Electronic QSL Card Centre now the World's Largest Award-Granting Amateur Radio Organization
On 21 March 2010, shortly after 2200 UTC, the 156 Thousandth member registered at eQSL.cc. The total number of accounts, including members with multiple QTH accounts, is over 171 thousand.
Over 156 million eQSLs are stored in our database, meaning that each member has uploaded an average of 1000 electronic QSLs.
For comparison, the ARRL membership stood at about 154,627 (2008 Annual Report), the JARL at 74,353 (March 2009), the DARC membership stands at about 45,000, and the RSGB at about 23,000 members.
The web site QRZ.com which started out mainly as a place to perform callsign lookups, but has now expanded into forums, counts over 300,000 amateur radio operators in its membership.
Some History
Our first generation web site was launched on May 14, 1998. Within a few months, a die-hard group of early adopters had already begun spreading the word,
and we registered our first thousand members.
In 2000, the technology was available to convert the system from one based on sequential files to one using a real database.
And it's a good thing, because we jumped from 100,000 up to 1 million eQSLs in our database that year, and our membership stood at over 7,000.
Not much more than a year later, we were already at 10 million eQSLs and over 30,000 members.
By 2006, we crossed the 100,000 member mark.
On New Year's Eve 2007/2008 we had more than 122,000 members and over 92 million eQSLs in our database.
Today, March 2010
- eQSL.cc has been growing exponentially, currently adding about 75 new members every day and between 5000 and 10,000 new eQSLs every HOUR.
- We approved 265 eAwards in March 2010, breaking all previous records. To date, we have issued 10,000 eAwards, nearly all of which were reviewed by our eAward Manager Russ Fish, K7INA.
- Over 25% of our members have received Authenticity Guaranteed certification, making their eQSLs eligible as credits for eAwards.
- Our all-volunteer Advisory Board works tirelessly every single day:
- Our Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish translators have made over 5,000 translations to help make the system more useful for members across the world.
- Our AG committee members have reviewed over 40,000 licenses for the AG program
- Our Support committee members have answered over 121,000 email requests for technical support in many languages
- Advisory Board members moderate forums, discussion groups, and answer countless questions about how eQSL.cc works
- They have fixed hundreds of thousands of incorrect grid squares, CQ zones, county names, and other profile information
- They have recruited thousands of new members and new advertisers
- They help organize and manage contests and nets
A big THANK YOU to everyone who has helped make the Electronic QSL Card Centre the world's largest and fastest growing award-granting amateur radio organization!
Comparison with ARRL total membership numbers
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