The current drama with the Logbook of the World (LoTW) and its prolonged outage has made me think about the topic of QSLing and why it is or seems to be important to me.

What kind of QSL?

I am also concerned with the question of what type of QSL is really for me: electronic or paper?

Electronic QSL is fast and mostly free of charge. On the other hand, the current platforms are outdated, complex, not fraud-proof or only free of charge with limited functionality.

Paper cards are slow, often expensive and very time-consuming but are a nice memory (especially of special QSOs) and thus materialise immaterial events. You can also show them to non-hams to make the experience more tangible for them. Furthermore, they add a personal touch to the personal experience of a QSO, e.g. with a picture or handwritten greetings.

Why QSLing?

Apart from the positive aspects of a paper card: Why is the confirmation itself so important to some or why do I believe it is? I can think of the following reasons:

Confirmation is required for awards. Here it is important that you can trust the confirmation, i.e. that you cannot cheat. However, this raises the question of why an award has to have such a highly official character? Who is interested in such an award? Actually, only the person who has it or would like to have it. Isn’t it enough to analyse your own logbook? Isn’t it enough to know that you have worked 100 different DXCCs or all Japanese prefectures? Why do you pay money to have the printed diploma sent to you (Disclaimer: I’ve done all that too)? In the end, it’s only for yourself anyway and you have all the data, can analyse it and be happy that you’ve done it. It’s not about documents that give you new band privileges or a better job. Why do you need the document? So that you believe in yourself? To make it more tangible? Maybe it’s the same as with the paper cards: To materialise something immaterial.

You do it for the sake of others, i.e. to help your communication partner to get their awards. In the end, the same applies to me here as I have already written about awards. But if you are realistic, hardly any award hunter is interested in a QSL card from a German radio amateur.

You feel a QSO is only half done if it is unconfirmed. Perhaps you are not sure whether you are actually in the logbook of the communication partner or, even worse, you are unsure whether you have correctly copied the other person’s callsign. Reasons for this could be a confusing pile-up or very poor conditions. The question is, however, whether the QSO is not generally incomplete. All you would really need in this case is a simple feedback, a kind of ping from their logbook to your logbook. But that’s another thing.

Why thinking about this?

Why all the thought? With a modern logging software, electronic QSLs via LoTW, eQSL, QRZ etc. are no real effort. The uploads and downloads happen automatically in the background, so you don’t have to worry about them. Practical, but on the other hand it feels very impersonal. However, the lacking willingness to participate in these QSL mechanisms also leads to exclusion. It is not uncommon to read that an interesting station is QRV, but that there is no interest in a QSO because it does not do LoTW. I have to admit that I also practiced this when I tried to work specific entities in the past.

What now?

I could just leave everything as it is: simply automatically transmit each QSL electronically to the various services (if available at the time) and exchange paper cards in special cases. But what happens if I limit myself to the latter? Am I taking the fun out of it or am I taking the pressure out of a hobby that shouldn’t be stressful but should be fun? And by pressure I don’t mean the process of confirming the QSO, but the pressure of wanting to achieve this and that. Or just upload everything but ignore the results? That wouldn’t work in my case.

Sounds like I’ll have to find out through an experiment…