[RTTY] BARTG Sprint Rules Questions

[Ed Muns]

Jim, N7US wrote:
> Regarding Ed's question #4:  My FCC license specifies my 
> location as Illinois. Do I use N7US or must I use N7US/9?  If 
> the latter, I won't participate, as it complicates LOTW, 
> requiring a separate certificate.

I am in this situation, call sign W0YK operating in US call area 6.  I never
append '/6' to my call sign, but of course the BARTG Sprint requires it.
Since my LoTW account did not provide for W0YK/6 QSOs, I was interested in
what it would take to upload my log, correctly, to LoTW after the contest on
Sunday.  Turns out, it was trivial.

1.  Per Jim's comment above, I understood that I needed to "sign" my BARTG
Sprint log (call sign W0YK/6) with a "certificate" for W0YK/6, not my normal
W0YK certificate.  It took all of sixty seconds to run the TQSL Cert
program, create a W0YK/6 "certificate request" and submit to ARRL.  The
immediate response from the LoTW server was that I had exceeded the number
of certificates and a ARRL LoTW staff person would review.  (I have some
foreign call signs in addition to being trustee for a number of US club call
signs for which I submit log data to LoTW.)

2.  I thought this might be a problem, but twelve hours later, first thing
Monday morning, my W0YK/6 certificate came into my email.  It took another
second 60-second session to get it installed and create the "tq8" log file
for uploading to LoTW.

3.  The last thing I did was to add a "rule" to my W0YK WAS and DXCC award
accounts to include W0YK or W0YK/6 QSOs.  This also took less than a minute.
In the time it took to do this third step, the LoTW server processed all my
BARTG Sprint QSOs and reflected QSLs for nearly half of them.  BARTG Sprint
was my first RTTY operation from W0YK in 2009 and 45 states were credited
for RTTY QSOs in Triple Play.

So, I didn't experience what I'd call complication, but I know a number of
people have found LoTW difficult and time-consuming to use.  For me, this
was amazingly simple and fast.

Ed - W0YK