On Fri,12/30/2016 6:10 PM, W0MU wrote:
Postage overseas is beyond ridiculous these days. K1ZM said it costs
more to ship his book overseas than the book costs!
Yes. The cost of international postage and shipping have made paper QSLs
a luxury that few of us can afford. Sure, having a paper card for a
rare or difficult QSO is nice, but those costs have made it an
anachronism. Electronic QSLing has to be our standard practice. Last I
looked, my average cost for mailing my card and an SASE to a DX station
has reached $3.50 and was fast approaching $4 as more countries raise
their rates. As several others have noted, that's not ARRL's fault!
I don't support everything the ARRL does but I am not sure they are
completely to blame here.
From where I sit, LOTW is one of the very best things ARRL has done for
ham radio in the last 20 years. I no longer bother with awards that
won't accept LOTW or eQSL. That rules out county awards and it rules out
IOTA unless and until IOTA gets a workable and user-friendly electronic
method going that doesn't require paper cards.
I agree with Charly that the biggest problem with LOTW is getting more
hams to use it. I don't know what the obstacles are, but it needs
serious attention. I think part of it is motivation -- ham radio is
pretty much run by we old guys who don't have a dog in the race. We have
our 300+ countries, our Honor Rolls, our band slots, so many of us don't
"get" what it means to new hams. I'm certainly aware of it -- when I
moved across the country 10 years ago, I started over on all my awards.
It doesn't seem fair to me to count QSOs made 2,000 miles closer to the
DX. LOTW has saved my thousands of dollars in postage as I've filled
nearly 2,200 band and mode slots. That's enough to buy a couple of nice
radios!
As to the boxes and boxes of JA cards that have clogged the Bureau
system to the point of paralysis -- I have boxes full and no longer
respond to JA cards. Indeed, several years ago, I stopped responding to
any paper cards from stations that don't put their logs on LOTW. When I
was a kid in ham radio, we said that a QSL was the final courtesy of a
QSO, and we paid the postage ourselves. In 2016, LOTW is the final
courtesy of a QSO.
I'm happy to kick in to support a DXpedition, but I'm unwilling to dump
my retirement savings into the world's postal systems.
73, Jim K9YC
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