We all like a bit of statistics in amateur radio. QSO’s, stations worked, countries worked, regions, zones, continents, prefixes, you name it, someone is keeping a list for it. For me, the CQ DX Marathon kind of covers the major things i want to know about myself and my station and what its achieved in the calender year.
Thankfully my logbook keeps track of all manner of information for me, I know i have worked 77 DXCC entities this year, yes, 77, the log has an error in it and i need to fix a VK0 into a VK1 and 25 zones. I have a fairly even split between Phone and CW and most of my contacts come from the 15m band, with a bit of 40m and 10m thrown in for good measure.
In all, this is not a bad result, I have 1 antenna, a 40m coil loaded shortened dipole that is 6m off the ground. Hardly a DX machine antenna, its actually pretty gimped, and I also run low power, 10w as per my licence restrictions. When you take those factors into account, and living in VK, this is a very good result indeed.
As for grand totals, my logs says I have worked a total of 96 DXCC, this should be 98, there are 2 log entries missing from there, but i cannot work out which ones. Of these I have 58 confirmed on Log Book of the World, a few others on eQSL and one or 2 more on ClubLog. Good enough for WIA F-Call of the year, perhaps. But i do not do this for the recognition, i do it to have some data to compare against. Last year in the CQ DX Marathon i worked 57 countries and 22 zones, in 4 months, Sept-Dec. So i have improved on that score, but used the whole 12 months. All in all, stats can be fun, can be interesting, and putting in a log for CQ DQ Marathon is a good way of keeping track of how you do. If only more people would send in their logs.
