[NCDXA] W3ICM and DXCC Challenge

[Fred Matos]

Posting this because I recently reached a personal achievement of 100O LoTW band-countries towards the DXCC Challenge award. 
After being inactive for many years, I moved into a new stand-alone house QTH in 2018 so I could put up antennas and become active again.
The new technologies and processes such as LoTW were all new to me, and my learning process was slow.   After several paper logging, I went electronic and I obtained a LoTW certificate. My first QSOs were uploaded in August 2018.
The DXCC Challenge was a new award to me, so I set my goal at 1000, with all QSOs confirmed on LoTW.  I have many old paper QSLs, but I wanted to make 1000 on LoTW without any paper cards as a personal achievement. 
My station began with 100 watts and a G5RV, slowly growing to a Carolina Windom and a linear, and finally to a SteppIR beam.  
I had about 750 when I put up the beam in January.   The beam helped a great deal, and I hit 900 this summer.   Propagation on 6,10, and 12 was poor for the three years, so my total for the three bands was around 50; and I was stuck around 950 in September.   The 10 and 12 meter bands opened up in late October, enabling me to pick up many more band-countries.  
I finally made it over 1000 on Monday, and I am now at 1020.   I have over 1000 old paper cards to sort and get recorded into the system.   I made 5-band DXX back in 1983, but they did not keep a record of the countries that I worked on each band.  They just verified that I had 100 on each band, and issued the award. Thus the cards must be submitted again for Challenge credit.
It's going to take the ARRL a long time to process some of my paper cards because they don't keep electronic records of DXpeditions.  To approve a QSO, they must manually look up the call, dates, and times in their paper files.  For example, I have Heard and Crozet QSL cards from 1981 and 1982 that I have not submitted before so they must be approved manually by looking through their file cabinets.
I sent a message to Tom Abernathy pointing out the archaic manual process, recommending that they modernize and move into the 21st century.  Tom will discuss with the League.  
 73
FredW3ICM


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