K9ZW QSL Hiatus – Stated November 2022 and Expect to run 6 months or so

My direct QSLing is on temporary Hiatus.

Actually the slow down started around Thanksgiving 2022, as I planned to take a QSLing break due to a planned temporary time load that included helping various family while they dealt with medical things.

That extra help ended up running more than two months, and included managing other’s affairs while they healed.

Then QDure dumped over ten thousand domestic QSL cards into the ARRL bureau system, who arranged freight so I could at least retrieve the cards. So in my office is 50kgs of completed cards awaiting envelopes and postage.

While doing double duty a lot of my stuff evened up put on hold, with a couple items needing attention before QSLing resumes.

And the QDure cards need to be processed. I have an idea of a system to start whittling away at the mountain of cards, and hope I will be allowed to bulk mail outgoing cards in say 1000 card lots.

I will keep posting logs to eQSL and QRZ.com. Periodic LoTW uploads will happen, maybe every other month or so.

Direct QSLing largely is on hold until I catch up though.

73

Steve
K9ZW

QDure QSL Service Misfire – That Old Domestic to Domestic Bureau Issue

Eighty Lbs. (36 Kg) of K9ZW Outgoing QSL Cards

Half of this is my fault by being too pumped up about clearing my monstrous backlog of QSL cards with a simple download followed by a PayPal payment.

I never thought through the QDure process, and what happened is all the DX cards went to their appropriate places, but the USA-to-USA domestic cards arrived in bulk at the ARRL Bureau in Newington CT – some 79 pounds (36 kilograms) of bulk cards.

Whoopsie, that isn’t they way the system works at the ARRL

Fortunately Rose-Anne KB1DMW was kind enough to contact me by email, and I have sent a payment to cover FedEx delivery of the bulk cards to my QTH.

I am not certain how many QDure QSL cards are in a 79 lbs stack, but I would guess north of 8000 at least. (I pulled 100 cards and weighed them – there are bit over 10,000 cards in this shipment!)

Ten Lbs. (4.5 Kg) Box of QSL Cards – the other box is 7x this amount

So my next step will be to figure out if these cards are organized in a way I that helps me slowly dispatch them, purge known duplicate cards, and figure out the label, envelop and posting part.

Sounds like a considerable chore ahead to organize, cull out verifiable duplicates, push out envelopes and mail the cards out.

As the cards have all the QSO information already printed on them, my busy work is fractionalized.

It looks like from initial sampling that 2-4% of the cards are DX station cards that need to go back to the ARRL Bureau.

Given the scale of the remaining project, it is time to look into software & hardware options that can reduce the time sink and checkbook drain.  Definitely need to look into ways to reduce the postage, as I really do not relish the idea of buying 100 rolls of stamps at $60/each.

No timeframe yet on completing the task, as until I realized that the cards would end up here I had not allocated time or more budget for the project.

But it will get done – eventually!

[Of course the equal amount of K9ZW to DX station QDure cards were appropriately sent to the respective bureaus, so I am good there!]

73

Steve
K9ZW

An Unusual QSL Batch

August 1st 2022 DX QSL card haul (was four envelopes)

The NIDXA W9 bureau (Northern Illinois DX Association) is awesome and fairly regularly I will get one their brown NIDXA envelopes with another batch of inbound QSL cards. (Link to NIDXA is https://qsl.nidxa.org/get-cards/)

Each envelope contains roughly 10-11 cards, an amount sized to best manage the postal costs.

Every now and then I might get two of these brown NIDXA envelopes in a given day, or back to back on successive days.

Monday August 1st (2022) my inbound mail was unusual, as there were Four NIDXA envelopes!  Each had the typical 10-11 cards in them!  Woo Hoo!

The breakdown by country was:

• 5 cards from Holland
• 1 card from Belgium
• 3 cards from the Ukraine
• 5 cards from Japan
• 29 cards from Germany

Quite a nice batch of QSL cards.

Other than replying to direct QSL cards received, I haven’t done a bulk DX QSL card print since well before the pandemic.

For my DX outbound I had been using GlobalQSL but they seemed to have shut shop during the pandemic.  I haven’t been able to find out the backstory, but with the modest credit I had with GlobalQSL I also depended on them for reference on to what date I had QSLed up to in my logs.

Once I figure out what date to start from and filter out domestic QSOs, I will to find a new service.

One that I am trying out is the Spanish QDure service – https://qsl.ure.es/en/ as they seem ready to handle the many thousand DX cards in arrears that I want to catch up on.  I’ve done 15,000 QSL cards as a trial order with QDure and will see how this works out.  As it turns out they will do Domestic QSLs for me as well.  Kind of curious how that works out, but it is worth the try!

Looking for any other suggestions where I can download my QSO data and have cards printed and sent to bureaus?

73

Steve
K9ZW

K9ZW Paper QSLs starting to flow

After a very long hiatus I’ve started the QSL card process. First batches will focus on responding to SASEs and a couple friends/local hams who I really owed QSL cards to.

Second prioritization are fellow veterans and received QSL cards that caught my eye.

First batch readied and went out in the mail today (08FEB21) .

Thought I had grabbed a photo of the two dozen envelopes which contained around three dozen QSL cards. Turns out through operator error I took a lovely video of some of the outgoing mail sitting patiently on my breakfast table.

Here is a picture taken from the video:

Part of the outgoing first batch

The whole catch-up QSL process will take quite a few months as I work off the backlog.

73

Steve
K9ZW

More New K9ZW QSL Cards

More new K9ZW QSL Cards (upper right is a guest card) – Fronts

My remaining three designs arrived from printing, along with a variation made up as a “Guest Operator’s QSL Card” for people operating from my Washington Island neighbor & friend George W9EVT’s station.

These are updates to designs Jeff K1NSS did for me back in the 2014-2015 timeframe, that I never had printed as physical QSL cards. A series of distractions, an anticipated QTH move that would have required rework before printing that didn’t happen in the end, and our actual home QTH move kept putting the project on the back burner.

New K9ZW “Circle-n-Select” QSO Cards

‌The first two designs of my new QSL cards arrived and I took a moment to fill out an imaginary QSO with myself to see how they would work.

K9ZW Circle-n-Select QSL Card in B&W

K9ZW Circle-n-Select QSL Card in Color version

Jeff K1NSS worked with a concept I suggested to make a quick to fill out card covering the the complexity of having combinations of various working positions, station/antenna locations, available radios and antennas.