Peter's DX Corner

Top 10 DX presents itself as the World’s largest SWL contest. I think they have organized it since 2017. So as posted earlier I decide to participate. Now I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time to spare as we were preparing our move to a new house. So I spent more time packing boxes than behind the radio. But in the true Olympic spirit: “Participation is more important than winning”.

The contest is about logging 10 stations from different countries between 2300 and 30000 kHz. Points are awarded using this formula: distance (in km) / power (in kW). WRTH data are used as reference.
In addition to the rule above there was multiplier of 3 to boost your score for stations from a different continent. Here I probably made my first mistake I tried to log stations from different continents and only missed Antartica. But in hindsight I think you get a multiplier bonus for each station from a different continent than your own…

Below the 10 stations and points I collected (it differs somewhat from the 10918 points I was officially awarded, as my distance estimates might be slightly off).

This resulted in a 15th place among 36 participants Worldwide, 11th place in Europe and as I was the only Dutch participant: 1st place in The Netherlands. The winner was “ace DX-er” Christoph Ratzer from Austria with 545863 points, of which 318513 points were picked up for 1 catch! Congratulations! I was very pleased to see my DX friend Patrick Robic picking up 3rd place with 194204 points!

Now I have to say these scores made me aware of the real challenge of this contest. It is called Top 10 DX… but from the scoring I get the feeling that low power is more important than distance (DX). And so a relatively easy catch for me like RealMix Radio resulted in more points than stations from Palau and Guam which, subject to propagation, are not always easy if you also have to write down some proper details.

So that makes you wonder… Christoph knew how to log a station which yielded over 300000 points. Outside Europe that is a station at say 10000 kms with 100 Watt only (10000/0.1 x 3). Inside Europe you are looking for say 3000 kms with 10 Watt only (3000/0.01). DX-ers in the top 4 reported 10 catches with an average between 13000 and 23000 points. So that’s 10 stations with max 1-3 kW at a average distance of 10000 kms. The problem with Top 10 DX is that they don’t disclose which stations were received by any of the participants. Frankly, I’m not sure I like that as it doesn’t help me to get better as a DX-er by learning from others.

My conclusion: if you want to get a high score in the Top 10 DX contest you have to research which stations less than 3 kW outside your continent can be received (and less than 0.3 kW when on your continent). Those are the ones to target, anything else barely adds a significant number of points.

“Will I participate next year?” The answer is “maybe…”. If time permits I will invest in putting together a shortlist of stations that would result in at least 5000 points each. If that is a set I consider viable logging at my QTH I might give it another try. It might also be that I decide that this is just not my type of contest as noise levels block the reception of the few weak stations you need to have for a proper result and I can’t compensate for that by putting in more time and improve my score by adding some – slightly higher powered – stations. And again, the fact that the results of my “betters” are not made public plays a role as well: I do like competition, but more than that I do like helping fellow hobbyists to become better.

So we’ll see. That said, a big thank you to the organizers, it is always good to create challenges for the serious DX-er, and I do know that you also rather spend time behind the radio than processing spreadsheets of contest participants.