New Ham Radio Goals for 2025

Exactly one year ago I decided to concentrate more on the QSOs itself instead of collecting QSLs to achieve certain awards. This worked nicely for a while but it turned out to become boring after a while. It looks like I have to keep changing my behaviour in order to maintain my interest in the hobby. This doesn’t just refer to the communicative aspect of the hobby, but also to the tinkering part. It was only when I decided to achieve two new goals that new ideas came up to expand the station.

Goals for 2025 (and probably 2026)

My LoTW DXCC award account currently looks like this:

Here you can see that (apart from CW) two new goals can be derived:

Firstly, I would like to achieve the DXCC on 7 bands. Getting 100 points on 12m seems to me to be a realistic goal for this year.

I would also like to aim for the DXCC Challenge Award. This involves working and confirming a total of 1000 DXCC entity points on the bands from 160m to 6m. I am currently at 937 and every additional point is a bigger and bigger hurdle.

Motivation for antenna projects

The goal of achieving the DXCC Challenge Award has given me renewed motivation to experiment with antennas. My 13m long vertical antenna works well on 160 to 12m, but poorly on 10m and not at all on 6m. This eventually led to the purchase and construction of a 10m/6m Moxon antenna, which I am currently having a lot of fun with.