[CQ-Contest] LoTW Usage - Will you use it???

[Dick Green]

Bruce,

I would contact the league and see if they will accept a mailed CD-ROM
containing your signed logs (assuming you have CD-R capability.) During the
design phase, there was some talk about accepting large logs via mail, but I
don't know what the final policy decision was. Technically, it doesn't
matter what medium is used to transfer the QSOs because they're signed with
your cert.

Another choice would be to e-mail your zipped ADIF file and cert to a
trusted person who has broadband or can stand the dial-up time. Basically,
this person will be acting as your LoTW QSL Manager. Note that the .TQ6 cert
file you receive via e-mail from ARRL is *not* what you would send to your
trusted friend (i.e., this file is not exportable.) After you load the .TQ6
cert file into your copy of TQSLcert, use the "Certificate... Save" command
to create a cert file that can be exported. This file will have the
extension .P12. You can simply e-mail the .P12 file to your trusted friend,
and he can use the "File... Load Certificate" command to load it into his
copy of TrustedQSL.

It's true that signing each record makes the file much larger, but there are
many advantages to this, not the least of which is that each QSO record can
be independently verified. Also, grouping information does not have to be
stored for each batch of signed records received. The records don't have to
be stored together at all.

73, Dick WC1M

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Sawyer [mailto:n6nt at arrl.net] 
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2003 7:15 PM
> To: cq-contest at contesting.com
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] LoTW Usage - Will you use it???
> 
> 
> I would if I could, but since I can't I won't!  In the first 
> place, the ARRL wants a mailed copy of my license before they 
> will issue me a certificate. I can't mail that until I get 
> back to Little Cayman in another couple of weeks, but even 
> then it won't do me any good.  Once you sign the file it 
> becomes so enormous (I have 143,829 QSOs in the log at the 
> moment) that it would require me many hours to upload the 
> file via a dial-in connection. And since I have to pay by the 
> hour while I'm on Little Cayman, that's way more than I'm 
> willing to spend.  So it will probably be next summer before 
> I can upload the file, the next time I come back to CA.  I 
> would be perfectly willing to upload a zipped ADIF file, but 
> the signed file is a monster. That's the result of applying 
> DSS to every single record in the file.
> 
> Bruce, ZF2NT
> 
> On 26 Sep 2003 Dennis Ponsness wrote:
> 
> > Now that LoTW is up and running, I have a question for the 
> "big guns" as
> > well as the rest of us <grin>...   Will you be uploading 
> your contest logs
> > to LoTW in addition to the regular contest robot?  Myself, 
> I will be 
> > uploading to LoTW on a regular basis (probably after each 'test).  
> > Also, will you "big guns" be uploading past logs as well?  Hey, the 
> > ARRL set up
> a
> > pretty neat system for us to use and it would be a shame not to use 
> > it!
> 
> 
>