Expedition QSLs
As you can imagine, operating in other DXCC countries
leads to a greater demand for written confirmation of the contacts than one typically encounters in the “lower 48”. For most of the contest DXpeditions I’ve been on, QSL cards have been handled
graciously and ably by Arlen Turriff K6VNX. To the extent I used my own separate
callsign outside the contest period on these trips; I have handled the cards myself.
All cards received directly have been answered directly, and replies to cards received through the bureau have been
sent when sufficient volume accumulated. Starting with the 2008 Honduras
operation, I have also started to put these individual contacts onto the ARRL’s Logbook of The World (LoTW). As time permits, I will try to convert earlier hand-kept logs to ADIF and submit them to LoTW as well.
KH6 / KH7 QSLs
Hindsight is 20/20, and I know now that I should have
engaged a QSL manager for contacts made while I lived in Hawaii
(August 1992 through August 1996). But work demands following the move to the
Islands kept me from even looking into it. As
a result, my very understanding wife and I dealt with the incoming cards ourselves. Once again, direct incoming cards went
out the same way, usually with minimal or no delay (with one exception discussed below).
Bureau cards took longer to get to, mainly due to the sheer volume. I
can honestly say that we spent far more time on QSLing than I did operating. It’s
a big job, and blessings on the volunteers who act as managers for popular DX stations and contest operations! The large numbers revealed some patterns, including the tendency of some hams to send multiple cards for
a single contact. This caused me to question whether the senders’ arrangements
with their respective incoming bureaus were working as intended. To be safe,
we replied again (and again) when requested. Another kink came when cards contained
an incorrect date or time (not as rare as you might expect), requiring more painstaking searches of the logs.
On returning to California,
I found that my logging computer was no longer operating properly, and the back-up disks were nowhere to be found. Thus, cards received after mid-1996 could not be verified except for those from a few paper logs I had
produced and kept. To those of you who tried and gave up, my profound apologies! However, if there is any truth to “Better late than never”, there is good
news: I recently (November, 2008) found the back-up disks. The old computer log
has at last been resurrected and, with the expert help kindly provided by long-time contester and software guru Larry Weaver
N6TW, the files generated by my old pre-Cabrillo logging program have now been converted to the Cabrillo format. I have been diligently responding to the cards that had accumulated in those dust-laden bureau envelopes,
and as of January 2008 I think I’m about through the entire stack.
There is one small subset of cards to which I cannot
reply. These relate to contacts made by some guest operators before and after
the October, 1993 CQ Worldwide DX-Phone contest. I’m not sure whether logs
were ever kept for those contacts; if there were any, I have never seen them. I
know those dates are blank in the computer log, so I’m sorry to say that any such contacts cannot be confirmed.
I have now uploaded all of the Hawaii contacts for which I have records to LoTW, including those made on RS-12, the
Russian 15m-in, 10m-out satellite, and those for the 1995 CQ WPX-CW contest, for which I used the then-newly-available KH7
designator. No, I was not on Kure,
just home on the North Shore of O’ahu. Contesters and prefix-hunters got
a new one out of that, but country-chasers did not. I did extensive hand clean-up
of these log conversions to get them posted, but the job is finally done.
I have recently been asked about the eQSL application
on the Web. While I am not opposed to the concept, I haven’t really looked
into it yet. Right now my efforts are on getting my hand logs into LoTW and keeping up to date with it going forward.
