Easy DX, Difficult DX

Quoting DX University, "There are three primary population centers in the world, Europe, the USA/NA and Japan/Asia. Of these three centers, at least one will be the most difficult from almost all DXpedition destinations". This is, of course, true, but where exactly are the areas difficult for each of these centers?

To find this out, I collected the QSO by Band statistics for 486 DXpeditions from ClubLog and OH2BU Mega DXpeditions spreadsheet, and plotted the data on the map. In Fig. 1 below, every DXPedition is represented with a circle, and the color of the circle corresponds to the continent that had the highest number of QSO with that DXpedition. I used red for Asia, green for North America, and blue for Europe.


Click to enlarge 		Fig.1. The continent with the highest number of QSO.

AS is red, NA is green, EU is blue

The blue color dominates this map. Europeans have the highest QSO counts with the DXpeditions in the Atlantic, Indian and Antarctic oceans, in South America, Africa, Europe and Central Asia. This is probably because Europe has the highest number of Hams, more than NA and AS have together. To correct for this, I have created another map, with QSO counts scaled by the size of the Ham population of each continent. According to Michael's G7VJR research, 51% of Hams live in EU, 31% in NA, and 12% in AS. Here is the corrected map:


Click to enlarge 		Fig.2. The continent with the highest QSO per Ham

This map shows which continent has the highest number of QSO per Ham. Now the World is split much more evenly between EU, AS and NA, but even on this map NA has a fairly small area of domination, limited to Central America and East Pacific. We need better antennas to compete with EU and AS!

The map on Fig.2 shows where our easy DX is. A similar map on Fig.3 shows the difficult DX as it plots the continent with the lowest number of QSO per Ham. The color codes are the same as on the previous maps.


Click to enlarge 		Fig.3. The continent with the lowest QSO per Ham

Asia has difficulties working the Atlantic DX, Europe's weak area is Pacific, and NA has problems everywhere, including Alaska on their own continent! Something to think about.

For those who want to play with the data, here is a list of all DXpeditions used in the analysis, with their QSO counts: DxpedCounts.lst. You can open this file in Notepad, or view it in DX Atlas on the map using the File / Load / Island List menu command.

Please email your comments to .

73 Alex VE3NEA