I rely on WSJT-X’s color coding to tell me whether a station calling CQ on FT8 is one I’ve worked or not. Recently, I’d focused a bit more on 60M prefixes for a WPX award endorsement. I was a bit surprised how few of the calling stations appeared to be new to me on this band. So many stations calling CQ showed up without any background color. I hadn’t worked that many 60M stations. How is it that I happened to work all of the stations who were calling CQ so consistently?
It turns out, I hadn’t worked them on this band. I queried some callsigns against my records on the ARRL’s Logbook of the World, to which I upload my logs on at least a weekly basis. Very consistently it showed no contacts made on 60M for those stations. There may be a bug in WSJT-X’s color coding scheme.
Previously, I had written about the importance of paying attention to what your tech is telling you. The moral of the story is don’t always believe what your tech is telling you. Trust but verify? We all make mistakes. Don’t let a mistake like this prevent you from working that previously unworked station for DXCC or WPX credit.