QSL complications

Last night I was home alone as my wife was attending a meeting and I had planned to get up to date with my outgoing QSL cards.

I installed a piece of software called BV7 QSL Labels on my new laptop and imported my custom QSL templates from my old computer. These templates let me print QSL data directly on my QSL cards so no labels are needed. I exported two QSL files from Logger32, one for LA1TPA operations and one for LA1TPA/P operations. The portable QSOs are all from SOTA activations and I have a QSL template for this only. This template prints SOTA summit reference and "/P" on the cards. I printed a lot of cards and all of them were OK.

When I was done with the SOTA cards I imported the other QSL file and printed 80(!!) cards before I found out I was still using the template I designed for SOTA cards! Obviously I had to throw away 80 cards and as these were my last cards I have to wait for another batch of cards from Gennady at UX5UO print before I can finish the job...

Licenced for five years

On November 4th I had been licenced for five years so I decided to take another look at my electronic log data. I used a software called ADIF Filter by Marek SP7DQR to make the statistics.

• 31% of my QSOs are made in 2010 while only 3.2% in 2006
• 37.2% of my QSOs are on 20m and 29.9% on 40m
• 57.9% of my QSOs are made while operating /Portable
• My QSL return rate is 33.5%
• I have worked 76 DXCCs, all with 5W SSB

Digi QSO!

I received a new USB Soundcard for my laptop in the mail today and decided to have a try on PSK31 tonight. I struggled a bit to get CAT PTT from FLDIGI to work with my K3/10 but after some googling I found a rig.xml from Julian G4ILO that worked. I have a lot of QRM in my shack and only an indoor magnetic loop antenna so I was amazed when I found out I could see a lot of stations in the waterfall. I decided to answer a CQ on 40m from E74QA and was exited when Eno from Cazin in Bosnia-Herzegovina came right back to me. This is actually not my first PSK31 qso as I had two QSOs back in October 2007.