I have known Tedd for about 30 years. We live about 4 miles apart. We both got to the top of the Honor Roll when we worked the P5 around the same time. But Tedd didn't spend that much time on the air. Rather he took on the task of assembling DXpedition information and distributed it for free. Over the years there have been many DX Bulletins that were published for profit. Many of us received them in the mail every week. But when the BBS became popular, DX info could be distributed in a different way. Tedd was one of the early ones to take advantage of the technology. Then we had email and list servers and a robust internet that changed the landscape of bulletin distribution. In the year 2000 I started putting the OPDX Bulletin on my website starting wtih issue 475. Now there are over 1100 issues of the bulltin on the website for research and reference.
You might think that the only peole that read the OPDX are DX'ers. Thousands do read it as email or on list servers, and according to my web stats, up 10 1000 read it on the webiste. What I found suprizing is that people will not only read the current OPDX, but they will read back issues by the hundreds as well. What a great resource it has and will still be. The OPDX will remain on the EIDX Network (papays.com) website for the forseeable future.
As hinted above, others do read the OPDX. I checked my personal email from work one Monday morning and was a little concerned when I noticed there was one from someone at fcc.gov. My first thought was that I had violated some rule . But when i read the email, the question was "Where is yesterday's OPDX Bulletin? It is not on your website!" I don't remember why that was the case but as we exchanged emails, the sender told me that the first thing they did every Monday morning was to read the OPDX Bulletin while having their first cup. Part of their job was to field complaints about problems on the ham bands (you know what can happen when rare DX shows up), and the OPDX let them know what would be going on with various operations, when they would start and end, frequencies used etc. They could use this information to respond to the complaints in a meaningful way. When you put stuff on the web you just never know who might read it and how it might be used!
And this brings me to the main points of sharing this information. Why does the OPDX stand out? There are many reasons. Tedd is not a harvard educated journalist. But he is more unbiased than 99% of the ones you see on TV these days. Tedd has no agenda. You don't see much opinion, just the facts. That doesn't mean that Tedd doesn't have an opinion, it just means that he is not going to influence the reader one way or the other. All the information is there, but you decide what it means. He has that philosophy in mind with everyting he writes. How refreshing!
The last point is the most important. DX'ers tend to give most all of the praise to the people who go on dxpeditions. There are more accolades for how rare, how difficult and how many qso's are made. And certainly without those dxpeditioners, we would have nothing to work so praise is appropriate. But there is more to DX than just the dxpeditions.
Have you ever thought about what it takes to put out a bulletin every week, year after year, when it's not a job that you get paid to do? Every day you get info, mostly from emails and reading posts about upcoming dxpeditions. You gather that info and edit it for publication. That can take manyhours. Then on the weekend, the info has to be assembled into a bulletin. You have not only dxpeiitions but propagation predictions, qsl routes, special events, IOTAs, awards and annoucements etc. But being a journalist means verfiying the info. Reserach is needed to resolve conflictive information. There is no staff to do that; you must do it all. After the OPDX is assembled, Tedd's XYL Linda proofs it for spelling an grammar. Only then is it ready to go out. And sometimes there are problems with sending it. Subsriber lists have to be maintained as well. This takes hours and hours every week. Tedd usually manages to put a bulletin out even when away from home. How many of us would be willing to do that year after year with no compensation?
And this brings we to something we all can do to show our appreciation to Tedd. Various organizations give out awards every year, mostly to those who go on big dxpeditions. They don't often recognize those who contribute countless hours to the benefit of others. So if you have benefitted from the OPDX Bulletin over the years, why not drop a line to those award giving organizations and ask them to recognize Tedd. Maybe if enough of us do that, he might be the beneficiary of a well deserved award. Thank you Tedd.