Digital Most Needed DXCC Entities

Welcome to the Digital Most Needed DXCC Entities survey home page. These surveys were conducted as a tool for individuals and teams planning DXpeditions to see which entities are needed most on the digital modes.

For all practical purposes, the first documented digital “Most Needed” survey was introduced to subscribers of the RTTY reflector on August 13, 2002. The survey form was written in HTML and the data was manually entered into an Excel spreadsheet. The results were posted on aa5au.com. There were 246 entries and Scarborough Reef was #1 on the list since it had not been activated on RTTY in either the 1995 or 1997 DXpeditions.

The 2005 survey started on August 14 using the same HTML form and method as 2002. Exactly 2 weeks after announcing the survey, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Despite being evacuated from my home for 3 weeks, the results were published on October 7. There were 359 entries and Scarborough Reef remained #1 since it had not been activated since the last survey.

In February 2011, Dennis W1UE, posted a message to the RTTY reflector looking for a “Most Wanted RTTY Countries” list. This prompted me to run another survey. This time, Larry K8UT, offered to host the survey since he had already written a “Mosted Needed” form on this DX club’s website. The software Larry used allowed the results to be outputted in Excel format which greatly simplified presenting the results. That survey netted 352 entries. Scarborough Reef remained #1 even though it had been activated on RTTY in 2007. Unfortunately only 322 RTTY contacts were logged.

The 2016 survey was born out of a discussion between Ed, W0YK, and myself in April. It was time for another survey. Even though the previous surveys were “digital” surveys, they were named “RTTY” surveys. The team decided to go ahead and replace “RTTY” with “Digital” in the survey name. Larry still had the survey form built, so we used it once again. The survey was announced on April 28. The team made a great push to get the survey advertised. The number of entries more than doubled that of 2005 and 2011 to 716. Since “Most Wanted” data was already available on Club Log, we decided to compare our results with Club Log. The results were published on May 16, 2016.