GlobalQSL, part II

This week, I received the 100 blank QSL cards I ordered from GlobalQSL. The printing quality is outstanding and surpasses all my expectations! A nice glossy finish makes makes these cards really stand out.

Any remarks? Yes. When you design the back of the card, you must leave a certain part of the card (right hand corner) free of images or text, as this is the part where QSL information will be printed. However, I expected blank cards to be pre-printed with “To station”, “Frequency”, “RST” and such, so I could take a pen and fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, the right hand corner of the card is completely empty.

I’ll have to use stickers, I’m afraid.

The HBH Award

In case you’re thinking that this award actually exists: it doesn’t. Maybe it should. ‘HBH’ is an additional note I make in my log book. It stands for ‘Hi Bye Ham’, a special breed of radio amateurs. The typical HBH has only one line, which is something like “PD0AC, you’re 5/9, QRZ?”

Technically speaking I made a QSO, but after running into a Hi Bye Ham, I feel like I’m suffering from a very bad hangover. What’s the guy’s name? Where does he live? Is he married? What type of gear does he use? Has he ever been to Holland? Does he own a dog? Any subject would be nice! Any conversation with a duration exceeding three minutes would be great!

Most English HAMs don’t seem to suffer from the HBH disease, neither do American HAMs. I wish I knew why, but thankfully there are lots of them to talk to every day.

The Dove Experiment

Pigeons are sensitive to electromagnetic fields, so they say. True or not? Time to put this to the test. I have a regular visitor, a turtle dove, who takes a daily nap on one of the radials of my 5/8 wave vertical for 10 meters. He/she must really like it there, almost every day, the bird is present.

I set my Yaesu FT-840 to 29.300 MHz, FM mode, and the initial power output to 5 Watts. No reaction. At 10 Watts, the bird raises its head and starts to look around a bit. At 15 Watts, my feathered fan becomes restless and starts to hop around. At 25 Watts, the turtle dove takes off.

I repeated the test a few times, just to be sure. On average, the turtle dove leaves my antenna when the power is around 25 Watts. Amazing, these animals.

JOTA 2007, Biddinghuizen, The Netherlands

It was my first JOTA (Jamboree On The Air) ever – I just never considered spending a weekend with kids, transceivers and antennas. When Roel PE1RF asked me to help them out, I thought I’d give it a try. To be honest, I expected it to become one big disillusion. Modern kids don’t care much about radio, I argued. They care more about computers and chat programs. Not the kids of the Osborne Scouting Group, however. No JOTI there (Jamboree On The Internet), only JOTA. Fine with me. They can chat at home all year long.

We used a variety of transceivers and antennas, so we could use any band between 80 meters and 70 centimeters. Beams, full squares, rotary dipoles, bunches of long wires, you name it. The scouts had engineered a 28 meter high tower, completely out of wood. Perfect!

After explaining to the kids how HF signals travel, they talked to many European stations. The youngest kids were happy with listening. They were real chatterboxes, but became completely silent when you put a microphone in front of their faces. A good tip for parents, maybe? In total, we logged more than 325 QSOs.

Filters made it possible to use more bands at the same time

Listening, listening, listening..

Hello Japan? It’s me!

Our youngest HAM

Taking down the towers

Hey, I might be a girl, but I can disassemble a rotary dipole

Stupid coax. I hate coax.

GlobalQSL, first impressions

Due to all sorts of reasons my new QSL cards weren’t printed, and I looked for ways to make things easier. One of them was to make use of eQSL (link), which I did, but not many amateurs use that service.

When GlobalQSL (link) came into the picture, I thought I’d give it a try. GlobalQSL is not an electronic service. I mean: it’s not an eQSL look-a-like. Cards are actually printed on high quality paper (full color, both sides) and sent through the bureau. Apart from that, there’s a lot of electronic processing going on.

After creating an account, you can download their QSL card design program. It takes a bit of time and experimenting to get it right, but working with the program is not too hard. When you’re happy with the results, you can upload your design to the GlobalQSl server. For $82, you will get 1000 cards printed, including distribution through the bureau.

You can enter your QSOs manually, or upload them in ADIF format. Multiple QSOs with the same station will be printed on one card, saving time, money and cards.

Pros (so far):

• Easy, saves a lot of time
• reasonably priced
• real cards
• price includes delivery (bureau)
• handles multiple designs and/or call signs

Cons (so far):

• Slow. Cards won’t be be printed immediately: the interval is every 2000 cards or 2 months, which ever comes first. (*)

If you are a fanatic DX or contest operator, 2000 cards is nothing. For an average Ham however, 2000 cards is something that could take a year or more. QSL bureaus are notorious for being slow, and 2 months of extra delay isn’t helping. Maybe the interval could be changed to one month?

I also ordered 100 blank cards, which will be sent to my QTH. Let’s see how fast they can print and deliver them. I’ll keep you posted.

(*) Update 10/11/2007, 14.34 UTC

Paul 4X6UU from GlobalQSL made a comment on this article about the “Cons”:

“GlobalQsl prints the cards every time there are 2000 cards to be printed to a IARU bureau. Having thousands of users uploading ADIF files every day, this means that we print cards every day for a few IARU bureaus. The only bureaus that are printed once every 2 months are the small and rare ones, like HB0 for example.

The every 2 month printing is done even if there are only a few QSLs for that specific bureau.”