[Dxbase] ARRL Diamond DXCC

[Gary AL9A]

Just an interesting observation for those chasing the Diamond DXCC award.

A while back I submitted my first 100 QSOs for the award, only to 
subsequently have 2 of them rejected - one was a slim, the other a busted 
call.  In the time between my initial submission and the rejection of the 
two calls I managed to work a few more new ones for the DDXCC award.  Today 
I made out a new application submission with the 98 good ones from the first 
submission plus 10 additional new ones for a total of 108 QSOs just in case 
some of them bombed out again.

While going through the DDXCC info pages on the ARRL web site I noticed they 
had a section titled "Active Stations".  I checked this page and found that 
some of the more difficult countries have a few ops that are on the air more 
or less regularly.  So I worked my way through the list and added the active 
station calls to my copy of the ARRL's Excel tracking spreadsheet.  I just 
spent about an hour going through the various active calls using the DXbase 
Wizard to search through my 2012 QSOs country prefix by country prefix.  I 
output any hits to the Wizard data table in a Report format and then used a 
log template I had made up just for the DDXCC chase.

Much to my surprise I discovered my mdb file contained 6 new hits for the 
DDXXC award that I had previously missed which will bring my count up to 
114.  These have now been flagged in my data base so that I can pull them 
when I hit the 125 endorsement level.  Without the flexibility of DXbase and 
the Wizard selection filters it is doubtful that I would ever have found 
these nuggets laying buried in the log.  Yahoo!

73,
Gary AL9A