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I have a story for you. All of it is true, but I have not changed my name.

Wow! I am always amazed at those moments in my amateur radio hobby when spontaneous joy is had by unexpected events.

Iran worked as ATNO DXCC 2022-APR-14

On Thursday, 14-April-2022, at about 17:30 Universal Time (UT), the unexpected occurred, and it started by accident.

I have been reorganizing my radio shack. Once I moved my main transceiver (the Icom IC-7610) from one desk to another, and had it back in operation, I left it tuned to a random frequency, in the CW mode. It was just sitting there, hissing away with the typical shortwave sounds of a frequency on which no one was transmitting. And me? I was going about reorganizing my radio shack.

After a while, I heard the start of a Morse-code CW signal; the operator was sending a CQ call–a transmission that invites a response from anyone who wishes to have a QSO with the calling station. What I heard was, “CQ CQ DE EP2ABS EP2ABS…”

NOTE: This transceiver, my Icom IC-7610, is listening with the new antenna—the 254-foot doublet up at 80 feet–that was raised up into the air here at my QTH by a fine crew from Hams in the Air.

I looked up EP2ABS on QRZ dot com, because I did not know from what country/entity the EP2 prefix on callsigns belongs. I was excited to see that EP2 is from Iran!

I started answering his CQ call, “DE NW7US NW7US,” for at least ten minutes; each time he sent his CQ, I answered. Finally, I heard him answering me, “NW7US NW7US DE EP2ABS 5NN…”

I answered back, sending my signal report, “5NN 5NN DE NW7US TU”

Soon after that simple exchange, he confirmed our QSO by posting our QSO to Logbook of the World (LotW).

Thus, by accident–as I had simply left the transceiver tuned to a randomly-selected frequency and stayed on that frequency listening while doing my chores–I heard the Iranian station calling CQ. What are the odds!?!?

This is my first QSO with Iran, another All Time New One (ATNO). How cool!

Note: This is a testimony to the work from the crew that did the fine work of getting this antenna installed.  Here is a video presented by Hams on the Air:

73 de NW7US dit dit

Congratulations to the ARRL Logbook of the World (LOTW) which just reached 100 million confirmed contacts. This is the same as an impressive 200 million QSL cards out of about 630 million uploaded contacts on LOTW.

LOTW was established way back in 2003. This was only 2 years after I got my license. Since I have never enjoyed much to fill in QSL cards I embraced LOTW very quickly. I have to say though that I will of course respond with a paper QSL for those who ask for one.

But LOTW has been my primary means of confirming contacts for a decade. My DXCC was confirmed with LOTW.

Now at the same time that LOTW is celebrating 100 millions confirmations, I am celebrating 8 bands with 100 or more contacts all confirmed via Logbook of the World. This is on all bands from 3.5 to 28 MHz. This has been my goal for many years. The last confirmation came from the TC0A contest station in Turkey on 80 m after last month’s CQ World Wide CW contest.

I consider myself lucky to have reached 100 confirmations even on the elusive 12 m band which we all know will shut down soon not reopen again until the next solar maximum in about 11 years time.

But as the saying goes “The journey is the reward“, so what to do next as a radio amateur?

A last minute decision to swap the aerial, but worth it! Shame missed out on some E's when got called away :-( #ukac pic.twitter.com/TRarIikVpD
— Andrew Garratt (@nerdsville) August 26, 2014

Well that was fun, great conditions and some nice DX even operating as M6GTG #ukac pic.twitter.com/KwTLXiTPDD
— Andrew Garratt (@nerdsville) September 2, 2014

Well here goes nothing.. best get studying pic.twitter.com/FTDPqTPKSa
— Andrew Garratt (@nerdsville) August 28, 2014

If I had a dollar for every tirade I read or heard from a U.S. amateur regarding the “difficulty of setting up ARRL’s LoTW” software, I’d at least be able to buy another roofing filter for the K3.  These tirades are almost invariably qualified by the assertion that the complainer is “an IT professional.”

Personally, I find LoTW’s security simple and logical: they are simply trying to make it hard for one individual to generate a lot of untraceable certificates (to sign enough falsified logs to get on the “Honor Roll”).  And, since they optimized the database last (?) year, the processing and web interface are pretty good, too.  I kinda just followed the directions and it worked.

I don’t believe in Karma, but every time I read one of these rants by “an IT professional,” I feel a small amount of revenge has been exacted on them for all of the frustrating interactions (mercifully few, all things considered) I’ve endured with incompetent IT drones over the years…

This is the photo I wanted to headline this post, but I refuse to hotlink or copy it.  Positive, regularly-scheduled programming will return to the blog shortly, including a couple of construction projects…$50 HF triplexer, anyone?

When I returned from my operation as TI7/K2DBK in Costa Rica last summer, I didn’t receive any QSL cards immediately. I wasn’t very surprised by that, as I hadn’t worked all that many stations, Costa Rica isn’t a particularly rare entity, and I assumed that for the stations outside the US (where it’s a little less common), they’d be QSLing via the bureau or Logbook of The World. Since I had no cards that I needed to respond to, I focused my efforts on getting my operation approved for DXCC credit and getting a certificate so that I could upload the contacts to the Logbook of The World. As I wrote (here and here), that turned out to be an interesting challenge, but I was able to get that approval.

I didn’t really think about QSL cards after that until a few months ago, when I started receiving QSL requests via the ARRL DX bureau service. As I’ve written in the past, the bureau is a way to exchange QSL cards which, while inexpensive, can be quite slow, so lag of 6 or 8 months between the operation and the time to receive a card via the bureau isn’t terribly unusual. (Sometimes it can be much, much longer. I’m still receiving QSL cards via the bureau for my operation from Grand Cayman in 2007, and others for operations from home back to 2001. The bureau service itself isn’t quite that slow, but often folks like myself will discover after a few years that a particular card is needed.) When I first received those bureau cards, I realized that I had to create a QSL card but it wasn’t a high priority, as I wasn’t planning to send cards out via the bureau for at least a few months.

Things changed about a week ago when I received the first of several directly mailed QSL requests. Although it’s common to send a QSL card relatively soon after a contact, particularly if it’s sent “direct” (meaning mailed directly to the station, not via the bureau), sometimes stations will not realize until much later that they “need” the confirmation, or, as I’ve done, sometimes they simply forget at the time of the contact. Regardless of the delay, I have always made it a point to respond to direct QSL cards as soon as possible (normally I’ll send out a return card the day after I receive one). Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that because I still had the creation of the QSL card for my TI7/K2DBK on the “to do” list. The receipt of the handful of direct requests (all of which were from non-US stations) was the kick that I needed to get going designing my card.

I’ve always designed and printed my “special” cards myself, because the number of cards that I typically need is usually so small that it’s not worth it to have them professionally printed. There are a number of tools that can be used for the actual design, but for me, the hardest part is always coming up with an attractive layout. However, I’ve come up with sort of a standard that I’ve used on multiple cards, and I try to follow that now for each new one I create. I’ve followed that “standard” for the latest card, which is to use a background image shot with one or sometimes two “inserts”, along with a QSO information block. I’ve always used my own photos, not a “stock” photo, as I think it makes the card more personal. I usually include a picture of myself on the cards because I think that makes it even more personal.

When I first started printing the cards, I though that I’d use a gloss “postcard” printer stock (like this from Staples), separate the postcards (they are set up for 4 on a page that have perforations to make separation easy) and just mail them. However, I realized that the size of each card was bigger than the standard QSL card size and I had trouble fitting them in some envelopes. As a result, I wind up using a paper cutter to trim the cards down to about 5.3″ x 3.5″. Most likely the next time I buy paper stock for my printer I’ll just use plain “everyday” inkjet photo paper since it should be a bit less expensive.

With a card designed, I printed off enough copies on my inkjet printer to respond to the direct requests, and I’ll be working on responding to the bureau cards next. I think that this particular design worked out really well, and the color of the sand on the beach is light enough so that I can just use a regular pen to fill in the QSO information in the information box and it’s quite readable.

)

George visits the Twit.tv studios and interviews Randy Hall, K7AGE. Tommy visits the Huntsville Hamfest. Jim builds an Audio Isolation Interface. Peter shows us the DATV QSO Party.

Saturday afternoon I was going through my QSO logs in preparation for a long-overdue bureau mailing. One of the things I do prior to doing a mailing is that I validate that I still need the card (sometimes I’ll get a confirmation for that band/mode from another operator, or sometimes it’ll get confirmed via Logbook of The World [LoTW] since I initially flagged it) and I also check to make sure that I’m not sending to a bureau that doesn’t exist, or sending via the bureau when I could send direct to a US manager.

In going through the log, I discovered that I had an unconfirmed QSO with Joel, V44KAI on 6m from 2009. That was my only contact with V4 on 6m so I definitely wanted to confirm it. I noticed that I had two other contacts with him (on different bands) which had been confirmed via LoTW, but not the 6m contact. Joel’s qrz.com page explain that because he sometimes encounters QRM/QRN that it’s a good idea to contact him before asking his manager, W5TFW. I emailed Joel who replied that some of his older logs were on paper and hadn’t been put into electronic form so that they could be uploaded to LoTW.

On Sunday morning I got another email from Joel who told me that he found the (valid) QSO in his logs and had emailed his manager to give him the details so that it could be uploaded to LoTW. I checked and probably within 10 minutes of my seeing that email I found that the matching QSL record was in the LoTW system, confirming V4 on 6m for me.

The reason that I wrote this is because to me this exemplifies the ham radio spirit. Joel is clearly an active ham (try a search for V44KAI on the DX-Summit search page and you’ll see what I mean) and as Joel says on his qrz.com page, his manager obviously keeps busy keeping the records up to date. The fact that both of these guys took the time to quickly respond to my question and do the work necessary to provide me with the confirmation I needed helps remind me that despite some of the less-altruistic hams floating around, there are still plenty of good guys. Thanks to both of them for that reminder.

Edit: I was asked what a “manager” is, so by way of explanation:
A manager is a person who handles someone else’s QSLing duties for them. There are all kinds of reasons to have managers, including having the manager in a country with a better mail system to reduce mail theft, or simple because the DX station handles a large volume of cards and can’t keep up with it themselves.