[VHFcontesting] "Stop Gap Proposal for LoTW & VUCC" Bill Moore Replies

[Les Rayburn]

Here in the SE, we're very fortunate to have a Division Director who is also an active VHF Man. Greg Sarratt, W4OZK has been active in VHF contests for years, and holds several VUCC awards himself. 

He recently took the idea of a "stop gap" proposal to ARRL HQ and ran it past Bill Moore, NC1L, who is the Awards Director for his thoughts on the proposal. Bill has raised some interesting objections to the proposal, that may invalidate it. In any event, I hope the proposal, and the endorsement of it by several Division Directors will serve to keep this issue on the front burner until the IT folks can get it resolved via the software. In the meantime, I'm going to the Post Office to buy some of their "forever stamps" to send out yet another batch of paper QSL requests. 

Thanks to Greg for taking this proposal forward, and for others who wrote or contacted their Section Managers and Division Directors to endorse it. Bill's response to the proposal is attached below: 

73,

Les Rayburn, N1LF



Thanks for your e-mail and for also keeping this issue on the front burner for us. You are not the only one discouraged by this but for me the reasons are much different from yours. 

 Your suggestion of getting the card checkers to view online data from LoTW directly is interesting, but one that may not be 100% feasible. This would contain (or lack) the same data as I note in the 2 attachments here. I selected 2 out of 5 contacts from your LoTW account. >From this I can tell it is from your grid  but the DX station failed to note their grid when they did their certificate so their grid is missing. (there are probably thousands of QSOs like this in LoTW). Having a card checker sort through this, and many would probably have little idea of what they are actually looking at (paper or what is on the screen) unless they are sufficiently familiar (trained) with LoTW, could be an effort in futility. The suggestions to have checkers view reports from LoTW would not be beneficial and having checkers potentially spending hours scouring someone's LoTW account I don't think many would be likely to want to do this. (If you submitted an LoTW-only application with 300 grids can you imagine having a checker sorting through all of this, one by one.).

 I wish I had a better idea on when this will happen but right now I don't. No one wants this more than me. From a work perspective the amount of time it could save (not to mention the costs) would make me one happy dude. 



If I hear of any progress on this I will try and let you know. 

 

Bill Moore NC1L

Awards Branch Manager

ARRL - The national association for Amateur RadioT

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