I totally accept the fact that I'm an old fart and that the condition colors (and reduces) my thinking process. Having said that I fail to understand some of the thinking express during the recent new country/ Mt. Athos threads.
There is a danger in any discussion that the definitions of key terms may not be universally shared. To wit, what do we mean by DX? To be sure, at one time DX was defined by distance, this is still a valid criterion on VHF and especially UHF bands. I don't think that defination is valid any longer. I have a converted CB SSB rig on ten meters. There is no question that at some point I have put a S9 signal at an point on this planet. If someone was there, and listening for me, I could have easily worked them. The same holds for anyone reading this message. So the distance test fails for DX as we know it.
I would hope we would all agree that our attraction to DXing has at it's base the element of difficulty. The difficulty can take many form, competition, propagation, and lack of activity from a particular DX entity.
Since there is a competitive element, a measurement metric is involved. Many of us have chosen a country count as that metric. If that's true, why difference does it make what the countries are as long as we all share a common list. Why should it make any difference if the "country" is an "office building" in NYC or a small group of buildings surrounded by Greece? Indeed, why should on-the-air activity make any difference in the recognition of country status?
It seem to me this thread (and I contributed to a portion of it) really is about how to create a new country and how to remove a country that is already there.
It the first case, we already have a set of rules. If you don't like the rules, lobby to change them but there are rules. In the later case it would seem to me that any country not meeting the test of the current rules should be removed. We are then left with something approaching what we have now. An all time score and I score base on the currently available countries. If you live long enough you may well become number one on the first list.
I started DXing in the late 50s and things have changed. I'm not necessarily saying the old way was better (although I really do believe it was.) Back then few DXers ran a KW, many didn't have a beam, and there were no packet clusters, lists, and DXpeditions (as we now know them) were relatively rare. At gatherings of DXers that talk center on how to work some station that show up about twice a year for about an hour each time (AC5PN) or who would once in a while show up in a French speaking phone net in the then DX portion on the upper end of 20 meter phone (FW8AA.)
Can it be that we have become spoiled by high power, big antennas, packet clusters, and DXpeditions having 40K contact in a few day?
Urb, W2DEC
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