I’ve not been specifically chasing new DXCC entities for a while and because of this, I’ve only picked up four since 2015.
I know there’s been some interest surrounding the 3C0L and 3C1L DXpedition to Annobon and Equatorial Guinea respectively over the last few weeks and although I missed out on working 3C0L, I was keen to work 3C1L. I’ve heard them a couple of times over the last two or three days but not been able to work them.
I’d left a browser window open on DXWatch set to 3C1L and as I took my morning break, I saw that they’d been spotted on 17m. It only took a few minutes of calling before I heard my callsign coming back. The last letter was blatted by noise a little so to ensure that they’d received me correctly, I called again and received the acknowledgement back. You can hear a recording of this QSO on my Audio Snippets page.
Only an hour or so later, I was passing the shack again and glanced at the screen to see a single spot had just been reported on 12m. I thought this was worth a try so tuned to their frequency to hear a weak signal. I set my split to just over 1kHz and called them. To my astonishment, I worked them on my first call.
A similar thing happened this afternoon. I saw they’d been spotted on my favourite band, 15m so I found them and started calling. They weren’t very strong and there was a lot of QRM but I’m pretty sure that within a couple of minutes, I’d worked them for a third band slot. Out of the three, this is the one I’m most happy with (assuming it was a good QSO).
This is my first new DXCC in the log since April 2016 and takes me to a total of 272 separate DXCC entities worked.
