Stations That Have Not Responded to Direct QSL Requests

I generally QSL DX stations worked on new bands/modes via the bureau. Occasionally, if I need the QSL for an award and I have not received a reply card via the bureau after a reasonable period, I will send a second QSL direct, always accompanied by (for US destinations) an SASE, or (for DX destinations) a self-addressed airmail envelope and several dollars (nowadays typically $3, or more if I am requesting multiple cards), hidden as carefully as possible within the sending envelope.

NB (1) If the station operator posted different instructions somewhere such as on qrz.com, I tried to follow those instructions.

NB (2) Some stations have more recently stated that they no longer respond to requests for paper cards. Nevertheless, there was no such indication at the time at which I submitted the request to which no response was received. 

I realise that there are many reasons why I might not receive a response to such a direct request, many of which are not the fault of the other station. Nevertheless, reading around the Internet, some stations do seem consistently not to respond to QSL requests -- even some that advertise that they respond to all requests no matter how they are received.

Emphasising that some of these stations may well be blameless -- international mail in particular seems always to be a bit hit-or-miss -- nevertheless here is a list of those stations to whom direct QSLs have been sent, and from whom no reply was received. All the pertinent QSOs were made in 2010, so there has been plenty of time for a card to arrive via any method.

Station	Manager
CO6LP
C6AMS	NA6M
HP8/NC6Q	NC6Q
OA4BHY
PJ2A	N5UCF
PJ5/AA4NC	AA4NC
PJ7/K5IL	K5IL
PZ1EH
UN7PL
V21C
YT8A	YU1EA
7V2PI	EA5FL
9K2MU

If you are on this list and believe that I have made a mistake (it happens often enough -- keeping track of several thousand QSLs per year is not an error-free process) please let me know and I will investigate further.

More on the Growth of the RBN

Recently, I looked briefly at the year-by-year growth of the RBN. In that post, I showed plots of the annual state of the RBN only in toto; i.e., taking the data as a whole, plotted on a latitude/longitude grid. But the RBN does not exist only in the two geographic dimensions: it has a third dimension: frequency (or, of course, its equivalent, wavelength). Here, then, are similar plots showing the posts by the RBN on an annual basis, band by band, from 160m to 10m. To view the plots with sufficient detail to be useful, you will probably have to view the images at full size, rather than as they are rendered on this page.

We begin with an integrated plot showing all the data (so this is like the plots in the last post on this subject, but consolidated into a single image), then follow this with the equivalent plots for the separate bands.

All bands, 160m to 10m

160m

80m

40m

30m

20m

17m

15m

12m

10m

Revised augmented logs for CQ WW SSB from 2005 to 2016

I recently added another column to the flags on each line of the CQ WW SSB augmented logs for 2005 to 2016 (the MD5 hash of the file is 3ba5bc3d157cb7b7d1974832b82f81e5). However, K0KR reminded me that some logs contain frequencies that merely indicate the band, not the actual frequency of the QSO. In such logs, it is not possible to determine whether a logged QSO was part of a run. Therefore I have changed the values and meaning of the new column (column #11) as described below.

The additions to the standard CQ WW Cabrillo QSO line are now (changes in bold):

1. The letter "A" or "U" indicating "assisted" or "unassisted"
2. A four-digit number representing the time if the contact in minutes measured from the start of the contest. (I realise that this can be calculated from the other information on the line, but it saves a lot of time to have the number readily available in the file without having to calculate it each time.)
3. Band
4. A set of eleven flags, each -- apart from column k -- encoded as T/F: 

• a. QSO is confirmed by a log from the second party 
• b. QSO is a reverse bust (i.e., the second party appears to have bust the call of the first party) 
• c. QSO is an ordinary bust (i.e., the first party appears to have bust the call of the second party) 
• d. the call of the second party is unique 
• e. QSO appears to be a NIL 
• f. QSO is with a station that did not send in a log, but who did make 20 or more QSOs in the contest 
• g. QSO appears to be a country mult 
• h. QSO appears to be a zone mult 
• i. QSO is a zone bust (i.e., the received zone appears to be a bust)
• j. QSO is a reverse zone bust (i.e. the second party appears to have bust the zone of the first party)
• k. This entry has three possible values rather than just T/F:
• T: QSO appears to be made during a run by the first party
• F: QSO appears not to be made during a run by the first party
• U: the run status is unknown because insufficient frequency information is available in the first party's log 

Note that the encoding of some of the flags requires subjective decisions to be made as to whether the flag should be true or false; consequently, and because CQ has yet to understand the importance of making their scoring code public, the value of a flag for a specific QSO line in some circumstances might not match the value that CQ would assign. (Also, CQ has more data available in the form of check logs, which are not made public.)

Note also that I made no attempt to deduce the run status of a QSO in the second party's log (if such exists), regardless of the status in the first party's log. This allows one cleanly to perform correct statistical analyses anent the number of QSOs made by running stations merely by excluding QSOs marked with a U in column k.

Why I Don't Use a Word Processor (2)

Before I begin to explain in some detail why I don't use a word processor to write my books, I should probably interject a post about what I do use instead.

The basic information can be found in the colophon of any of my books, but it's probably a good idea to describe the software and the process here in a bit more detail.

I use two programs to generate the PDFs that are used to print my books: VEDIT PLUS and pdfTeX (the covers use a third program, Scribus).

The Basic Idea

 

A word processor tries to be the universal answer to the problem of creating documents. In particular, it conflates two processes that are fundamentally distinct: the creation of content and the layout of that content on the page. I will go into some detail in a later post why this is not the good idea that it might seem to be, but for now all I need to say is that instead of using a single program to perform these tasks, I use two very different programs, each dedicated to performing just one. I use VEDIT PLUS for the job of actually writing, and pdfTeX for the job of creating the PDFs that I print for the purpose of editing drafts, and for producing the final PDFs that are used to print the published book.

VEDIT PLUS

 

The first task, that of actually writing the text, can be done in any reasonable editor program. There is a huge number of these programs, and which to use is mostly a matter of personal preference, although some useful features may be missing from some low-end editors.

The VEDIT PLUS program that I use (the name has undergone several changes over the years: I'm not even sure that it's not simply called "VEDIT" nowadays, although originally that referred to a version of the program with fewer features) has been around since at least the early 1980s. I have used it as my main editor for about 35 years (starting with a CP/M-86 version, I think), and still use it daily, not only for writing purposes but also for general editing of text files. Although it is a Windows program, I run it in Linux using the WINE compatibility layer that allows Windows programs to run under Linux.

There is really no good reason to use VEDIT PLUS instead of a more well-known and readily available editor such as emacs, but VEDIT PLUS does everything I need, and using the program has long been second nature to me (also, although it's not relevant to the production of books, it is the best and fastest editor I've ever used for working on large files). VEDIT PLUS is the one piece of commercial software that I have on my systems, which I suppose says something about how useful I find it.

pdfTeX

 

pdfTeX is an extended version of the TeX typesetting program, and is capable of producing PDF files natively. (When I started writing, I used the original TeX program as documented in the TeXbook, and converted the output to PDF via a series of conversion programs.)

The process then is:

1. Write text using VEDIT PLUS;
2. Use pdfTeX to convert the text file produced by VEDIT PLUS to PDF;
3. Print the PDF.

So that's what I use. Next time, we'll start to look in more depth at why I use these two programs rather than a single word processor program.

UA9BA's 160m Signal

Willy, UA9BA, has posted a brief article about his 160m antenna. Therein, he compares his 160m signal to those of RG9A, R8TT and UN7LZ in this year's CQ 160m contest.

Unfortunately, the graphs he presents are impossible to interpret quantitatively and with statistically meaningful confidence limits, a situation exacerbated by the RBN's unique use of the term SNR.

A much clearer picture emerges if we issue the command:
  compare-multiple-sigs 20170128 20170128 160m EU UA9BA RG9A R8TT UN7LZ
which generates this plot:

This tells us immediately that, for the periods in which UA9BA and one of the other stations could be heard by the European portion of the RBN, there is no evidence that there was a substantive difference between the signals from UA9BA and RG9A or between the signals from UA9BA and UN7LZ. We can, however, be 99% certain that UA9BA was stronger than R8TT in Europe, with a signal difference of a few dB.

I note that although Willy refers to the other station as his "local rivals", they are actually rather distant from him, and (if the maps on qrz.com are correct) the stations are actually considerably closer to Europe, which, of course, makes his signal even more impressive.

NB: The graphs in Willy's post show that there are periods when not all the stations generated posts at a given RBN receiver. This is hardly surprising, given the relatively large separation of the stations and the nature of propagation on 160m. A statistically meaningful signal comparison requires enough pairwise measurements be made at about the same time so that a statistical analysis with usefully narrow 99% confidence limits can be performed.

The Growth of the RBN

In this post, as an example of the utility of a summary file of RBN data, I showed a simple graph of the RBN's numerical growth since inception in 2009:

 

If we look at the original data rather than the summary, we can create a more useful series of pictures showing the geographic growth (and, in some areas, the lack of such growth) of the RBN. In these images, the size and colour of each ring represents the number of posts from each RBN poster in the named year.

We can see that, apart from the near-saturation geographical coverage in  most of Europe and parts of the U.S. and Canada, RBN posters are scattered thinly around the world. In particular, Africa, South America, the Pacific, most of Australia, and a large swath of Asia are nearly devoid of reporting stations -- and even the stations that do exist in those places make few postings to the network (although part of this may be simply because of a relative paucity of stations heard).

So, although the growth in raw numbers in the original summary graph looks quite impressive, the distribution maps show that there is a long way to go before reasonably dense geographical coverage is in place over most of the globe. Since it is not even necessary to possess a transmitting license to establish a useful RBN receiver, it is particularly dispiriting that so many densely populated, technologically modern countries around the world have not even a single location posting received signals to the RBN.

The same data can be plotted in a less-cluttered manner that perhaps makes the lack of posting stations across much of the world even clearer:

Running vs. Pouncing: the Changing Face of Contesting: CQ WW SSB

I don't think that these graphs derived from the CQ WW SSB public logs require comment from me: