In the fall of 2022 I realized that the 5 band DXCC award was actually achievable in my situation. With the new, exciting, solar cycle 25 and the DX Engineering DXE-HEXX-5TAP-2 (20/17/15/12/10M) shoehorned in the attic I was able to quickly earn DXCC status on 10 and 12m (almost anyway-getting those last 10 take longer than the first 50!). I needed to focus on 80m and thus I reworked the 43ft vertical and replaced the remote tuner. Of course, high solar activity isn’t the best time to work DX on 80m. I monitoring the F2 LUF each night (late night) waiting on it to dip below 3.5 MHz, but of course the upper atmosphere is so excited that the LUF only dips that low in the northern hemisphere… and this is in December… so I may not get 5BDXCC until the next solar minimum 🙁

Also when I added a 3rd ICOM to the desk I replaced the two Raspberry Pis with a refurbished HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini Business Desktop and I use the one HP to run all 3 ICOM radios (and log across the network to Log4OM on the windows PC). To do this I loaded Ubuntu onto the HP, then compiled and setup WSJTX and was working great for a few months. The problem I encountered is that WSJTX is great for making contacts but it is designed for making weak signal contacts everywhere and not designed to focus on DXCC. This leads to a very busy call window making it hard to focus on the few remaining countries needed for DXCC. After reading about FTDX and how it is WSJT-X re-worked for DX, I switched to using FTDX and wow, what a difference. It’s truly created specifically for finding those needed DX contacts. Also it allows me to call ‘CQ DX’ and ignore the people calling me who are not DX.

Side story: I fully support the people in mainland US who are working on Worked All States but when the band is wide open for DX and I’m calling CQ DX.. it’s a bit frustrating..

I really like Ubuntu but the audio system has it’s quirks just like Windows does (just completely different quirks). I also really appreciate how FTDX helps me filter domestic activity in the call windows and chase the DX that I really need. Absolutely great tool and I’m really happy it is available for Linux.

Here is the call window with the filters off

Here is the call window with filters on

Some of the Filter choices

As for Ubuntu, I like it enough I’m considering changing my main computer to Ubuntu and running Windows in VirtualBox on Linux! LOL! Almost like the OS/2 days when I ran OS/2 for it’s multiplexing and Windows in a shell for the few things that were Windows only (in this case it’s Log4OM that I must have). The other fun thing about Ubuntu is that I can still write PowerShell scripts. Basically I can do about everything in Ubuntu now.. maybe also need to test SatPC32.