DX Is

The reason for the title is that working DX (distant stations) is hard to explain but vitally important for those hams that have caught the fever. Some of the attractions of working and being DX are explained here.

DX is any ham outside your own country. It could be a station in the Bahamas just a short distance off the Florida coast or it could be a remote island where a group of hams have to endure hardships to simply get there and bring all their equipment as well as food, etc. to operate. The latter is known as a DXpedition and these range from easy (going to a place where you can use an existing station like I have done) to difficult (large expense involved in transporting people and equipment to a very remote site)

The reason people do it is because it is exciting to operate from a place where people really want to contact you as evidenced by the pile-ups of stations calling the DX and because of the enjoyment of providing a new country to a large number of hams. Working DX is challenging because of the competition with other stations in a pile-up while trying to contact the DX station and because some stations are rarely on the air, making contacting them very difficult.

A website that I have found very useful is DX Summit. It gives near real-time dx reports for all the ham bands as well as other useful info. Just to show how worldwide the web is, it is located in Finland.

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