RECEPTION REPORTING TECHNIQUES
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By Edward G. Stroh
(This article first appeared in the May 1992 issue of DX Chicago)

I am sure all of you members of CADX have your own ways of QSLing the stations that you report to. Some of those way work well, and maybe some not so well. I wouldn’t say that I am some sort of QSL king or anything even close to that, but I just thought that I would share with you my procedures of going after that elusive QSL card.

I usually send a 3-page reception report. Some of you may think this is overkill, but it seems to work for me. I use to send those commercially available form type of reception reports that were sold by Gilfer Associates in New Jersey, but I thought that maybe some stations might be more likely to respond to a reception report that looked as if the reporter spent a fair amount of time preparing it. Plus, the amount of information that you can squeeze into one of those commercially prepared forms is limited. I do all my reception report preparing on the computer with a word processing program. I have most of the basic things that I use in every report saved on disk, and when I am ready to write my next reception report, I just load in the prepared file and customize it for that particular station. Many of my ideas came from the book written by the king of QSLs, Gerry Dexter, and entitled ‘Secrets of Successful QSLing’. If you are a QSL hound, then I would highly recommend buying this book. It has everything one needs to know about QSLing from A to Z. As far as I know it is only available from Gilfer Associates. I have never seen it advertised anywhere else.

The first page of the report is in the form of a personal letter stating that I heard their station and I give details of the conditions such as reception quality, interference, atmospheric noise, signal strength, and sometime the WWV geophysical readings for that day (solar flux, A index, K index). I also give some comments about the program details at this point. I then tell about my receiver and antenna in rather great detail, such as the height and the direction of the antenna. In the last part of my personal letter I tell them about myself, my family and the area in which I live. Actually all this takes up to 2 pages.

The third page is the actual reception report, which is similar to the commercially prepared forms that I spoke about earlier, but is customized to my own preferences. It has all the necessities such as frequency, UTC date, UTC time, program details, SINFO code, and weather conditions.

Another thing that I consider important is to include in the envelope what I call goodies. This included photocopies of the specifications of my receiver and antenna. I also include a picture postcard of the Chicago skyline. The last and most important thing is to include return postage. I always include this no matter what station I am writing to. In these days of economic hard times and budget cuts, return postage is necessity. It can be in the form of International Reply Coupons (IRC’s), mint stamps, or U.S. one dollar bills. I usually use IRC’s, since they are readily available from your local post office.

I know what you might be thinking by now. All this paper in 1 envelope spells EXTRA POSTAGE. Well, in my opinion it is worth it to go the extra mile and include all this stuff, and pay the extra postage. Another thing about postage, sometimes it may be advisable to send the report via registered mail. I have done this with such countries as Vietnam, North Korea, and Syria. Now it really gets expensive. There have been times that I have sent reports that have cost as much as $ 8.00, counting the postage, registered mail fee and IRC’s. Well, like I said earlier, maybe all this is a bit of overkill, but it seems to work for me.

One last, very important thing that I would like to mention is ‘Thank you letters’. I always send a thank you letter to a station after I receive a QSL from them. Actually what this does is to give the next person who may send in a report to that station a better chance of getting that elusive QSL. It doesn’t hurt for us to promote a little good will.

NOTE BY CHRISTOS RIGAS: Gilfer Associates mentioned in the article have been out of business for a while.

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