90 and counting

By my latest count, I have 90 DXCC countries. The DXCC list that the ARRL publishes is rather confusing in that some of the sub countries (Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man) are listed with separate entries, but some country's alternate calls (Saudi Arabia's 7Z) are not. I finally figured out how the list is constructed and have 90 countries. I got Isle of Man and Scotland yesterday as 15 was finally open to the north.

It is 0000Z now and not much activity on the bands. 10 m was open to the western Hemisphere last night, but very quiet tonight. 10 and 15 stayed open last night to about 1800 Z and then died out. I was able to get arm-chair copy with many east coast stations and they were rather surprised that I could hear them on 10 as well as I could. Hopefully 10 m will be open like that again. 20 m has been open from about 0300 to about 0600 Z but I have to be at school most mornings so I don't know what happens to it from about 0600 to 1200 Z.

I have two pet peeves. One for stations where both stations have signed with "sk" and they continue to exchange "73 and best wishes". Folks, "sk" means I am done! The other is when I call a station (clearly with the other's callsign 3 times) and someone else jumps right in there calling me. Give the other station at least a fighting chance! My policy now is to just ignore the intruding station and not even call them back later. Maybe if some of these folks get the cold shoulder a few more times, they will be considerate and let me at least try to call the original station. I have started to make a daily list of stations that intrude and just ignore them for the day.

I have shifted to HRD almost exclusively. MixW is a nice program and its macros work very well, but the SuperSweep feature of HRD makes it nice to watch other stations and keep an eye out for new countries. The DX spot system is fun, but many of the DX stations don't appear on the spot until long after they have left the air. The agrivating part of HRD is that the screen freezes on transmit. Maybe I can turn that off, because I would like to make the QRZ.COM log entry while transmitting my station info.