ARRL: GB Boo-Boo

Leading on from sudden and never-before seen problems I recently had with ARRL's LoTW system, limited information has now come to hand that lets us see what is going on.

Now, just for clarity, I couldn't care two-hoots for DX awards and all that rubbish. It's sort-of nice to have a record of QSOs, especially of SSB QSOs, where the engagement may well have been memorable and enjoyable. For digital QSOs? Well, I mean, they are just conveyor-belt material, with only the very rarest being of any real human meaning (I count my spectacular 50W/3-ele 144MHz QSO with Cabo Verde in this latter category!)

So, what's happened?

My overarching callsign for LoTW is MW1CFN. 'W' signifies Wales, of course. I have a few certificates for other forms of my call, plus a couple for occasional, ongoing Marconi Carnarvon station commemorations. The following screengrab shows all this:

T-QSL, when I fired it up the other day to upload some GB1MUU QSOs, told me the certificate for that call expired in 54 days' time; did I want to submit a renewal request?  Why, yes, of course. When I began that process, I was confronted with this:

Here was the first sign of trouble: GB1MUU is listed in the greyed-out (unmodifiable) DXCC entity box as 'England'. Ticking 'Show All Entities' does not, in fact, pull up any alternative UK-based entities. It should show 'Wales', reflecting the entity I applied and obtained the certificate for in the first place.

Now, GBx callsigns are issued as temporary special event calls that may be used from anywhere within the UK (this has to be specified to a high location accuracy at the time of application). There no longer being a requirement or even a recommendation to include a regional secondary locator in any callsign, there has anyway never been a requirement to add one to a GBx call. 

You might say that 'GB' suggests those at OFCOM perceive of it as a central, all-UK type callsign and that the ARRL might be broadly right to decide it's an 'England' call. But that doesn't hold, because both GB and the UK have constituent countries, the only difference being that the concept of GB doesn't include Northern Ireland whilst the term 'UK' does. 

Which constituent country of the UK the GBx call is actually transmitted from is up to the operator to choose at the time of application, as appropriate. The call can be used only at one designated location and certainly can't be used in another constituent country of the UK. In any event, OFCOM would not be so politically naive and contentious to try and force an operator like me, in Wales, to accept it's an 'England' callsign. This would be to reopen some very sore wounds indeed in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.

That said, OFCOM has made some big mistakes in relation to the 'K for Cornwall' débâcle, though its reverse-ferret there seems to have been prompted by opposition from the RSGB elite of the time.

In my case I had, within the past three or so years, been able to select - and did select - Wales as my operating 'entity' within T-QSL/LoTw; this much is unarguably evident from the existing certificate. 

For completeness, persisting with the renewal process for GB1MUU resulted in:

So it can only be concluded that the ARRL has coded its system to decide that, whenever it sees a GBx callsign, it automatically deems it to be an England and England-only callsign. Other UK countries do not, according to the ARRL, now exist so far as GBx calls are concerned. 

Except, this is entirely at odds with the ARRL's DXCC list, which does include Wales as a DXCC entity. The ARRL, rather disgracefully, expect folk to cough-up $5.95 for the DXCC list rather than simply sticking it up online, so I have to rely on a third-party list by PA0ABM (dated 2022) to prove this - plus the fact my recently-renewed MW1CFN certificate is for 'Wales':

 

My guess is that someone at the ARRL - perhaps a new member of staff for example - at the ARRL has mistakenly interpreted GBx calls as applicable to England alone and changed the system accordingly. Whilst these things happen, they shouldn't be permitted to hold sway within the LoTW, once the errors are highlighted.

I was rather dreading having to look up the ARRL rules, their definition of DXCC entity and how that compares with the legal or conventional definition of a 'country'. But because Wales is firmly on the DXCC list, this descent into a black hole of definitions can be avoided and Wales (or any other relevant UK country) should not have been replaced with England when updating this and any other GBx callsign. 

This move by ARRL also, in an entirely unfair, retrospective manner, prevents me uploading GB1MUU QSOs because the 'Wales' I properly selected and was accepted by LoTW for the certificate in the past doesn't match the 'England' that they have now decided it should be.

I had two issues to raise with LoTW about my account, the second of which was this wrong assertion about GBx calls. This was either missed or entirely ignored in the response I received last night. I also sent a separate e-mail to the ARRL about this error. We'll see what they say, but I'm not holding my breath because responses from the ARRL are rarely polite and often rather cowboy-nation defiant [days later, I still haven't heard back from them].

In any case, none of this matters to me personally, as I simply turned heel, abandoning the whole LoTW anachronism for the much nicer, simpler ClubLog. That, and the fact I don't exactly warm to Trumpland deciding how the world outside America should work.