The venerable QSL bureau

Foundations of Amateur Radio

One of the oldest global aspects of our hobby, other than actually using the radio, is the QSL bureau. It uses a postcard-like system to confirm that two stations made contact, sent via the postal service as a so-called QSL card. Of course, that only works if you have each other's address which after World War II was somewhat difficult. As a result the QSL bureau was born.

Intended as a single point of contact for a country, a local QSL bureau consists of one or more volunteers, paid staff or contractors, who act as the distribution point for incoming and outgoing QSL cards. If you and I agreed to confirm our contact via the bureau, my QSL card to you would be sent to the VK outgoing QSL bureau, which would hold my card until there were sufficient outgoing cards from all over Australia to your country to package them all up and send them to the incoming QSL bureau in your country.

Your QSL bureau would then wait until there were enough QSL cards for your region to send it on, where it would eventually get into your hands in a variety of ways, via the postal service, through your local club, or at a local hamfest where the QSL bureau might have a stall. Your QSL card to me would make a similar, reverse, journey.

This process could take weeks or sometimes years.

Although not fast, this worked for many decades, but once electronic communications and computers started appearing, combined with increased costs associated with privatised international postal services, the wheels started coming off.

Getting access to historic documents has proven challenging. I can tell you that over the years the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, has coordinated and controlled how the QSL bureaus should work. For example, a resolution adopted in 1985 and updated in 2009 "strongly encouraged" its member societies to accept incoming QSL cards for all amateurs in their country, regardless of affiliation. It also instructed QSL bureaus to only send cards to the official QSL bureau if there was more than one.

Several years ago, the IARU administrative council recognised several trends, among them the environmental impact of unwanted cards generated in bulk by computer logging software, lower levels of adoption and ultimately the closing of some smaller QSL bureaus after being overwhelmed by undeliverable cards from increasingly popular holiday DXpeditions.

In September 2018, the IARU adopted resolution 18-1 that stated that it "resolves that member societies are encouraged to continue to offer QSL bureau service in their countries, exchanging cards with the bureaus of other member-societies, for as long as doing so is economically justifiable, and further resolves that amateurs are encouraged to adopt confirmation practices, including but not limited to using electronic confirmation systems, that reduce the volume of unwanted and undeliverable QSL cards being introduced into the bureau system."

This resolution took effect on New Year's Day, 2019. I'll also note that the IARU has its own year 2000 issue, having been in existence for nearly a century, its resolutions are named after the last two digits of the year followed by a sequential number, so resolution 25-1 could refer to 1925 or 2025, but I digress.

The internet has introduced several confirmation processes. The most vocal of these is "Logbook of The World", or LoTW. I'm not a fan and haven't been for some time. I'll get into why in a moment. Other contenders are eQSL.cc, qsl.net, qrz.com, clublog.org and others that have yet to steal the limelight. If I've forgotten the one you run, let me know.

Saying that I'm not a fan of LoTW is understating it. Recent ARRL ransomware payments aside, why do I need to legally prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I made contact with some random amateur? Why does this need to be authenticated, signed with a time-limited certificate and verified with 100 points of identity and why do we continue to roll out new and interesting procedures for what is essentially a postcard saying that on this day, time and frequency we made contact using this mode for the purposes of .. wait for it .. our hobby?

The eQSL website has an interesting statement: "One of the problems with an e-mail based system is that there is no security inherent in that mechanism. Anyone can purport to be P5ABC, and you'll have a difficult time verifying it."

So what .. and what made you think that the postcard ending up in your letterbox was guaranteed to be from P5ABC?

If you're going to the effort of pretending to be P5ABC, what harm does that do in the scheme of things? For that matter, how do you know that the station you talked to on-air was actually P5ABC? I ask because I've spoken to an amateur who recently did some HF direction finding during several popular DXpedition pile-ups. They discovered that there were several stations purporting to be the DXpedition that were not.

So. Right now we're in a situation where many if not all amateurs are connected to the internet. Most will have an email address. You already know mine, [email protected]. If we made contact on-air, send me an email. If what you wrote matches my logs, I'll send you a reply to confirm it.

How do you get the address? One possible approach is to create an online email database where you could submit the email address associated with your callsign and you could look-up a station to contact them.

Another is for member societies to offer email addresses, the ARRL and the WIA already offer this service to current members.

I'll also point out that one of the reasons that the QSL bureau was instigated in the first place was because some addresses for amateurs were not available. If you make contact today and you want to send them an email confirmation the question to ask is simple: "Hey, what's your email address?"

Will that cover everyone?

Nope. Neither does the current system. What it achieves is that my personal private identifying information isn't stored at the ARRL if I'm not a member. Besides, in my opinion a list of email addresses combined with callsigns is hardly something worth getting excited about, unless of course it's used by manufacturers to send out product announcements and discount codes. We should be so lucky.

If you have a better idea, you know how to get in touch. What I can say is that this is the ultimate decentralised QSL system, not unlike the contact you made on HF.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB