On Monday, January 7, John Dack, W7KH, of Seattle, Washington, passed away. He was 91. An ARRL Life Member, Dack sat at the top of the DXCC mixed standings with 398 entities, including all 340 current entities and 58 deleted entities. He worked every DXCC entity except Daman and Diu (CR8), French Indochina (FI8) and Manchuria (C9). South Sudan (ST0) was the last new DX entity in Dack’s log; he worked ST0R in August 2011.

Dack was profiled in the September 2011 issue of QST in the “How’s DX?” column [Editor’s note: You must be an ARRL member and logged on to the ARRL website to read this article]. First licensed in 1938 when he was 17, Dack became interested in Amateur Radio due to some neighbors who were hams. “John remembered working Mexico, and this may have been the beginning of his interest in working DX, as he felt ‘like he had just worked Tibet,’ which he later did,” wrote “How’s DX?” conductor Bernie McClenny, W3UR. “Despite being [at the time] 90 years old, he still seems to be on top of his game and gets on the air about twice a week. There are no computers at W7KH and John still gets his DX news from the paper version of QRZ DX. All of his logs are still done with paper and pencil.”

Funeral arrangements are pending.