Let's talk QSLs

We broached the subject last weekend so let's do some ... instead of calling it brain-dumping, I'll call it experience dumping. 

First, my usual message to people who stop by for non-radio stuff: thanks for coming by and I should be  back to my usual tech topics tomorrow.  

As for the main question, I don't know how far toward the front of your mind this concept is, but your call sign is a much stronger identifier because while names can be very commonly repeated in your city, your call is the only name you have that uniquely identifies you. For example, there may be many (dozens? hundreds?) of people in the US named Joe Walsh, but only one on Earth who goes by the call WB6ACU (and played guitar for the Eagles). The call conveys what country you live in, generally conveys what part of the country for most nations, although not so much in the US for several years. That excludes virtually all of the people who have the same name as you.

A lot of bloggers use their real life names. Clearly, Silicon Graybeard is not my legal, that you can read on my birth certificate, name. I'm not going to use my call here because there are several freebie websites that allow you to search on a call and get the person's mailing address. In this "information age" that opens doors to unscrupulous actors being able to get into your life. In many places, strangers can look up photos of your home, as well as financial details, county tax assessments and other details you may not want widely looked at. I recommend keeping our calls out of the discussion.  

The oldest way I know of getting QSL cards is having a company printing cards do that for you, and it's still as valid as ever.  Those can be single-sided, so mailing address on one side with QSO details on the other. They're marginally cheaper than first class mail in envelopes, 65 cents vs. 82 according to the US Postal Service. Also in this day of home printers as good as any printer you can get, you can print your own.

But I don't think that's what most people are curious about. They're curious about electronic QSLs.  And maybe that brings us to a question we should have started with. 

What do you want your QSL for?

If you want your QSL for "the final courtesy of a QSO" anything from a paper postcard to anything you printed on a color printer will do. There's a host of companies that have sprung up based on the idea of an electronic QSL or eQSL. Many of them work by generating pretty image files, like the typical jpegs, png, or other file formats you see all the time. They then email the file to the other side of the QSO. I have had a dozen or two from a place called https://qslworld.com/, and another, smaller amount that are more clearly homemade. 

The first company that started a parallel business of doing online QSL exchanges that I knew of was eQSL.cc. and that was in the early 2000s. I started an account with them back then and have been a "member" for (guessing) over 20 years. They have a system called Authenticity Guaranteed (AG) that they started to remove the suspicion that computer pictures generated. If I wanted to use an eQSL for some award that another company issues, I'd ask how to do that. 

The problem with these is that if you want the QSL toward any sort of award you need to find out from the place that does the awards what they'll accept. The more popular awards appear to be Worked All States and DX Century Club - both are from the ARRL. Mailed cards are acceptable, but I don't really know if doing something like printing out a jpg QSL card that you got in an email is acceptable. Or how they'd tell. The thing that electronic QSLs face is the same thing online payments face: fakes. If you apply to the ARRL for DXCC sending them a box with 100 QSL cards in it - or 500 like I did in 2009/2010 -  it's more secure than 100 jpgs. 100 paper cards look distinctly different from 100 pictures on a monitor. 

I guess it was last year that I added eight band endorsement to my 5BDXCC. That was done entirely with contacts confirmed by the ARRL's Log of The World (LoTW). That was the cheapest and easiest way to get an endorsement for (at least) 300 QSOs I've ever come across. 

Well, since I have no idea what the majority of people want to know, maybe I should leave it here and say fire away and leave whatever questions you have. Hopefully there's something that's useful or could spur looking around more.  

An illustration of what the LoTW shows you any time you want it. There are options for what you want to display and I did this a little after I got the 8BDXCC endorsement. I've worked DXCC on 6m, but it'll be a while before I cross the 100 confirmed line and apply for 9BDXCC.