As someone that does not have a long history of DXing, I am absolutely loving all of these stories. Keep 'em coming!


Could you provide some more background and detail about this? Are you speaking of BS7H alternating between China and Philippines? I did a bit of searching, but this is a new DXCC phenomena I'm unaware of, though in my studies of DXCC history I'm quickly discovering that about anything is possible.

Signal report is not a factor in determining a valid QSL. All that is necessary is matching call sign, mode, date/time (typically within 30 minutes), and band.

Duplicate uploads do not result in duplicate QSLs in LoTW. If it were so, we'd all have LOADS of dupes (I calculated about 2/3 of the recent queue backups were duplicates). I'm puzzled as to why the NH8S QSLs suddenly reappeared. I wonder if perhaps the operation was just approved for DXCC credit and they had to be reprocessed.

I *LOVE* my MacBook, but admit I still use a PC for radio rig control, contest logging, etc. I agree that if you maintain a clean system, any crashes are likely hardware related.

Most new Macs (at least the laptops) do have audio input, but it is integrated into the headphone/audio out port. It uses a 4-conductor plug, the same as is used on iPhones and iPads. For separate input/output ports, you'd need a splitter like this one - http://speechrecsolutions.com/iPad_audio.html#iphoneheadsetadapter Or you could get a USB adapter - something like the Signalink USB works splendidly with Macs.

HRD will output ADIF which can be imported into any logging program worth using.

The next two weekends are the North American QSO Parties for CW and SSB (http://www.ncjweb.com/naqprules.php). This is a great way to dabble in contesting, make LOTS of contacts, work on Worked All States award (with reasonable effort and time, you can work all 50 in one day), and have a lot of fun. Everyone is limited to 100 watts, so the playing field is pretty level. The exchange is simply your name and state. And the contest is only 12 hours long, which means you can be competitive without having to sit at the radio for 2 days straight.

I use N1MM and Fldigi. A great combination! I never could get MMTTY to install correctly on Win 7. N1MM makes logging almost effortless - a couple clicks and/or key presses and you're done. The learning curve is fairly steep with N1MM, but if you're serious about RTTY contesting, HRD will be a very serious limitation to success. I also use HRD Logbook for my standard logging, so when I'm done with a contest, I output an ADIF file from N1MM and import it into HRD. I then run a custom-built script to update missing contact data from QRZ.

I wondered the same thing. Perhaps it's due to such a quick jump in numbers. It seems to take a bit of time in the oven for the ionosphere to get baking. Or it could just be that nobody is calling.

I'm not aware of such a tool. I found the best way was to sort my 2012 QSOs by entity, then search (Ctrl + F in my browser) for the entity name in the online entry form (https://p1k.arrl.org/diamond-dxcc/diamond-entry.php), and enter any that match. There are 231 possible Diamond DXCC entities. Mine took an hour or so to complete. Hit Save frequently.

You can't really use the change in date of the logs currently being processed as an indicator of progress. Remember, it's just processed the few logs uploaded over the Christmas holiday. It still has to work through the millions of QSOs uploaded since.

Things are definitely a faster. It's currently adding new QSOs and processing new logs at about twice the rate as before the upgrade (at 4 new records per second, this still seems excruciatingly slow to me), but there's a LOT of logs to process. I've run a few projections and at the current rate it should be around a week or so for the queue to be processed. There are big contests the next 2 weekends that might push that to 10 days or so.

The good news is that queue processing after that should be measured in minutes, except perhaps immediately after big contests and until LoTW usage and/or database size perhaps doubles.

Yep, something is DEFINITELY broken. The queue now shows as empty, but nothing has been added to LoTW since 0530 UTC, about 10 hours ago.

This is why you don't do major upgrades on Friday evening.

Yes, definitely much improvement. For the week starting Dec. 24th, the average was 6994 new QSOs (1.9/second) and 86 new log files processed per hour. For the last 5 hours, the average has been 16695 QSOs per hour (4.6/second) and 289 log files per hour. In the last hour, it processed 78,000 new QSOs (22/second) alone!

Since the upgrade, the queue has dropped by almost 500,000 QSOs.

Things are definitely faster, and I'd predict that at this rate, it should work through the entire backlog in fairly short order - probably several days or maybe a week. It's hard to say for sure because you can't know the rate at which QSOs/logs are added to the queue, but with big contests the next 3 weekends, I think this is very good news.

The rate of new QSOs into LoTW for the last three hours has been about double the average for the last several weeks. And the rate in which files are added is about 5 times the average rate. One would expect the new file rate to be less than the new QSO rate because I'm sure there's LOADS of duplicates in the queue.

It's hard to say for sure with just a few hours of data, but it sure looks to me like it's running quite a bit faster.

It's still going strong. Lots of long path connections to the Middle East from western USA today - 2 ATNO for me (and I'm stuck at work missing several others). It's nice to see the SFI (143) and SN (116) numbers going up again - highest they've been since early November.

The site has been updated to extend the down time 3 more hours to 2000 UTC. I would certainly hope they are not running on NT - though that would definitely explain a lot.

The word "Forever" is always crossed out on the official USPS online images of stamps. I'd suppose it's an anti-counterfeiting thing.