LoTW WAS reporting oddities

Contacts

I was just looking at my LoTW WAS account and found some oddities. I emailed their help address to see what they say.

I completed and was awarded LoTW WAS Triple Play #243 which means, forgetting anything before January 1st, I must have completed 50 CW, 50 RTTY and 50 Phone contacts. If I didn’t, I couldn’t have receied the Triple Play Award. When looking at my WAS account and what states are needed on the various bands and band/mode combinations, LoTW says I need 2 phone contacts (Alaska and Hawaii). That would be rather impossible since I would have had to have made and confirmed phone contacts with both states in order to get the Triple Play.

Next, it shows I need a 40m contact with Hawaii in order to have all states on 40m. Well a quick search on LoTW of confirmed QSOs with Hawaii shows multiple 40m contacts including a 40m RTTY contact which was used as part of the Triple Play award.

I didn’t look to see what other awards are listing states that I already have confirmed but I’ll do a bit more investigation once I get an answer on the 2 problems listed above.

73,
K2DSL

EDIT: Boy those ARRL guys are quick! Less then 1 hour from sending an email I received a response from W3IZ (Norm) saying the rules on my WAS account were messed up and that he fixed them for me. I don’t recall ever setting any rules around dates, but not remembering is something I’m good at if you ask my wife.  So I just checked and everything looks good.

In case anyone also runs into something similar, there’s PPT slide show that Norm pointed me to on the LoTW home page at http://www.arrl.org/lotw/ . Off on the right is a link to WAS Accounts as a PowerPoint presentation.

Thanks Norm!

YS4M in El Salvador Confirmed

Contacts

My only contact with an El Salvador station has been confirmed. On Feb 22, 2009 I had a CW contact and sent for a QSL card direct to K9GY in the US. The card came on Monday, 1 day after I submitted all the paperwork for DXCC. I’ll add it to the new ones to send in a few months from now.

73,

K2DSL

Applied for DXCC via LoTW and additional QSL Cards

Contacts

I applied online via LoTW for the mixed and 20m DXCC awards. It certainly isn’t a very obvious process for someone going through this the first time and I still have some questions, but I took the easier way out by over selecting more contacts then I really needed. I ended up with 160 QSO records selected by selecting all Mixed, RTTY, Phone and 20m contacts in LoTW. In addition, I had 19 QSOs via paper QSL cards checked by our local DXCC card checker. Those 19 QSOs add an additional 17 mixed DXCCs and 14 20m DXCCs if I’m counting right.

The total fee for both the initial application for Mixed and 20m DXCC came to $57.60 which breaks down into $12 for the initial application (and covers the 1st certificate), $33.60 for the individual QSO “credits” plus $12 for the 2nd application certificate.

It’ll be a while before the awards are confirmed and issued. Using http://www.arrl.org/awards/dxcc/appstatus.html as my reference, they are processing applications from mid March with about a 5-6 week turnaround time.  That would put my application approval somewhere between the 8th-19th of June.

The larger number of QSO credits submitted was due to selecting Mixed and 20m (the 2 awards I was applying for) as well as Phone and RTTY since they are getting a bit close to the 100 QSO mark and many that fell into the Mixed/20m QSOs were also RTTY and Phone contacts. Now the part that I’m still not clear on is if I had multiple contacts for a DXCC entity and LoTW auto selects one of the contacts for Mixed (say 40m RTTY) and a different one for 20m (phone), there isn’t always a way to tell (that I can find) LoTW to use the 20m one as the Mixed as well. So if I just selected the 20m QSO, would LoTW and the DXCC process know to also apply that QSO to Mixed? I didn’t know so I just took the easy way out and possibly over applied.

Many thanks to all those extraordinary ops that made a contact with me and just as importantly, confirmed the contacts via LoTW or by returning QSL cards to me.

73,
K2DSL

New England QSO Party (NEQP) Recap

Contacts, Contests

I had just a little radio time this weekend and along with the 7 call area QSO Party and the Indiana QSO Party was the New England QSO Party. I made a few contacts on Sat and some on Sunday. New England is close to me so I need to make contacts on 40m and 80m. Well there was very little activity on 40m (and none on 80) when I was at the radio. Later in the day 40m activity picked up and I was able to log some contacts. Ended up with 36 total, mostly on 40m split been SSB phone contacts and CW contacts.

I logged a phone and CW contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT station that was operating the NEQP and wrote out a QSL card for those 2 Q’s.

Also during the day I logged a 20m phone contact with 5B4AIF which is in Cyprus (about 5.5k miles away) and got a nice signal report. I sent a QSL card direct to EB7DX, the QSL manager for the station.

73,
K2DSL

IN and 7 Area QSO Parties

Contacts, Contests

This weekend are 3 QSO Parties among other contests. The Indiana and 7 Area QSO Parties were just running on Saturday. The New England QSO Party also has a 2nd session today. On Saturday I had very little time to get on the radio, but when I did I was able to make 6 phone contacts with IN stations and 12 phone contacts with 7 area stations. In the 7 call area I made 4 contacts with Arizona, 2 with Oregon, 3 with Nevada, 2 with Montana and 1 with Utah.

I was hoping to make a contact with W7SUR (Spencer) in Utah as I’ve been emailing him back and forth about setting up his SignaLink, but I didn’t hear him on the area when I had a few moments to get on.

On Saturday I also logged 8 contacts in the New England QSO Party including a contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT Radio Society station celebrating their 100th year. They are probably the only US station I’ll send a QSL card for this weekends contacts. I just looked on their web page and it says no SASE is required for a return QSL. I wonder if they don’t want them, or they will still reply even if I send one? I imagine after this weekend there will be a lot of QSL cards coming in.

73,
K2DSL

KG4CN confirms Guantanamo Bay on LoTW

Contacts

This morning I saw that KG4CN (Dan) has confirmed our Guantanamo Bay contacts made earlier in April while he was there. Dan is W0CN and it was a pleasure working him while he was there. Thanks for the LoTW confirmations.

This morning before I saw it was confirmed I pulled the paper QSL card  from KG4SS which I have from Guantanamo Bay as I’m doing the paperwork associated with the non-LoTW QSLs for my DXCC application. It would really be nice if there was just an example or two on the ARRL site vs instructions that are less then obvious to someone who hasn’t already been through the process. I will bring the paper QSL cards with me to my clubs monthly meeting this weekend as one of the folks there is a DXCC card checker.

73,
K2DSL

Barbados confirmed via LoTW

Contacts

I previously had Barbados confirmed via QSL cards that I received, but this morning I noticed that 8P9A has uploaded some contacts from last month so now Barbados is confirmed for me via LoTW.  104 mixed DXCCs and 101 20m DXCCs confirmed via LoTW and an additional 18 via paper QSL cards.

I also emailed KG4CN who operated while he was in Guantanamo Bay Cuba to see if he was going to upload his contacts to LoTW and Dan replied back promptly that he was just waiting for the LoTW certificate to come in and felt it would be confirmed within the next 2 weeks. I have 40m RTTY confirmed via paper QSL for that entitiy but it will be nice to get the 20m confirmation and have it via LoTW.

73,
K2DSL

SP DX RTTY and Florida QSO Party

Contacts, Contests

I wasn’t dedicated to contesting this weekend and did a bunch of other things, but I did participate in 2.1 contests this weekend. There was a 1 day RTTY contest and a 2 session Florida QSO Party that spanned Sat and Sun. The 0.1 contest was I logged 2 Nebraska QSO Party ops as I was tuning around the FL QSO Party.

The SP DX RTTY contest summary is as follows:

        Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty   Sec   Cnt
         3.5       7      41    5    1    0
           7      34     137    9    2    0
          14      29     245   12    7    4
       Total      70     423   26   10    4

            Score : 60,912

The Florida QSO Party summary is as follows. I saw a note on one of the mailing lists that the score might need to be doubled when running low power. I’m ready to head off for the night so I’m not sure if N1MM calculated correctly or it’s really 2x what I have below.

        Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
           7  LSB      9      18    0
          14  CW      60     240   36
          14  USB     41      82   22
       Total  Both   110     340   58
           Score : 19,720

I didn’t notice anything exotic about the contacts other then another Turkey contact in the SP DX RTTY contest. And some of the FL ops that were moving between counties were just phenomenal with how many counties they hit and how good they are with CW.

Interesting that there were multiple times where FL stations were so on top of each other it was as if they were on the exact same frequency, which they might have been. They probably couldn’t hear each other on 20m but it must have been confusing when people were calling them.

I also logged 4M5M which is a special event station in Venezuela for International Marconi Day. Odd way to QSL though which I hadn’t seen before. I sent to a US station but need to include $$ for return postage because it’s coming back from Venezuela. Just happens to be the first time I’ve seen any QSL work like that.

73,
K2DSL

Sardina confirmed on LoTW – DXCC 20m achieved

Contacts

I happened to notice today when I got home from work that IM0/IK0FMB operating in Sardina confirmed the RTTY contacts we made on 20 and 40m one month ago. That gibes me 103 confirmed DXCCs for Mixed and 100 confirmed DXCCs for 20m. Add in the additional 19 DXCCs confirmed via QSL cards and I have 122 confirmed mixed DXCCs.

I need to get the QSL cards reviewed by a DXCC checker and then send in the paperwork and payment to the ARRL.

73,
K2DSL