LOTW

After uploading my contest QSO's from the CQ World Wide CW Contest, I decided to see how well I am doing on LOTW. I think more and more stations are taking the plunge and doing electronic QSL's. For me, this makes perfect sense. Yes, I do like the old fashioned QSL cards and I don't at all mind exchanging them. I have every QSL card I have ever received from day one. But, with today's postage rates and the weak USD, it just makes perfect sense to me to use such a great resource. It may take a bit to set up and get running but most software programs make uploading and downloading to e-QSL and LOTW extremely easy.

With that in mind, I looked at my QSL numbers using LOTW. I currently have 25,903 QSO's in my logbook. Of those, 12,396 have QSL records attached to them! Not bad as my percentage of QSL confirmations have increased over the last two years from just under 30% to 47.8%. Using LOTW only, I have confirmed WAS (Worked All States) on SSB, CW, RTTY, and am working on several other modes and band endorsements. I also have 129 countries confirmed via LOTW out of 185 worked and 158 confirmed via cards AND LOTW.

I just started to look at e-QSL stuff and have 80 + countries confirmed for my DXCC there and all 50 United States. Now that CQ accepts e-QSL confirmations, I think I may attempt to file for my first ever CQ awards once I get the confirmations that I need.

QSL'ing can be extremely expensive especially if confirming over seas contacts. It took me a while to get on the "boat" when it came to electronic QSL'ing but I'm glad I finally did. Oh, and in case you were wondering if hard copy QSL's dropped to near nothing, that is not the case. I get many confirmations both electronic and hard copy for the same QSO, which I don't mind in the least. I'm sure as we progress into the future, hard copy QSL cards will take a back seat to other means of confirming QSO's but until then, I enjoy them all. The bureau drops are fun but often times exhausting due to the amount of work involved to confirm several hundred at a time. I had an offer from an awesome QSL Manager to take over my QSL'ing duties but I'm still having way too much fun doing the "paperwork" side of this hobby. Moreover, one tends to collect a nice broad range of postal stamps from all over the world.