On QSLing

I am hav­ing a new batch of QSLs print­ed up. I am tak­ing a mul­ti-pronged approach, and try­ing a cou­ple of ven­dors this time.

1. I am a big fan of cus­tom QSLs, and hav­ing a graph­ic design­er wife (very expen­sive in the form of shoes and hand­bags) it is quite achiev­able for me. My recent iter­a­tion is some­thing that I have been toy­ing with over the past few years ref­er­enc­ing my involve­ment in the DIY tube hi-fi audio hob­by, and my gen­er­al fas­ci­na­tion with anachro­nis­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion hardware.

2. I am active on Log­book of the World (my opin­ions at a lat­er date). I wish more peo­ple used this some­what dif­fi­cult system.

3. I am active on eQSL (my opin­ions at a lat­er date). I wish more peo­ple used this some­what sim­plis­tic system.

4. I have fold­ers as the incom­ing QSL BURO (W7) for old and cur­rent calls. I also use the out­go­ing ARRL QSL ser­vice when I have some­thing DX

5. I am a big fan of QSL cards, but have often been very lax in send­ing. For instance, I uncov­ered a box of QSL cards from the 80s…addressed, unsent, embar­rass­ing­ly. You know, real life has a way of get­ting in the way of a col­lege stu­dent (then). I will get around to send­ing them at some point.

Which brings me to:

6. I have 100 QSL cards com­ing from Glob​alQSL​.com. I am going to give this a try to see how I like the image qual­i­ty. The ben­e­fits of this sys­tem is I can upload my logs in ADIF for­mat and have them print­ed with the log info and for­ward­ed direct­ly to the coun­try’s incom­ing QSL bureau. Not bad pric­ing I think, and as soon as I eye­ball the 100 blanks com­ing my way I like the idea of using them.

7. I have been look­ing at both KB3IFH and UX5UO, flop­ping back and forth between the quick con­ve­nience of KB3IFH and the bet­ter-cost-but-longer-lead-times of UX5UO. I just received some cards today, both print­ed by UX5UO…very nice!

Even though I like the con­ve­nience of eQSL, and the trust­ed ver­i­fi­ca­tion for awards by LoTW, I am a bit old fash­ioned and pre­fer to send cards along. I quite enjoy my Feld-Hell con­tacts and my JT65 exper­i­ments, along with some real­ly fine ragchews…I want to com­mem­o­rate these with a spe­cial card. And in a few weeks I will have my next ver­sion to send out.