One Short...

This week's seen a lot of activity on the new QRZ.com awards programme.  I've already spotted a number of operators with award badges on the header of their QRZ page, and successfully applied for some of my own.

Unfortunately, QRZ.com has run for many years with no awards programme.  As a result, spending valuable time entering QSOs into the QRZ.com system was a merely cosmetic and 'showing off' exercise.  Consequently, the confirmation rate is very low - about 50% in my case at the moment.

Looking through the awards I haven't yet got, I found I was one short of the DXCC.  Now, this really is very frustrating because the actual DXCC count is 184.  I'm not the sort to enter partial QSOs or QSOs that never took place!

Usefully, the QRZ.com awards page draws a lovely table of bands against each DXCC where you have had QSOs.  Yellow indicates 'unconfirmed'.  Looking at each one in turn, I found that the sole reason why QSOs aren't being confirmed by so many is that they themselves have not linked their callsign, which may well appear on QRZ.com as a listing, to the awards programme.  They have to elect to do so, and clearly many aren't.

This does seem to mean that the vast majority of QSOs unconfirmed to date are never going to be confirmed.  You can request a confirmation for any given QSO, but it's hit and miss as to whether that op will ever respond.  The other problem is that those stations, especially but not exclusively rarer DX, who haven't yet linked-up to the awards and then do so, will probably find themselves with a vast list of QSO confirmation requests going back many years.  Inevitably, most will feel overwhelmed and not bother.

But at least there is now an awards programme, at last, on QRZ.com!

UPDATE: Thanks to PE4BAS, I now know you can download LoTW QSOs into QRZ's system.  This works very smoothly (see instructions here.)  It took me about 2 minutes from registering to having 1923 new QSOs in QRZ, and my so-far confirmed DXCC shot up from 99 to 143, with my unconfirmed DXCC total now 206!  I now have several new awards pending, including the WAS award, which is always particularly pleasing. Thanks, Bas!

UPDATE (2): I ordered a certificate from QRZ.com, to see what it's like.  It arrived less than a week after ordering, and is of very good quality, protected adequately such that is just about survived without any damage (the envelope had a few dog ears that were close to making it across to the certificate.)  I think a somewhat stouter cardboard protector would be advisable for the future.  I won't be buying any more, because I'm not really interested in certs and such 'showing off' as may be necessary is more than adequately achieved via the QRZ.com badges online.