The ARRL has a special DXCC award in celebration of the 75th (Diamond) anniversary of the DXCC program, which began in September of 1937 with a list of just over 200 eligible countries. The purpose of the DDXCC award is to try and contact as many of those original countries as possible during 2012.
When the ARRL published some tools to keep track of your worked countries (tools can be found here), I decided it was time to go through my logbook, and I came up with 126 entries (so I thought). Now trying to match modern country prefixes to old countries is tough. For example a YO6T Yemeni contact might be logged in 3 different places, but it counts as Socotra Island. Sure enough after submitting my 126 entries, I had attributed one to the wrong place and it was eliminated. Fortunately that still left me with 125 countries, good enough for the basic award with the endorsement for 125 countries (the endorsement is black print on a silver sticker — it doesn’t look great in the scanned image below).
These certificates are not numbered, so there is no rush to obtain one. In fact you could wait until the end of the year. Contacts do not have to be confirmed at all, which is great given the poor confirmation rate of many DX stations (I’ve worked 179 countries and have confirmation from 129, for example). It’s actually nice to have an award that is based strictly on the honor system. More can be read about the DDXCC Award here: http://www.arrl.org/diamond-dxcc
Diamond DXCC Award with 125 Endorsement
