Topband: 160 meter QSL card checking

[Tim Shoppa]

The CQ Magazine DX Marathon judge seems to have some superb smarts as to
what validates a plausible contact. I know for sure he caught it when due
to a typo of mine, I busted a callsign from a perfectly common entity (G =
England) on my 80M DX Marathon application and he even knew the correct
callsign that I had worked.

In addition I strongly suspect that for top-of-category in DX Marathon that
he does further cross-checks especially when public logs are available for
search (the case for most DXpeditions but not the case for random hams). I
suspect he has some automation to help him with these checks but he's a
super smart guy who is very familiar with both common and rare callsigns
from all over the world. In fact the DX Marathon website lists some
"commonly busted callsigns" and "known pirate callsigns" with specific
dates and times and this is updated throughout the year - an immensely
valuable resource for any DX'er.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect DXCC Card Checkers to apply this
level of experience, smarts, cross-checks, or scrutiny to cards they are
checking. It requires experience and access to diverse resources (many
online that I know about but undoubtedly some offline and maybe paper
especially for anything more than a couple years old). It would be nice if
someone from HQ could help out with the scrutiny.

Tim N3QE

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 12:44 PM Richard (Rick) Karlquist <
richard at karlquist.com> wrote:

>
> I attained 160 meter DXCC around 5 years ago.
> I don't feel that it qualifies me to check
> QSL's.  Even though I did it from the west
> coast :-)  I can see where say 25 years ago,
> 160 meter DXCC really meant something.  Now
> that we have entered the FT8 era, digital
> DXCC has become far easier, and falls into the
> category of "that and $5 will get you a latte"
> as the saying goes.
>
> Clearly, it is time to retire this anachronism.
>
> Rick N6RK
>
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