[UK-CONTEST] How can I renew my LOTW certificate?

[Dave Sergeant]

On 26 Oct 2004 at 19:15, Doug Roberts wrote:

> You need to be running the 'TQSL Certificate' program - that's
> tqslcert.exe, not tqsl.exe.  When that window opens, click to
> highlight the certificate you need to renew.  From the menu bar at the
> top of the window, click on 'Certificate'.  'Renew Certificate' is the
> option at the bottom of the drop-down menu (but is greyed out unless
> you previously highlighted a certificate).
> 
> I have certificates for six different callsigns, all were renewed a
> month or so ago with no problems!

It seems you can only do this if you renew before your existing 
certificate has actually expired. Until I saw these posts I was not 
even aware the certificates had an expiry date and by the time of the 
first posting it was already too late.

As I found this morning:

Once the certificate has expired it does not appear in your list at 
all, although the original .tq6 file is still in the folder. There is 
therefore no certificate to click on in tqslcert and the only option 
available is to request a new certificate (and of course you no 
longer have a valid certificate to sign it with). Doing this may well 
require you to send your validation information to ARRL again.

The LOTW site indicates I should have received an email telling me to 
renew before it expired, but that would have gone to my old email 
address and probably went in the BTY Spamguard bucket. It also 
helpfully says 'it is important to renew your certificates before 
they expire!" (their exclamation mark).

I imagine MANY others have encountered this problem. Any idea how to 
best get round it? I have currently produced a .tq5 for submittal for 
a new certificate but am hesitating at the moment to send it off.

73 Dave G3YMC

http://www.davesergeant.com