My musings on Ham Radio … and stuff!
It’s been a while. Life gets in the way, doesn’t it?
Just to update a few statistics …
Other than that, there’s not a lot to report. I’m still active, but at a reduced rate from the Pandemic times. I have good intentions, but as I said, life gets in the way!
73 de Dick N4BC
I just calculated my QSO confirmation rate on QRZ.com, and I find that I have a rate of 82% … That’s great! On LOTW, my percentage is a bit lower … 73.5%. Still, both really high percentages. To me, it proves that if you make it easy enough, hams are more than happy to confirm.
I use N3FJP ACLog, and have it set up to upload confirmations to eLog, LOTW, and ClubLog as soon as I hit ENTER. For QRZ, I have to go to QRZ.com and manually download from LOTW to their logbook. Not hard at all.
I really don’t chase many awards anymore after 53 years of this hobby, but I realize that many others do, so I upload my QSOs to all these databases, and am happy to do so. Anything that helps others’ enjoyment of this great hobby is good with me!
73 de Dick N4BC
Not the red condiment … just a few notes about what I’ve been up to.
I just did a quick calculation of confirmations. Confirmations are running at 80.3% on QRZ and at 71.2% on on LOTW. I must admit, I NEVER saw rates that high, even when I was at a DX location years ago. Electronic confirmation has revolutionized QSLing. As a practical matter, I really don’t care as much as I did when I first started out fifty-three years ago. I still really appreciate the occasional physical card in the mail … very few and far between nowadays.
I haven’t been active much lately. I’ve had other things to compete for my time. One BIG life-changing thing I’ve done is get my first hearing aids. Truthfully, after the first week, I could kick myself for not doing this years ago. Meetings had become a real ordeal. I could hear fine, but understanding what was said was the problem. My problem is high-frequency loss … moderately severe. That’s where all the speech intelligibility lies. Too many years working around aircraft and in a shipyard, back before hearing protection was a big thing. It’s been a real eye-opener … or should I say ear-opener? 😀 😀
I’ll try to work a bit harder to get back into the radio groove and catch you all later.
73 de Dick N4BC