5 ms·

QSL Card

99 points by 1970-01-01 4y ago

guestbest 4y ago
Why was this posted? It is just a Wikipedia article
- detaro 4y ago
  presumably the submitter thought it was interesting
- throw0101c 4y ago
  This often happens: * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org Some other entries that got a bit of discussion: * Avoidance Speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35479757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35479757 * Purkinje effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462091 * 2001: A Space Odyssey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35425537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35425537 * Wronger Than Wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35420863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35420863 * Rational Dress Society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418320 * International Orange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35413385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35413385 And that's in just the last week.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  Shines a light on nerd trivia most people don't know about.
Tunecrew 4y ago
This is cool to me! KJ8T but I've never made my own QSL card...
- gorkish 4y ago
  Your call minded me that I had a nice QSO once with KJ2U. Will let anyone curious look that one up… The nice thing about having even a simple card is that you can build up a pretty neat collection, even if you only send them selectively. I also felt bad when someone would mail me a card and stamped envelope before I had one to return, so I hand sketched a few responses on notecards. I always enjoy seeing hand sketched cards in the old timers’ collections.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  It is cool, but I feel the shame of never having cards or going on the air any more. I dabbled with SOTA (Summits On The Air) a few years ago. I bought some bits to make a rig interface for FT8, but they never got soldered up. I was going to put up an EFHW at home. Yet another hobby waiting for me to have free time! 2E0XJM
lb1lf 4y ago
Incidentally, I just took a break from getting my QSL duties up to date - only to find this article on everybody's favourite procrastination site. Oh well. Some 50-ish cards to go.
osculum 4y ago
I got a box full of them. It's such a treat when you come home and they are waiting for you in your mailbox! One of my favorite ones is from the USS Hornet Museum [1] [1] https://www.qsl.net/nb6gc/QSL.htm https://www.qsl.net/nb6gc/QSL.htm
- lb1lf 4y ago
  Oooh, favourites, let's see... 9K2ZZ, Bob, in Kuwait City, methinks. To my untrained ear, he sounded like a Texan expat and he was always 20dB over S9 when I heard him on the bands c.2000. Always kept the QSO rate up - a typical exchange would be 'LB1LF, 59, name is Bob. 9K2ZZ QRZ?' (where QRZ? means 'Anyone else?' and 59 is the signal report) Anyway, late one night I heard him calling without the usual pile-up of radio amateurs trying to get in contact with him. No replies. I gave him a call, and we chatted for all of 45 seconds or so before he signed off and the band was quiet. When I got the card, it had a handwritten note on the back - 'Thanks for the rag chew!' (Ham radio lingo for a very long contact) Well, it sure was long by his usual standards, and I still get a chuckle every time I see it.
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    My favorite was a station that was a sailboat off the coast of France. (PJ2HB if I remember correctly). Late one night he created a pile up. (A pile up is when a rare or unusual station is on the air and everyone is trying to contact him). I kept throwing my call in, over and over. And when he finally acknowledged, we exchanged info and when I said my QTH (my location), he stated, "oh yes, I stopped often by the restaurant in your town back when I was in school". We proceeded to have a conversation for a few minutes, while everyone was keying over us, throwing their callsigns in and just piling on. It was beautiful. Another I was on 6 meters simplex during a band opening, talking a guy at with Cape Canaveral when he was on his lunch break. I was the QSL manager for an Antarctic station once. That was fun. Oh man, meteor scatter, ISS, satellite communications, SSTV, APRS... I forgot how much fun I used to have pre-internet days.
klinquist 4y ago
These days, most just use LoTW (Logbook Of The World) for ham radio contact confirmations. You even have to sign your confirmation upload with a public key they assign to keep everyone honest! (There are "contact contests" that people want to win...) Ham radio is fun. So many ways to enjoy the hobby. Short-distance communications, long distance communications, antenna theory... location beaconing, 2-way text messaging over radio, etc. Not many other communication methods out there that don't require a million dollars in infrastructure.
- tuugkbc 4y ago
  Just in case this raised the eyebrows of anyone else who knows a bit about public key cryptography, you don't, in fact, "sign your confirmation upload with a public key they assign", you sign with the private key they give you, from the key pair they assign. https://lotw.arrl.org/lotw-help/certreq/?lang=en https://lotw.arrl.org/lotw-help/certreq/?lang=en
  - nullc 4y ago
    > you sign with the private key they give you You sign with a private key you generated, whose public key they certified.
j4nek 4y ago
being not active in ham radio since leaving school, but always an nice feeling when some qsl cards from other continents coming in after some years :)
lormayna 4y ago
I am a SWL and recently ham and I really enjoy receiving QSL cards from different countries. My dream would be to get one from Voice of Korea, but it seems they stopped the QSL sending. One of my side project (still in early stage) it's just a QSL focused social network :)
- tacet 4y ago
  I am waiting for my first QSL card from HAARP.
junon 4y ago
The article has been defaced with Paul Graham/dang slander :/ garbage people. EDIT: vandal has been banned.
- 2kwatts 4y ago
  It seems like the user was banned from Wikipedia [1], and they have a history of screwing with pages that were on the HN front page. Probably just trolls. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/96.234.155.195 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/96.234.1...
notadev 4y ago
INT ZBZ INT ZEV…K/NAD …anyone?
jhoechtl 4y ago
Just asked IRRS Nexus to send me a QSL card for receiving AM on 1323 in Eastern Austria from Milano/Italy. https://www.nexus.org/member-services/radio-and-tv/schedules/ https://www.nexus.org/member-services/radio-and-tv/schedules...
pugworthy 4y ago
QSL cards bring back a lot of memories for me. My dad (W7AAI) has been a ham since the 50s and as a kid I always enjoyed all the QSL cards he had hanging on the wall in his shack. They were from all over the world which lead to a lot of time looking at our globe to see where these strange places were. QSL cards are right up there with the HAM license plates and an antenna poll in the back yard for iconic elements of old school HAM radio operators.
- pugworthy 4y ago
  PS Found this writeup by my dad. Some pictures of QSL cards including his first one in 1955. https://www.qcwa.org/w7aai-29229.htm https://www.qcwa.org/w7aai-29229.htm
rmason 4y ago
I've been a ham since the sixties and of course love QSL cards. But one thing not mentioned here are the stamps. I used to also be a stamp collector as a kid. I have QSL cards with stamps on them from countries that no longer exist, or no longer have the same country name since their independence. Because they're cancelled they are probably worthless in value but nevertheless I like looking at them as much or more than the cards themselves.
- LASR 4y ago
  I think being cancelled means the value goes up. For collector stamps anyway.
  - welcome_dragon 4y ago
    Cancelled here meaning they have a postmark on them I think.
AlbertCory 4y ago
In my teens, there was a blind man on our block who was a ham, with a great big tower in his backyard. He had braille markings on his equipment. Mr. Gannon was unfailingly helpful to me. Good memories.
- pugworthy 4y ago
  Do you recall his call sign?
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    I do: K9BCJ
    - pugworthy 4y ago
      https://www.cardcow.com/215722/k9bcj-ill-seeing-you-farther-down-road-qsl-ham-radio/ https://www.cardcow.com/215722/k9bcj-ill-seeing-you-farther-... "I'll be seeing you farther down the road"... :)
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        thanks, I don't remember ever seeing that, although I suppose I did.
nlh 4y ago
..DE K2KD.. I had a wall full of QSL cards when I was a kiddo. I still remember all those contacts with foreign hams that ended with “QSL via the bureau!” Which, as TFA mentions, was this magical (to me) extra-postal service routing system that somehow managed to get QSLs internationally at super low cost. So much fun. I haven’t really gotten back into ham stuff in ~30 years or so, but I sense the hobby is still alive, which is great. Every so often I’m tempted to buy a fancy SDR and see what the 2023 version of ham radio is like compared to the 1993 version…
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Cool to hear about your wall :-) It's practically a labyrinth of hobbies within the ham world these days, from AREDN and mesh to QRP backpacking to Netflix & Chill & JS8...not to mention academia, space, etc. I was just chatting on the local repeater during a hike today and realized how many of those areas sound really interesting given the time...
  - riceart 4y ago
    Ok I’ve been a ham for over 30 years - a bit out of the loop admittedly but this one: “Netflix & Chill” in the context of ham is one I’m not familiar with and couldn’t turn up on google.
    - themodelplumber 4y ago
      At the risk of being the guy who explains his own joke: It's just a reference to how laid back operations in digital modes (JS8 being one, but FT8 being more common maybe) seem, kind of set it and forget it. On social media you see some people saying things like "I woke up the next day to find that my laptop digital station made contacts in all these countries" First example I found: https://twitter.com/OH8STN/status/1611596504481038338?t=XuYcOOu5IKul12PT8nnodQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/OH8STN/status/1611596504481038338?t=XuYc... JS8 is interesting because it has a P2P aspect where it can relay messages through various stations/ continents to a destination.
- skittlebrau 4y ago
elahieh 4y ago
Radio Biafra must be one of the rarest QSLs in existence. It was very dangerous to get mail in and out during the civil war. https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/guest-post-possible-last-remaining-direct-biafra-qsl-emerges/ https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/guest-post-possible-last-rem...
curiousfab 4y ago
Some hams take this very seriously: http://g3txf.com/QSL-Office/QSL-Off.html http://g3txf.com/QSL-Office/QSL-Off.html Great collection, constantly updated: http://hamgallery.com/whatsnew/ http://hamgallery.com/whatsnew/
resters 4y ago
As others have pointed out, QSLing is alive and well in digital form.
jamesgill 4y ago
I'm a ham. These are a charming artifact of the 'old' days, but I've never heard of anyone using/exchanging these in the past few decades. The ARRL's 'Log Book of the World' is what people typically do instead (if they do it at all). http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world
- beaugunderson 4y ago
  Just from making normal FT8 contacts and some POTA FT8 I've gotten about 10 QSL cards in my mailbox in the last year. :)
  - lormayna 4y ago
    What are you using for the FT8 on POTA?
    - beaugunderson 4y ago
      I live on an RV and primarily use a IC-705 and one of two Chameleon antennas (the CHA-MIL and the CHA-TDL in vertical configuration)... just got a hexbeam pole but have yet to try it!
ibiza 4y ago
No Boilerplate mentioned Q codes in his most recent video: Amateur Radio: Open Source Airwaves https://youtu.be/XcF6tvepRlg https://youtu.be/XcF6tvepRlg
clbrmbr 4y ago
I’ve been meaning to get radio active again. Used to do SOTA but haven’t gotten a wire up at the new QTH. Thinking an EFHW. But maybe just a 40m inverted V?

QSL Card

99 points by 1970-01-01 4y ago

guestbest 4y ago

Why was this posted? It is just a Wikipedia article

detaro 4y ago
presumably the submitter thought it was interesting
throw0101c 4y ago
This often happens: * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org Some other entries that got a bit of discussion: * Avoidance Speech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35479757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35479757 * Purkinje effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462091 * 2001: A Space Odyssey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35425537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35425537 * Wronger Than Wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35420863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35420863 * Rational Dress Society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418320 * International Orange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35413385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35413385 And that's in just the last week.
jstarfish 4y ago
Shines a light on nerd trivia most people don't know about.

Tunecrew 4y ago

This is cool to me! KJ8T but I've never made my own QSL card...

gorkish 4y ago
Your call minded me that I had a nice QSO once with KJ2U. Will let anyone curious look that one up… The nice thing about having even a simple card is that you can build up a pretty neat collection, even if you only send them selectively. I also felt bad when someone would mail me a card and stamped envelope before I had one to return, so I hand sketched a few responses on notecards. I always enjoy seeing hand sketched cards in the old timers’ collections.
jimnotgym 4y ago
It is cool, but I feel the shame of never having cards or going on the air any more. I dabbled with SOTA (Summits On The Air) a few years ago. I bought some bits to make a rig interface for FT8, but they never got soldered up. I was going to put up an EFHW at home. Yet another hobby waiting for me to have free time! 2E0XJM

lb1lf 4y ago

Incidentally, I just took a break from getting my QSL duties up to date - only to find this article on everybody's favourite procrastination site. Oh well. Some 50-ish cards to go.

osculum 4y ago

I got a box full of them. It's such a treat when you come home and they are waiting for you in your mailbox! One of my favorite ones is from the USS Hornet Museum [1] [1] https://www.qsl.net/nb6gc/QSL.htm https://www.qsl.net/nb6gc/QSL.htm

lb1lf 4y ago
Oooh, favourites, let's see... 9K2ZZ, Bob, in Kuwait City, methinks. To my untrained ear, he sounded like a Texan expat and he was always 20dB over S9 when I heard him on the bands c.2000. Always kept the QSO rate up - a typical exchange would be 'LB1LF, 59, name is Bob. 9K2ZZ QRZ?' (where QRZ? means 'Anyone else?' and 59 is the signal report) Anyway, late one night I heard him calling without the usual pile-up of radio amateurs trying to get in contact with him. No replies. I gave him a call, and we chatted for all of 45 seconds or so before he signed off and the band was quiet. When I got the card, it had a handwritten note on the back - 'Thanks for the rag chew!' (Ham radio lingo for a very long contact) Well, it sure was long by his usual standards, and I still get a chuckle every time I see it.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  My favorite was a station that was a sailboat off the coast of France. (PJ2HB if I remember correctly). Late one night he created a pile up. (A pile up is when a rare or unusual station is on the air and everyone is trying to contact him). I kept throwing my call in, over and over. And when he finally acknowledged, we exchanged info and when I said my QTH (my location), he stated, "oh yes, I stopped often by the restaurant in your town back when I was in school". We proceeded to have a conversation for a few minutes, while everyone was keying over us, throwing their callsigns in and just piling on. It was beautiful. Another I was on 6 meters simplex during a band opening, talking a guy at with Cape Canaveral when he was on his lunch break. I was the QSL manager for an Antarctic station once. That was fun. Oh man, meteor scatter, ISS, satellite communications, SSTV, APRS... I forgot how much fun I used to have pre-internet days.

klinquist 4y ago

These days, most just use LoTW (Logbook Of The World) for ham radio contact confirmations. You even have to sign your confirmation upload with a public key they assign to keep everyone honest! (There are "contact contests" that people want to win...) Ham radio is fun. So many ways to enjoy the hobby. Short-distance communications, long distance communications, antenna theory... location beaconing, 2-way text messaging over radio, etc. Not many other communication methods out there that don't require a million dollars in infrastructure.

tuugkbc 4y ago
Just in case this raised the eyebrows of anyone else who knows a bit about public key cryptography, you don't, in fact, "sign your confirmation upload with a public key they assign", you sign with the private key they give you, from the key pair they assign. https://lotw.arrl.org/lotw-help/certreq/?lang=en https://lotw.arrl.org/lotw-help/certreq/?lang=en
- nullc 4y ago
  > you sign with the private key they give you You sign with a private key you generated, whose public key they certified.

j4nek 4y ago

being not active in ham radio since leaving school, but always an nice feeling when some qsl cards from other continents coming in after some years :)

lormayna 4y ago

I am a SWL and recently ham and I really enjoy receiving QSL cards from different countries. My dream would be to get one from Voice of Korea, but it seems they stopped the QSL sending. One of my side project (still in early stage) it's just a QSL focused social network :)

tacet 4y ago
I am waiting for my first QSL card from HAARP.

junon 4y ago

The article has been defaced with Paul Graham/dang slander :/ garbage people. EDIT: vandal has been banned.

2kwatts 4y ago
It seems like the user was banned from Wikipedia [1], and they have a history of screwing with pages that were on the HN front page. Probably just trolls. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/96.234.155.195 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/96.234.1...

notadev 4y ago

INT ZBZ INT ZEV…K/NAD …anyone?

jhoechtl 4y ago

Just asked IRRS Nexus to send me a QSL card for receiving AM on 1323 in Eastern Austria from Milano/Italy. https://www.nexus.org/member-services/radio-and-tv/schedules/ https://www.nexus.org/member-services/radio-and-tv/schedules...

pugworthy 4y ago

QSL cards bring back a lot of memories for me. My dad (W7AAI) has been a ham since the 50s and as a kid I always enjoyed all the QSL cards he had hanging on the wall in his shack. They were from all over the world which lead to a lot of time looking at our globe to see where these strange places were. QSL cards are right up there with the HAM license plates and an antenna poll in the back yard for iconic elements of old school HAM radio operators.

pugworthy 4y ago
PS Found this writeup by my dad. Some pictures of QSL cards including his first one in 1955. https://www.qcwa.org/w7aai-29229.htm https://www.qcwa.org/w7aai-29229.htm

rmason 4y ago

I've been a ham since the sixties and of course love QSL cards. But one thing not mentioned here are the stamps. I used to also be a stamp collector as a kid. I have QSL cards with stamps on them from countries that no longer exist, or no longer have the same country name since their independence. Because they're cancelled they are probably worthless in value but nevertheless I like looking at them as much or more than the cards themselves.

LASR 4y ago
I think being cancelled means the value goes up. For collector stamps anyway.
- welcome_dragon 4y ago
  Cancelled here meaning they have a postmark on them I think.

AlbertCory 4y ago

In my teens, there was a blind man on our block who was a ham, with a great big tower in his backyard. He had braille markings on his equipment. Mr. Gannon was unfailingly helpful to me. Good memories.

pugworthy 4y ago
Do you recall his call sign?
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  I do: K9BCJ
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    https://www.cardcow.com/215722/k9bcj-ill-seeing-you-farther-down-road-qsl-ham-radio/ https://www.cardcow.com/215722/k9bcj-ill-seeing-you-farther-... "I'll be seeing you farther down the road"... :)
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      thanks, I don't remember ever seeing that, although I suppose I did.

nlh 4y ago

..DE K2KD.. I had a wall full of QSL cards when I was a kiddo. I still remember all those contacts with foreign hams that ended with “QSL via the bureau!” Which, as TFA mentions, was this magical (to me) extra-postal service routing system that somehow managed to get QSLs internationally at super low cost. So much fun. I haven’t really gotten back into ham stuff in ~30 years or so, but I sense the hobby is still alive, which is great. Every so often I’m tempted to buy a fancy SDR and see what the 2023 version of ham radio is like compared to the 1993 version…

themodelplumber 4y ago
Cool to hear about your wall :-) It's practically a labyrinth of hobbies within the ham world these days, from AREDN and mesh to QRP backpacking to Netflix & Chill & JS8...not to mention academia, space, etc. I was just chatting on the local repeater during a hike today and realized how many of those areas sound really interesting given the time...
- riceart 4y ago
  Ok I’ve been a ham for over 30 years - a bit out of the loop admittedly but this one: “Netflix & Chill” in the context of ham is one I’m not familiar with and couldn’t turn up on google.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    At the risk of being the guy who explains his own joke: It's just a reference to how laid back operations in digital modes (JS8 being one, but FT8 being more common maybe) seem, kind of set it and forget it. On social media you see some people saying things like "I woke up the next day to find that my laptop digital station made contacts in all these countries" First example I found: https://twitter.com/OH8STN/status/1611596504481038338?t=XuYcOOu5IKul12PT8nnodQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/OH8STN/status/1611596504481038338?t=XuYc... JS8 is interesting because it has a P2P aspect where it can relay messages through various stations/ continents to a destination.
skittlebrau 4y ago

elahieh 4y ago

Radio Biafra must be one of the rarest QSLs in existence. It was very dangerous to get mail in and out during the civil war. https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/guest-post-possible-last-remaining-direct-biafra-qsl-emerges/ https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/guest-post-possible-last-rem...

curiousfab 4y ago

Some hams take this very seriously: http://g3txf.com/QSL-Office/QSL-Off.html http://g3txf.com/QSL-Office/QSL-Off.html Great collection, constantly updated: http://hamgallery.com/whatsnew/ http://hamgallery.com/whatsnew/

resters 4y ago

As others have pointed out, QSLing is alive and well in digital form.

jamesgill 4y ago

I'm a ham. These are a charming artifact of the 'old' days, but I've never heard of anyone using/exchanging these in the past few decades. The ARRL's 'Log Book of the World' is what people typically do instead (if they do it at all). http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world

beaugunderson 4y ago
Just from making normal FT8 contacts and some POTA FT8 I've gotten about 10 QSL cards in my mailbox in the last year. :)
- lormayna 4y ago
  What are you using for the FT8 on POTA?
  - beaugunderson 4y ago
    I live on an RV and primarily use a IC-705 and one of two Chameleon antennas (the CHA-MIL and the CHA-TDL in vertical configuration)... just got a hexbeam pole but have yet to try it!

ibiza 4y ago

No Boilerplate mentioned Q codes in his most recent video: Amateur Radio: Open Source Airwaves https://youtu.be/XcF6tvepRlg https://youtu.be/XcF6tvepRlg

clbrmbr 4y ago

I’ve been meaning to get radio active again. Used to do SOTA but haven’t gotten a wire up at the new QTH. Thinking an EFHW. But maybe just a 40m inverted V?