SIGNOFF

[steve.rodowicz at circellar.com]

SIGNOFF


>From De Syam <syam at Glue.umd.edu>  Fri Nov 24 02:42:25 1995
From: De Syam <syam at Glue.umd.edu> (De Syam)
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 1995 21:42:25 -0500 (EST)
Subject: JA QSL Return Rates
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951123212820.4154A-100000 at cappuccino.eng.umd.edu>

I am a serious QSL'er and therefore I observe the content of each bureau 
shipment I get with some care.

The last two shipments I received from the Bureau contained an inordinate 
number of JA QSL's even though the sunspots of the last couple years have 
reduced the number of JA QSO's I have made considerably.  Therefore I 
took particular care to note the dates of the QSO's on the JA cards, and 
was interested to find that most of them had dates 1991-1992, even though 
there were some included from early 1995.  

I am therefore postulating that the JARL Bureau was overwhelmed by the 
number of QSL's it was called on to handle during the high-sunspot years 
and simply placed a number of the outgoing cards "in the closet" until 
such time as it had the chance to sort them out to the various bureaus 
and ship them.  Now that the lack of sunspots have reduced the volume of 
current cards in the system the closet door has been opened and the piles 
inside are gradually being reduced as those cards are being reunited with 
the outgoing stream.  Thus a measurement of QSLing percentage which 
excludes only QSO's from the past 12 months might reflect a bias against 
the JA QSL'ers.  Though I have kept no statistics, it is my impression 
that the JA's are among the world's best QSL'ers.

                                       Very 73,

                                        Fred Laun, K3ZO

P. S.  Since the JARL Callbook lists only JARL Members, even that 
Callbook represents only some 10-15% of the Japanese amateurs, although 
one assumes that most of the active contesters/DX'ers are among this 
10-15%.  But the fact remains that some 85% of Japan's amateurs are not 
listed in ANY Callbook, much less the U.S.-published Radio Amateur 
Callbook.  The same is true in Thailand, where there are now 124,000 
hams.  The radio club lost so much money printing the first three Thai 
Callbooks that it stopped, so now the vast majority of Thailand's hams 
are not to be found in any Callbook anywhere.