Tom EI4DQ completes an 11 band DXCC!

Congrats to Tom EI4DQ who recently achieved an 11 band DXCC!

While a number of EI stations have 10 band DXCC, Tom is the only one to get the magic 100 countries confirmed on eleven bands.

The key difference of course is that EI4DQ has managed to get DXCC on 144 MHz (2 metres) as well primarily by bouncing signals off the moon.

It's probably no exaggeration to say that it's easier to get an 8 band DXCC from 10m-80m than it is to get DXCC on 2m!

Here is an excerpt of Tom's 11 Band DXCC journey....

On the 21st of August 2019, I finally completed my 11 band DXCC.

I had started my plan of trying to gain the 11 band DXCC goal back in March of 2015, after completing DXCC for the 2 metre and 6 metre bands. I decided it was time to try and get DXCC on the HF bands as well. 

The last time I had operated the HF bands was back around 1998. I installed various antennas for all the hf bands i.e. dipoles, verticals, loops, etc. I decided to start at the bottom i.e. 160mtr band (1.8 MHz), and work my way up to 10mtr (28 MHz).

My first 160mtr antenna was a single wire inverted L. It worked ok but I had lots of issues feeding it at the base as it had a very low impedance. I always had to use some type of tuner at the base to feed it and make it work. 

I then made a folded Marconi L antenna out of 450 ohm open wire feeder, i.e. 4x impedance transformation. Wow what a difference! 

Direct 50 ohm feed, no tuner, 1:1 vswr, and hearing and working DX much better. I also had about 60 radials down of various lengths.

I started to listen to all the 160mtr contests picking off needed DXCC both on cw and ssb and then on FT8. I also started monitoring the Reverse Beacon Network, and the DXsummet DX cluster  for any new DXCC countries that were about. I was about to install a separate receive antenna for 160mts in late 2017, but when I purchased a ICOM IC7610, its noise reducing capabilities and receive were so good that I did not need any receive antenna. I completed DXCC on 160mtr in late February of 2019. 

80mtr / 40mtr / and 30mtr DXCC were all completed by March of 2019. 20mtr and 17mtr were completed by April of 2019. 15mts was completed in June of 2019 and 10mtr was completed in July of 2019. 

All contacts were confirmed via Logbook of the World (LOTW). I could have used some of my QSL cards from previous activity in the 1970's to 1990's period when I was very active on the HF bands but chose not to do so. I also tended to only pick out stations who were in the LOTW program.

The last band 12mtr (24 MHz) was completed in August of 2019. This band was the most frustrating band to work DX! It was a pain to hear DX on 15mtr and 10mtr and sweet nothing on 12mtr. It took me 2 months just to dig out the last needed DCXX to make 100 on this band. My final total on this band was 112 DXCC but only 100 of them uploaded to LOTW. 

So at last on the 21st of August 2019, the 11 band DXCC was completed. All together it took me just over 4 years to complete the needed HF DXCC.

All my antennas are homebrew vertical dipoles, loops or verticals, modes used cw / ssb / ft8.

Now its back to 6mtr, 4mtr and 2mtr! ... Tom, EI4DQ