[TowerTalk] Remote Ham Radio

[Jim Brown]

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