towers, tree climbers, and the only antenna I
bought, the small 3-el SteppIR. Except for the Elecraft gear, I bought
everything used (and built the 5B4AGN bandpass filter sets).
This is how much you paid for your DXCC. I
don´t want to think how much cost my station!, this is what I pay for my
DXCC and contest scores!
Is that for the scores, or for the pleasure of having a nice station to
operate, or for the personal satisfaction of having built it? For me,
it's all three.
Everyone "pay" for DXCC, I don´t know anyone that didn´t spend money, even
to build their own radio and antenna, you always need to buy parts,
Yes, but it costs a LOT less when you live around the Atlantic basin,
where it's possible to work DXCC in a weekend contest with 100W and
modest antennas!
so this comment makes little sense.
It does when you put dollar numbers into it. Some of these stations
have cost more than $200K in today's dollars, and I suspect W7RN cost
more than twice that.
where the population is very small, we do wells by hand with a shovel, we
raise the antennas and towers with ropes and manpower, not with bulldozers
and cranes that make the job quite very easy :-)
My friends dug both tower bases by hand, we mixed the concrete with a
small portable mixer that took about ten batches to fill the base. My
neighbor, K6XX, built the tower using ropes and pulleys and did all the
climbing, assisted on the ground by a half dozen or so NCCC members (not
all the same day). I know that K6XX personally designed and built
everything in his station except the rigs, including nearly a dozen
towers. He also cleared the land by hand, which was very densely covered
with nasty brush. Bob is REAL cheap, and scrounges a lot of stuff used.
And he DID build some of the rigs -- he's the primary manufacturing
engineer for Elecraft, and he's also built a lot of control circuitry
and switching.
73, Jim K9YC
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