It was an exciting surprise when Dmitri, RA9USU, appeared in the CQ WW DX Contest SSB 2013 from 7O2A in Socotra Island in Yemen. This was a rare one!
The country files used by the most common logging software have Yemen in Asia and zone 21. The operator at 7O2A was sending zone 37.
As the logs came in, we needed to make a decision on how to score contacts with 7O2A. Is it zone 21 or 37? Is it Africa or Asia?
A little research about Socotra revealed:
- WAC says Asia, based upon an RSGB request in 1954
- RSGB Prefix Guide (2012, G4BWP) says Africa
- RSGB IOTA says Africa, AF-028
- Wikipedia says it ‘may be considered to be in Africa’
Given the above, we have decided to score Socotra island as zone 37 in Africa. The country files used to perform the log checking have been set to score 7O2A this way.
Since the operator sent zone 37 for every QSO, anyone logging 7O2A in zone 21, will have an exchange error and lose the contact.
If you are interested in learning more about the unique environment found only on Socotra, please see this article by National Geographic (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/socotra/white-text) and accompanying photographs (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/socotra/melford-moffett-photography).
