Building My Log

Radio Vatican's antenna farm as depicted on their circa 1967 QSL card.

Building my AM, FM, TV and shortwave log from QSL cards and letters I received before I became a ham was an interesting exercise.

The big takeaway was that unlike amateur radio QSL cards, commercial radio station QSLs lack key information.

Some QSLs lacked the frequency and/or time of the reported reception. A few even lacked the date of the reported reception. For example, the QSLs I have from BBC, HCJB and Radio Peking simply confirm my reception report, but do not repeat any data (date, time, or frequency) from my report. As a result, their entries in my log are kind of sketchy.

Also, I found it interesting that about 1/5th of the QSLs listed the operating frequency in Meters as well as Hertz.

While I was revisiting those QSLs, I recalled an anecdote that I will write about in my next post.