If you remember back in July 18th of this year when I started looking at EQSL return rates and commented that I was getting a 41.46% return rate on the 1488 eqsls I had sent out and a 42.22% return rate on the 135 DXCC countries I had sent out to.
Now on September 18th of this year the EQSL totals are:
666 returned from 1631 sent for a rate of : 40.83%
66 confirmed DXCC from 140 contacted for a rate of: 47.14%
As of September 18th of this year the LoTW totals are
513 returned from 1432 sent for a rate of : 35.82%
93 DXCC confirmed out of 140 contacted for a rate of : 66.42%
So what unscientific conclusions can we draw from the above worthless stats? I think the first one is fairly simple…
DXPeditions confirm contacts via LoTW.
A high percentage of my new ones are from working DXPeditons and so the higher return rate for DXCC counts are from DXPeditions rather than regular Amateur Radio Operators… The fact that backs up this thought is that I only had a 35% return rate overall in LoTW where I had a 40% return rate from EQSL…
I believe the reason for this is thats its very simple to configure Ham Radio Deluxe to work with your EQSL account and automatically send out an EQSL with every contact you make. Due to security concerns the ARRL makes you jump through a few more hoops and people don’t want to spend the time to get on LoTW.
Now as both services are offered at a very low cost to the Amateur Radio Community (FREE) there is no real reason not to use both services.
Every contact I log gets an EQSL card sent to them as a reminder that I would really like a confirmation on LoTW so I can work on my DXCC and WAS. If they send me an EQSL in return and no LoTW confirmation it tells me I better get a card out to them in the mail or via the buro if I want this one confirmed as they are not going to reply via LoTW.
Using both gives you a few extra tools to get your awards that little bit quicker…
73bob
Tags: amateur radio, Amateur Radio DX, amateur radio qsl cards, EQSL, Logbook of the World
