Adventures in Ham Radio

[Rastus]

I've had them hit several years afterwards.  And...I accidently had the wrong time in one contact.  I corrected the time and after it uploaded the contact was confirmed.

[alfsauve]

Forgot to attach the picture. sorry. 

With over 4,500 contacts I've got an 80% confirmation rate.  Some of the missing are bad uploads with wrong data, but probably less than 1%.

[Rastus]

Impressive.

Does the confirmation rate vary by mode?

[alfsauve]

I have no idea since I've never had an HF phone or CW contact in over 10 years much less have logged them.  In fact I can tell you my last two SSB contacts. Around 20 years abo, both mobile and not planned, believe it or not.  Discechio (sp) Island and Pitcairn Island.  Both DXpeditions.  Never bothered to even QSL.    Shows how excited I get over DXpeditions.

So I don't have access to any data.  I'd love for the ARRL to give me a week of read-only query privileges.  It'd be fun to crunch the data for trends.  My guess is the confirmation rate for CW and Phone is much lower since it requires some manual entry.  I suspect Award hunters do it religiously but the vast majority of rag chewers and net'ers probably don't unless asked.  My observation on much of HF phone and CW, as well as local VHF/UHF is that it's all very cliquish.  Don't get me started on the U/V satellite FM transponder traffic.  I gave up after a couple of attempts because it was the same two hams hogging every southeastern pass.    Us digital dudes don't want to socialize.  We just want to rack up the contacts and sometimes the awards.

[Rastus]

Pitcairn.  Quite a history there.

[Sponsor]

[alfsauve]

Not being a real big DXer.  Actually not even a regular one,  I had no idea there is a DXpedition to Desecheco Island this month.  Going on right now.  I've heard a couple of times but not strong enough to work.

The home web page is:  https://desecheo2026.com/kp5/
Nice links about the island and the effort to leave zero footprint (I bet the back out their poop and pee).

But for up-to-the-minute information.  Like when they take breaks to recharge batteries.  You have to go to the facebook group.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61585525894897

or search for:  Desecheo 2026 Dxpedition
 
Somewhat unrelated but I finally figured out how in Grid Tracker to get it to notify me of certain events.   Any time it decodes, W1AW (for the 250th USA award) or KP5/NP3VI (Desecheo) then it announces the call sign over my speakers.  Helps a lot as I multitask at the desk while only occasionally glancing at the radio screen.