Counting Maidenhead grid squares is widely done by VHF/UHF amateurs. To some extent this is because "countries" in the DXCC sense do not accurately measure your performance on the higher bands.
For example I have worked Northern France on 23cm. After that how do I test my gear? If I make an improvement all I could then do in country terms is to work France again. Even if I reached the Mediterranean coast it would only count as one DXCC entity. On the other hand if I improve my set-up and I work a square in France much further away than the Somme in JO00 (say as far as the Var Valley in JN33 - 1500km instead of 700km) then the squares show the progress while the DXCC list does not.
I might point out that although I would love to work into the Var on 23cm, it would take a very big improvement to make it that far. You never know though.
Some people work to collect summits, others islands, and others again count prefixes. I count squares. Or rather I look at the totals to check my progress. So far 942 on all bands, 620 on 6m, 296 on 4m, 251 on 2m, 106 on 70cm and 37 on 23cm.
Being lazy by nature (or so my school teacher told me) I do not actually count square totals. Gabriel, EA6VQ does it for me thanks to his excellent VQLog software. Once I enter a callsign into VQLog it tells me if I have worked that square before on that band (or other bands).
If several new stations call me, I will often choose to reply first to the ones who give their square in their reply. So anyone using "Tx 2" (replying with a report and not their square) goes to the back of the queue. For people I know well then the locator is not needed, but for new calls the square matters to me. I see other square hunters doing the same thing, which is a good reason for using Tx 2 sparingly. Of course if you want to use Tx 2 in any situation that is up to you, I do not make the rules. However, I do decide who I reply to so those who give squares obviously get my attention first.
If I get a chance I hunt out a new square. The last two new 6m ones were hard to reach in different ways. EA5V is in square JM09. On the six figure notation he is at JM09ax, which is right in the corner of his square. The point about this location is that it is in a very small patch of the Spanish mainland and most of the rest of the square is in the sea. Only the north of Ibiza is in that square, and I have never worked anybody in the north of Ibiza. I had never worked anybody in JM09 square until now.
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| DXMaps seen at GM4FVM on 21 November 2024 |
There are quite a few square like this which have very little land in them. IM56 is another one with just a tiny sliver of Portugal in it ...
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| IM56 square as seen on DXMaps |
Local amateurs do activate IM56 square from time to time. Needless to say I do not have that one yet.
The second new square could hardly be more different from working EA5V in JM09.
On 20 November I worked XV3T in Vietnam on 6m. This is the first time I have worked Vietnam from here on any band.
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| 50MHz contacts at GM4FVM 20 to 21 November 2024 |
So that produced a new square and a new country. It represents a square which is also difficult to work, but for entirely different reasons. JM09 is quite close (1772km) but there is very little activity. OK33 is far away (9934km), there is not much activity, and it takes remarkably good propagation to reach it.
The thing about squares, which is also true for DXCCs, is that they all count. They might vary, but these two difficult ones just add two more like any two easy ones.
Once you reach 620 the rest are all pretty difficult.
That activity map above looks a lot different from the last posting when I had worked 195 stations in eleven days. Things were even worse than that map shows. In the eleven days after the last posting (8 November) I worked no stations at all. I was away for a large part of that time, but it is not all DX at GM4FVM.
73 Jim
GM4FVM
