This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news.
Back in early January (the 4th), I did a post mentioning that this February was going to be my 50th anniversary of getting my first amateur radio license, my Novice class license. I figured the date based on having a QSL card in an old file box.
The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time of the contact was February 9, 1976 at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC) on Saturday morning. Saturday was February 7th and 0000 UTC would have been 7:00 PM in the evening of Friday, February 6th, EST. For me to be operating Monday, the license would have been received in the mail, before that Monday at 4:15 PM, although it might have come a day or more before that first contact.
If you've been working toward getting a ham license, you've probably heard of QSL cards. There are a couple of handfuls of Q signals in common use, and QSL has got to be one of the most commonly used Q signals. The precise definition is a little wordy, but a common reference says.
I am acknowledging receipt. - ("QSL" as a statement)
Can you acknowledge receipt (of a message or transmission)? ("QSL?" as a question)
It was an old saying 50 years ago that a QSL card is "the final courtesy of making a contact" and you'll still see that saying today. It's not unusual to find that you don't get a card back in reply to every one you send because it's not unusual for one side of the contact to want a card more than the other side. Especially if you work a rare or hard to contact country.
In all the ways that Ham radio hobby has changed over my 50 years, one of the biggest changes has been exchanging QSL cards. As the name implies, for the vast majority of QSLs exchanged in my first couple of years, a QSL card was made out of a postcard-style card with space to write the other guy's address and the details of the contact. I'd write the other guy's address on it, stick a postage stamp on it and drop it in mail. The other end of the contact either did the same thing such that we both got each other's card within a day or two of mailing ours. We can still do that today, but it has been years since I've gotten plain, postcard-style QSL in the mail.
The next level after the postcard dropped in a mailbox was to go to cards in an envelope and using first class mail. That's still a perfectly reasonable way to send cards to guys in our country, and the next level of caring is to enclose an SASE - a Self Addressed, Stamped Envelope - to pay the postage for the guy on the other end. This goes for virtually all of the "first and second" world countries.
The first problem with sending a QSL to some countries is how to pay for their postage. There used to be something we could buy at a US Post Office called an International Reply Coupon or IRC that was redeemable for postage in other countries. I'm not sure if they still exist in some places but these days I regularly see other hams saying where they live the postal services won't accept the IRCs. There have been times when the safe way was to buy fresh postage for the country you're mailing to and either put that on your SASE or the other guy could put that postage on the reply envelope. You could include a couple of bucks in the envelope with your card and the SAE, but that predictably led to mail being stolen from the guy it was intended for so someone could pocket the couple of bucks. The post office employees would learn who the guys were that had the radio towers and regularly got the large, thick envelopes that contained cash.
With the advent of computers and phones everywhere for everything, that has also affected QSLing. There are services that keep a little memory file for every licensee, like QRZ, and licensees can edit their "Biography" page to include info on how to QSL. In the last decade, hams started turning to various online payment services like PayPal, with the end result being you can send an email to them, listing all the contact details (time, signal reports, frequency, mode and all), send them something like $5 and get a bunch of contacts confirmed.
In a parallel move to using online services for looking up addresses and paying for QSLs, a group of electronic QSL services got started. You upload the details for one or a bunch of QSOs you've had and depending on the service, you can either make your own QSL or use standard cards they have.
If you're chasing a particular award, check their rules for what an acceptable electronic QSL is. One of the best services is the American Radio Relay League's Logbook Of The World or LOTW. A competitor is just called eQSL.cc and I've used both of those for as long as they're been around. A startup that's sending me a lot of cards these days is QSL World. I haven't yet joined or supported them, but I've replied to the cards I've gotten. While I'm not 100% sure of this, my guess is that LOTW works a lot like the ARRL's DXCC works. You can submit log entries that get security checks when you upload them, or you can send them physical cards, but I don't know how they handle the electronic cards from eQSL, QSL World or others.
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