Every DXCC chaser carries a private ranking of what is hard. Ask ten operators which entity is the rarest and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by whatever they personally have never caught. It is one of those questions the hobby argues about endlessly and rarely measures.
We can measure part of it, because we run a DX cluster and we keep the spots. So here is the DxQSO Most Wanted list: every DXCC entity ranked by how rarely it actually appears on the air, drawn from our own spot archive.
DxQSO runs its own DXSpider cluster node, and every spot that crosses it is archived. Aggregate several years of that, count how often each DXCC entity is spotted, and sort ascending: the entity that appears least often is rank 1.
248 entities are currently ranked — every entity that has appeared in the archive. The top of the list looks like this:
| Rank | Entity |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tokelau |
| 2 | Macquarie Island |
| 3 | Mellish Reef |
| 4 | Scarborough Shoal |
| 5 | Chagos Islands |
| 6 | New Zealand Subantarctic Islands |
| 7 | Banaba |
| 8 | St. Paul Island |
| 9 | Mauritania |
| 10 | Agaléga and Saint Brandon |
And at the other end, unsurprisingly: the United States, Italy and Spain are the three most-spotted entities on the list.
Worth being precise, because this is a measurement and measurements mean specific things.
This ranks how often an entity is spotted. That is a mixture of three things: how often anybody is active there, how well they are heard by the operators doing the spotting, and how interesting people found the contact. An entity nobody has activated in two years sits at the top of this list, and correctly so — you cannot work what is not on.
It is not a survey of what operators still need. That is a different measure, gathered a different way, and the two correlate without being the same. An entity can be genuinely rare on the air while a great many operators already have it confirmed from a DXpedition years ago.
Both numbers are useful and they answer different questions. What do I still need? is answered by your own logbook. What is realistically catchable this year? is what a rarity ranking is actually good for.
Because a list of rare entities on its own is trivia. Joined to your logbook it becomes useful.
DxQSO buckets your confirmed entities into difficulty tiers using this ranking, so instead of one flat DXCC number you can see the shape of your standing — how much of what you hold is genuinely hard, and where the achievable gaps are. And because DxQSO is watching the cluster in real time, it can do the thing that actually matters: tell you when something you still need, from the difficult end of your own list, is on the air right now.
That is the point of measuring rarity at all. Not a leaderboard — a filter, so the alert you get is worth the interruption.
DxQSO's own DXSpider cluster node. Every spot is archived, and the ranking is computed from how rarely each entity appears.
Because those are the entities that have actually appeared in the archive. An entity nobody has spotted cannot be ranked by spot count.
No — it measures on-air rarity rather than polling what operators still need. The two broadly agree at the extremes and differ in the middle.
Yes, and we intend to republish it. One well-run DXpedition can change the top twenty.
73, Steve, N1EZ
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