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11-14 of 14 messages
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RE: DX stations, and Logbook of The World (LoTW)
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by K3GM on June 13, 2009
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".......Your ideas seems logical but will the ARRL support LoTW once is not 100% under their control?"
Hi Ed. I doubt whether control of LoTW could be wrestled away from the League. There's undoubtedly a revenue stream from the program. But along with my gripe about the lack of a VUCC award, I was more curious about how DX stations feel about supporting a US based program, and what keeps other DX organizations from creating their own QSL programs. What would happen if the RSGB, DARC, or JARL, all respected organizations decided to start their on Loogbook's? Can you imagine the fractured mess it would be? Other than that, I just can't fathom why the League doesn't support VUCC with LoTW? Look at any record, and there's your grid, as well as the grid from the station you've worked, DX or stateside. Perhaps in the future....
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RE: DX stations, and Logbook of The World (LoTW)
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by W7ETA on June 13, 2009
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"What would happen if the RSGB, DARC, or JARL, all respected organizations decided to start their on Loogbook's?"
You'd submit your logs to them for their award, like submitting your contest log.
73
Bob
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RE: DX stations, and Logbook of The World (LoTW)
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by LA4RT on June 18, 2009
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I'm not aware of any international ham radio body with the resources to run any kind of IT infrastructure. Setting up a new body would be costly, and where would they get the money from? Besides, nobody outside the USA hates the ARRL anyway. If they hate anything, it's their own national ham radio organization.
Of course, there are changes I would like to see to LotW. I don't think it would be hard for them to make digitally signed reports. If they did, other organizations could decide whether they were willing to accept LotW in lieu of QSLs, with no need for bilateral agreement. I've heard complaints that IOTA numbers on LotW are often wrong, but they can be wrong on paper QSLs as well.
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RE: DX stations, and Logbook of The World (LoTW)
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by WO0Z on June 18, 2009
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>I'm not aware of any international ham radio body
>with the resources to run any kind of IT
>infrastructure. Setting up a new body would
>be costly, and where would they get the money from?
If by "costly" you mean a few thousand dollars, then yes.
It's the Internet Age. You don't need a three story building on the Washington Mall or a posh London neighborhood to do something like this.
All you would need is a web address and a fairly inexpensive and anonymous server, plus _maybe_ one IT guy to run it.
There are about 230 million QSOs in LOTW right now. It probably takes about 100 bytes apiece to store them.
That's 20 Gigabytes of data. Not much these days. It will grow, to be sure, but not by infinite amounts and not by amounts that a decent Linux server can't handle. We're talking a basic 1U to 3U server here.
I don't know what the bandwidth would be to run the site (not trivial), but certainly it isn't like www.google.com either. That could be a bigger expense, but it isn't insurmountable and it doesn't have to be _people_ intensive to get nowadays.
The biggest issue would be, simply enough, credibility. The IT infrastructure required just isn't that significant these days, especially if you dial back the security to something reasonable.
LOTW apparently was designed with every scenario any security expert could dream up. But, in fact, it only has to be hard enough that someone would rather try forging paper cards (more difficult than meets the eye, by the way, but hardly impossible). It could have been simpler, but now that we have it, we have it. It's probably easier overall to simply leave it as it is, unless it is very labor intensive.
So, all things considered, LOTW really is going to end up being "it" as far as any sort of "universal" confirmation would be (if we ever get one). Because it is the first large, established ham organization that got there. The credibility of the ARRL is going to be larger than anyone else who attempts it now (this is true even if you, personally, hate the ARRL).
That matters more than the ups and downs of the various technology choices they made.
If they can't figure out how to interoperate with other groups, it just never will happen.
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