No, this is not a post about the high price of HF gear, or anything similar to that. Instead it’s about award stickers. I recently received two stickers for two separate awards and thought I’d pontificate a bit about them.
The two stickers that just arrived are for my DXCC Phone and WPX Mixed certificates. The DXCC sticker is for confirming QSOs with 150 different countries and the WPX version is for confirming 450 prefixes. I also have an existing North America endorsement for the WPX certificate that I picked up when I first applied for it. Nothing too impressive, but it’s a start.
What both share is a conundrum that everyone getting them might face. Where to put them? There’s no dedicated space on either certificate to guide the owner on what the best placement is. Those of us with OCD might fret on what the “right” choice is.
The Czech S6S award certificate (their version of Worked All Continents) solved this dilemma for us by providing clearly marked positions where single band stickers can be placed. Order, consistency, cleanliness. Be still, my beating heart.
Most award certificates provide what looks like a blank slate. The unadorned blank areas are ripe with possibilities and uncertainties. A quick Google image search of DXCC award stickers will show a number of examples where stickers cover up the certificate border and maybe even the mode of the award. Worse yet, the size of stickers seems to have changed over the years so the line of successive stickers gets taller like a compounding interest diagram. Chaos!
If you’re very proud of your DXCC certificate you might have also sprung for a nice frame, which just so happens to be harder to open and reopen as endorsements are applied. All of which just illustrates the trivialities that inhabit my head.
Has anyone ever established the “right” way to affix endorsement stickers to DXCC and WPX certificates?