How many DX’ers are there in the World?

clublog uniques3

Continent 1+ logged QSOs 2+ logged QSOs 6+ logged QSOs
Europe 269,000 132,000 77,500
North America 157,000 82,000 46,000
Asia 73,000 33,000 18,000
South America 17,300 7,800 4,000
Oceania 13,400 6,400 3,500
Africa 7,800 3,400 1,800
Antarctica 151* 63 37

The sample size is 24 million QSOs. Counting just unique callsigns appears to me to strongly emphasize problem QSOs. That’s a trend which should be expected to get worse with a bigger sample, since that would mean there will be more unique errors in the data. For example, if the size of the sample doubled to 48 million QSOs then the 1+ QSOs column would inflate a lot, and the others would increase too. It’s probably best to focus on the 6+ column, above. That means that likely over 50 people have the call in their log worldwide; small enough to catch very short operations but large enough to avoid one-off mistakes.

How many unique callsigns in Club Log

The countries are grouped by continent as per normal ARRL conventions (followed strictly by Club Log). Allow for special events, contest calls, temporary callsigns, as well as logging errors. It’s striking that individual logging errors must be a substantial source of uniques in the average log. Is there another explanation for the difference between 151 and 37 Antarctic stations when we require not one, but 6+ references to the call? In the context of 24 million QSOs, noise is significant. I suppose that some callsigns will get busted more than others, too – and the more prefixes there are in a continent, perhaps the more error-prone that continent becomes?

Here are the top 30 DXCC entities by population (using the 6+ QSOs filter and again working from 1 January 2012 to the present day, April 2013):

USA 40809
JAPAN 11340
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY 11010
EUROPEAN RUSSIA 8216
ITALY 8074
ENGLAND (many special calls in use in 2012) 7750
SPAIN 4822
UKRAINE 4665
FRANCE 4029
POLAND 3903
CANADA 2974
ASIATIC RUSSIA 2628
NETHERLANDS 2354
CZECH REPUBLIC 1897
SWEDEN 1798
BRAZIL 1682
BELGIUM 1605
AUSTRALIA 1545
ROMANIA 1235
FINLAND 1228
AUSTRIA 1157
SWITZERLAND 1034
HUNGARY 1013
ARGENTINA 945
SCOTLAND (many special calls in use in 2012) 887
CHINA 854
DENMARK 842
NORWAY 808
CROATIA 801
GREECE 756

A further analysis which I have performed is to check whether continental populations are changing in proportion over time. Are any continents showing an increase relative to others? Since 2000, it seems probably not. Here is the data (“Unique callsigns by continent, as found in Club Log data from 2000 to 2013 where unique means a distinct callsign appearing not less than 3 times”).

Year AN AS EU NA OC SA
2000 0.0% 13.0% 45.7% 34.4% 2.5% 3.0%
2001 0.0% 12.8% 46.1% 35.0% 2.1% 2.7%
2002 0.0% 12.6% 46.7% 34.5% 2.1% 2.9%
2003 0.0% 12.0% 51.2% 30.8% 1.9% 2.9%
2004 0.0% 12.1% 51.4% 30.5% 2.0% 2.7%
2005 0.0% 11.5% 53.5% 29.2% 1.9% 2.5%
2006 0.0% 10.8% 54.3% 29.2% 2.0% 2.3%
2007 0.0% 11.0% 53.0% 30.4% 2.1% 2.3%
2008 0.0% 11.0% 52.9% 30.2% 2.2% 2.4%
2009 0.0% 11.3% 50.9% 31.7% 2.2% 2.6%
2010 0.0% 11.8% 50.9% 31.0% 2.3% 2.8%
2011 0.0% 12.4% 48.7% 32.6% 2.3% 2.8%
2012 0.0% 12.1% 50.7% 30.8% 2.3% 2.8%
2013 0.0% 11.5% 52.0% 30.9% 2.0% 2.4%

(Apologies for the absence of AF in the data above – this was unintentionally missed off by G7VJR when copying the data into HTML – I will add this data back shortly).

 

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Charles M0OXO

I was born in the 1960’s and have lived all my life in the Coal Mining Town of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, Northern England. My parents were all from this area of Yorkshire and my father worked in the main Industry of the local Collieries as a face worker. I have been married to my wife Debbie for 35+ years and we have two children and two grandchildren.

I have been licensed for around 20 years after my interest was re-kindled when I retired from my role as a Police Officer within South Yorkshire Police Force. The latter few years were spent as Radio Operator in the Force Operations Control Room at Sheffield, before my career ended.

IOTA chasing is (and always has been) my real passion, as climbing the ladder to reach Honour Roll status was always my main aim. The 1000 Islands Trophy is still out of reach but I am heading in the right direction. I am currently a Board Member of IOTA Ltd and IREF.

In my free time I am a keen Photographer of Wildlife, Aviation, (anything really) but the QSL Manager role is my main passion within Ham Radio.

https://www.m0oxo.com/
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