An American Take...

N0UN runs a regularly-updated and often very interesting blog. 

The other Day, N0UN, who is an avid DX-chaser with a station to match, issued his latest post.

In this, he dwells on the 'instant gratification' that DX chasers now expect, the role of the DX cluster, and the need to build a big station with lots of power over DECADES, to use his emphasis.  It's an interesting post.

Now, with the greatest of respect to my north American and, indeed, European colleagues, the desire to build big, expensive, complex and time-consuming stations (that can quickly become your only activity) is an attitude driven by relative wealth.  In other words, it's an attitude born of an affluent consumer society.

Now, I have no bones to pick with N0UN, other than the overall impression of 'one must have a big station built up over decades' to achieve anything notable in terms of DX is simply misguided.  That, and a fundamental clash over the use of kW-range output.

First of all, whilst N0UN's post is about pile ups and DXpeditions, not everyone gains excitement from shouting down a microphone, figuring out the current split RX frequency, and doing it for hours, perhaps days, to get a QSO logged.  Many do, but I certainly find myself tuning away from pile ups pretty much as soon as I realise there's one there. 

No, it isn't resignation to not getting the DX.  Whilst I put no store at all in it, my current confirmed DXCC is 146, with an as-yet unconfirmed 206 total.  Much of that has been achieved with a delta loop.  No, my approach is simply a realisation that, over time, my turn at that rare DX will come without the need for joining a baying crowd of people who haven't stopped to think 'why am I doing this?'  I will catch someone some other day, when I least expect it.  Indeed, if I pick a quiet day and call DX, someone very far away will probably call me!

And there is the point: not being heard in a pile up does not equate to an underlying inability to be heard.  


The other overall impression that someone might get from reading N0UN's latest missive is that big stations, big power and a whole lifetime are necessary factors to enjoy good DX and build up a score, either under your own or someone else's programme.

I wholly disagree.  This kind of thinking also damages the hobby.

Why?

Because, if you insist on formal contesting, there is ample reward for working the world (and off it!) using 5W or less - entering the QRP categories.  If you want to compete with yourself, simply to find out 'how far can it go?', then you need only a ground plane antenna on a beach and similar low powers - more if you want - to work any DX location you like.

Sure, operating relatively cheap, simple stations like this does demand more patience, time and good operating, as well as informed location and time of operation selection.  It invariably won't get you the kind of instant pile-up busting response of which N0UN has many recorded examples upon his blog.  But those foregoing factors are all interesting aspects of the hobby.  In many cases, you'll find they are aspects the consumerist DXer will have ignored over those decades.

Let's not portray ham radio, as it already so often is, as a hobby only for the retired rich in the west.  This is symptomatic of almost every hobby I can think of.  Amateur astronomy, for example, portrays itself in the hobby magazines as something that demands £10,000 before you can begin.  But then, magazines would, wouldn't they, because they owe their very existence to advertising for those very same, very expensive products.  Ham radio is exactly the same.  Consumers in the west are just sheep dancing to some salesman's vision of nirvana.

Nirvana, of course, is for those who attain it through the calmness and wisdom that rejects temptation and egotism.

What I came to the conclusion was that, whilst N0UN was bemoaning the instant DX gratification expected nowadays, brought about by the internet, it seems he might have been pursuing that very same gratification in a different way - through the deployment of a big station! 

One might suspect that the argument arising there is that you can only join the big guns if you are affluent.  And so we seem to have come full circle...