Saturday, September 8, 2012

The ups and downs of QSLing


One aspect of amateur radio which can be both rewarding and frustrating is the exchange of QSL cards. I get a lot of QSL requests in through the IRTS bureau. Having processed some 700-800 cards over the past number of months, I had the pleasure yesterday of sorting all the outgoing cards into continents and countries so I could send them to the outgoing manager. Above is a photo showing the sorted cards. It can take a number of hours to process each incoming bundle and fill out the return card and mark everything off in the log. This amount of cards probably took about five or six hours to process. It is a time consuming business!


On the slightly less frustrating side of the QSL bureau is when you get some nice cards incoming. Today I received 183 incoming cards from the bureau. There were quite a few from the 'usual suspects' including Germany/Sloevnia/Bulgaria etc., but some nice and unusual ones too. Above is a card from JD1BMH, Ogasawara Island, which would be a new DXCC confirmed. Also on left is DP1POL from Antarctica. Other highlights include ZD8W Ascension Island, 9M2TO West Malaysia, and a bunch of cards from Japan. Nice.

1 comment:

  1. Sure qsl'ing is a time consuming business! So, time for LOTW. LOTW is the qsl method of 21 century. With ARRL's LOTW you can free your clubs staff from collecting and sending cards hihi.
    Enjoy the hobby, good DX.
    73

    ReplyDelete

All comments are moderated - so spam will not get through.