I became a member of the DX Century Club or DXCC!
This is an amateur radio award earned by making a distant contact (called DX), with 100 or more geographic entities (“countries”) around the world.
The difficulty is not in making contacts with 100 or more entities, the difficulty is more in getting them confirmed! I must have spoken with people from around 230 countries in the world, just most of them never confirmed the contact.
How can a contact be confirmed, I hear you say?! 😉 The American Radio Amateur organization (ARRL) has a nicely set up system for confirming contacts called Logbook Of The World (LotW). The LoTW QSL is purely electronic; there is no paper confirmation.
If you want to participate in this you need to send the ARRL a copy of your license certificate, plus a copy of passport or driving license. When / if they confirm your subscription you will be allowed to send your log records to them.
Log records in the LoTW database are automatically compared so that when a contact is claimed by both amateurs a confirmation is given for the DXCC award (or other awards).
The matching process is blind; none of the two stations can see pending confirmations for him before he uploads a matching record.
So today I finally got the 100th entity confirmed! It was a contact I made with Sardinia in Februari 2013 (!) Sardinia is seen as a separate entity. I guess the person didn’t get to sending in his log until now, but I’m grateful he did! 🙂
The award is nothing more than a nice paper to hang on the wall but it means something to me none the less, so I’m happy about it.
Now it’s up to the next award!