#antennas — Public Fediverse posts

Are you a DXer?

Ham Radio Outside the Box received this interesting email from DX Marathon Ambassador · Chile, Luis Soto Neira CA6SNT.

If you’ve been on the air working DX this year, you almost certainly already have a 2026 DX Marathon score without knowing it.

I help promote the DX Marathon, and I’m trying to get hams from more countries taking part. Would you join us? It’s free, and there’s no registration anywhere.

Everything happens at entry.dxmarathon.com — nothing needs to be sent to me. You upload an ADIF file from your logging program there. It can be your entire log, all years included: only 2026 QSOs count and including others does no harm, so there’s no need to filter it or sort it by country or zone.

The site then asks two or three questions about power and antenna, and those questions are part of the submission: if you only upload the file and stop there, your entry never arrives. Use the standard category — the Challenge is a separate entry that counts your entities and zones band by band, so leave it aside for now.

No confirmation email is sent, so check it yourself at entry.dxmarathon.com/dxm/entries, where your callsign appears within a few minutes. Your DXCC entities and zones are shown at entry.dxmarathon.com/leaderboard — the sum of the two is your score.

You can upload again as many times as you wish through January 5th, 2027, and only the last submission counts. More details on www.dxmarathon.com and on the DX Marathon’s QRZ page, W4DXM.
100% of participants get a certificate with their accomplishments.

If you use two callsigns, or if you operate remotely or from more than one location, there are two conditions worth knowing: dxmarathon.com/rules/2026.

Thanks, and see you on the bands.
73,

Luis Soto Neira
CA6SNT
DX Marathon Ambassador · Chile
Email: [email protected]
WhatsApp: +56 9 6761 4461
Valdivia, Chile · FF30JD · CQ 12 / ITU 14

And here is another interesting DX related message received at Ham Radio Outside the Box from the Amateur Radio Association of Serbia:

Contest Invitation

Dear contesters,

We invite you to participate in YUDX Contest 2026.

The contest will be held on the last full weekend of September,
i.e. Saturday at 12:00 UTC up to Sunday at 11:59 UTC (September 26–27, 2026).

More information

Let’s meet in YUDX Contest 2026,
YUDX Contest Committee

Accidental DX!

I know many hams specialize in working DX. To be successful requires a powerful station (well maybe at least 100 watts) and a decent antenna – like a steerable beam. It also requires a lot of patience and/or a lot of skill. My own personal operating style involves sitting out in the Big Blue Sky Shack with a QRP CW radio pumping 5 watts or less into a simple wire antenna. Ain’t gonna cut it for DX yeah? Well, not so fast … I was once out at a local park setting up for a POTA activation when I realized I had left my antenna at home!

A decision had to be made. Abort? or Improvise, Adapt, Overcome! Luckily I had 10 meters of wire in my truck so I thought “dipole!”. I cut the wire in half and improvised a terrible, jungle-style dipole. No center connector, just wire wrapped around the coax connector.

I didn’t have a pole with me and the surrounding trees were very short, more like bushes in fact. I found a stick to support the center of the dipole about 1 meter above ground and threw the ends of the wire into the bushes about two and half meters above ground. Maybe this will get enough contacts for a POTA activation if I am really lucky and the propagation gods are in a good mood, was the highly optimistic thought swimming around in my head.

The park location was right on the shore of one of the Great Lakes so I didn’t even have the advantage of height. At the top of a mountain I could probably get away with an arrangement like this, but less than a couple hundred meters above sea level?

Well maybe blind optimism is all we need some days. I made the 10 contacts required to validate an activation, and then some. Among my contacts were two DX stations from way over the Atlantic Ocean. Big station? Piff! Beam antenna? Piff!

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RT @[email protected]

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