{"id":1045,"date":"2011-12-31T16:01:19","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T16:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2012-01-01T03:26:24","modified_gmt":"2012-01-01T03:26:24","slug":"the-fun-of-electronic-qsl-lotw-and-eqsl-cc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/the-fun-of-electronic-qsl-lotw-and-eqsl-cc\/","title":{"rendered":"The fun of electronic QSL (LoTW and eQSL.cc)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen a few messages from AR over the years saying &#8220;can&#8217;t see the point of that LoTW or eQSL.cc&#8221; so I was going to put the other side of the debate&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve only been licensed since 2003, but in the last few years I have completed some 5,000 home-based QSO and around 3,000 portable \/ mobile. If I add in the RTTY contests, then we work around 2,000 over the 48Hrs..<\/p>\n<p>So, just working on my own QSO, its around 8,000. Let&#8217;s assume I only QSL by receipt, so thats around 50% of the Q&#8230;so I need to provide 4,000 cards.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong &#8211; I have no problem sending people cards if they send me one via the bureau &#8230;but I see no need to send one for every QSO. This is for a number of reasons&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Why send a card to everyone, when a large percentage will never make it (not in bureau, no envelops, not interested in collecting) and many other reasons.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0Cost, do I really need to send a card to a G station to &#8220;confirm&#8221; the QSO ?<\/li>\n<li>Cost, not only of the cards themselves, but the time it takes to complete them, postage, qsl managers&#8217; time, bureau time, post operative time (very PC) and the fact that many will sit in the draw gathering dust&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So if it is not the time, money, natural waste, the space they take up or the fact many just never get to their locations what could it be&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>[fx..drum roll]<\/em> <strong> LoTW (log book of the World).\u00a0 <\/strong>Yes an electronic based QSL system. It takes up no space, is reasonably easy to set-up and &#8230;.well best of all FREE. Oh that&#8217;s right it doesn&#8217;t take up any time, or require you to send bits of paper in the post&#8230;.or indeed use any natural resources and its instant.<\/p>\n<p>Remember the day when you used to take pictures on a film camera, sure it was fun waiting to see what you got back in the post&#8230; It usually took a week or so, cost a fortune and more times than not you just had pictures with stickers saying &#8220;Note blur \/ motion shake&#8221;. Oh yes, the joy of paying lots of money and waiting ages only to find out 4 out of 24 of your pictures are any good&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The old paper bureau is a bit like that, and then exactly what do you do with the 800 cards from DL stations ?<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully eQSL (for the not serious contester) or LoTW have come to the rescue. They are free, quick, reliable and best of all back up your log for free.<\/p>\n<p>Now, what did I do with that pile of cards from DL&#8230;sorry must dash need to write out more cards \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>73 Dave M0TAZ (email: <a href=\"mailto:m0taz@lefars.org.uk\">m0taz@lefars.org.uk<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen a few messages from AR over the years saying &#8220;can&#8217;t see the point of that LoTW or eQSL.cc&#8221; so I was going to put the other side of the debate&#8230; I&#8217;ve only been licensed since 2003, but in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/the-fun-of-electronic-qsl-lotw-and-eqsl-cc\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-qsl","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p22sia-gR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefars.org.uk\/WPblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}