There is an excellent substitute for LOTW. It is called "eQSL.cc". It even will print and mail you a real card plus you can download or upload the image of the real card. It is very easy to use and i prefer it over LOTW.
Les W4SCO www.logwindow.com www.myweblinks.cc
At 12:25 AM 1/25/2007, you wrote:
One of the other nuisances of LoTW is that is definitely NOT rover-friendly. For example, each location i operate from has to be submitted as a separate file. As a rover, until recently, i had more locations that i have operated from than confirmed grid squares! Yet it's the rovers who provide the rare grid squares and make life more interesting for the rest of us. Roving can be alot of work, and contact made as rovers don't even count towards most awards.
I'm not sure LoTW handles grid square boundaries properly and it seems even less likely it handles grid square corners at all... I ended up writing my own software for preparing QSL cards and LoTW is one of my biggest headaches.
On the other hand, if God[dess] Forbid, i drop dead tomorrow [and have not designated a QSL manager in my will], people will still have a way of their confirming QSOs with me.. And perhaps someday all of this won't have to be done by mail. But alas, at this point, my confirmation rate via LoTW is about 1.5% (and that is quite an improvement over a year ago). It's a step in the right direction, but it's got a long ways to go.
So it would be nice if LoTW became more friendly to VHF-and-above operators (as i don't think satellite operators are the only ones suffering) and they come up with an automated way of designating satellites (such as utilizing the current KEPS [plus an 'alias' file so they can match commonly used names which differ from the NORAD names]). A lot have gone up recently, albeit so far, most are telemetry-only birds.
Finally, one of the nice things about the paper cards that is lacking on LoTW is the personal touch in the comments on a card. This is included in LoTW submissions as the 'QSLMSG' field, but one does not get that field back in the "ARRL Logbook of the World Status Report" which one has a matching contact, alas. So i'll keep sending out the paper ones in the foreseeable future, there does not seem to be an adequate substitute...
-- KD6PAG (Networking Old-Timer, Satellite QRPer)
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