That’s what everyone thought decades ago - that China would never allow ham radio. Albania never. Burma never. Aves Island never., etc… even DPRK was among that “no way” list right up until when it wasn’t. I’m not sure the number of unlikely activity venues changes; only the names change.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
The question is, are restrictions on ham radio DXing growing or shrinking?
I tried to get a handle on this. The posting may be hard to find, but I basically tried to establish how frequently certain entities had been activated, including
very small ones. That's the thing about some of these -- they were little more than "demonstrations" or "good will" exercises. 5,000 QSOs over 20 years is not my idea of a fair shake. But, I counted those anyway.
I did the top 20 or 25 or so.
Even being generous with places like P5, it was certainly the case that there were many entities that were about the same, but that on balance there were more in the "harder" category than in the "easy".
Moreover, the fact that you can still make this claim at all was because of these things:
1. The US Fish and Wildlife said "no Kingman Reef ever again, no kidding, we aren't budging".
2. The ARRL promptly deleted it from the DXCC list.
Since 2006, when Amateur Radio was shut down, EZ hasn't had as much as a goodwill demonstration. So far, they've been harsher than North Korea or Albania ever were. We're closing in on 20 years of zero QSOs. I haven't heard the slightest hint of that easing. Zorro, now SK, had done wonders in opening up those kinds of places. We haven't replaced him and if he ever made any progress with EZ, I never heard of it. Nor anyone else.
Meanwhile, we have places that used to be activated by literally scrambling up a rope ladder from a speedboat that now requires a helicopter to activate and an agreement
not to do it again for twenty years.
Baker was activated, in part, because the team was able to fund a US F&W "compliance officer"
and pay her salary while the operation continued. We did not used to do things like that. But now, we do.
If the price of oil rises north of 100 dollars a barrel and stays there, at least a half dozen entities in the southern hemisphere (like Heard and other far southern ones) will become million dollar operations. We have proven we can do those, but it's not like we can do five of them a year. And, to my knowledge, we really haven't replaced the Braveheart and its crew, which were vital in many of the operations we
did run over the last decade or so.
In some respects, especially over the last twenty years, we're having more trouble with environmental restrictions than we have with the likes of BY. We didn't used to have to make 'see you in 20 years' kinds of agreements.
So, sorry, the difficulty, on balance, is greater. And, we have nothing on the horizon for EZ in particular. HR is a better discussion than #1 HR. Nobody who didn't have EZ by 2006 has had
any chance whatever of #1 HR. And no prospect of it, either.
Some of the younger DXers are starting to catch on to stuff like this. They pay attention to EZ because they don't have it. Me, I have it so, I could settle for plattitudes that "everything always becomes available eventually." But then, it's easy for me to say when I have the one that is off the air for almost 20 years by fiat, straight from the top. I might feel differently about my chances if I was looking at EZ on my need list.
Truth is, and I've long said this, #1 HR is the problem. If you choose to ignore it, your DXing life is a much happier one. A world where you can miss nine is much more achievable than "getting them all" when we don't control the activation in the end.