Hi all

I'm one of the very first members of eQSL (2000) and Platinium member.
But for now I'm done with it for these reasons :

1. Nothing has changed in 20 years, only N5UP turned a rich man. The web still looking as 20 years ago, the standard eQSL cards are still awful, etc

2. I'm receiving loads of incorrect eQSLs (mainly wrong calls, NOT in LOG, etc). I stopped returning them to sender, too much workload

3. eQSL is still not taken serious, my remarks 1 and 2 are some of the main reasons.

Unfortunatly my money for Platinium is in the pocket of N5UP and co. Because my HRD still uploads automatically, I keep uploading my logs. But I don't give a dime anymore on what is coming in. Sorry. I'm done with it.

Sincerely yours ON4VT aka OT4V

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ON4VT DANNY VAN TRICHT
Edited by F6DKQ Guy FALCOZ on Aug 5, 2020 at 07:02 AM

As a Volunteer, I have no reply to this

=> forwarded to N5UP

Sorry you feel that way, Danny. I feel I've added many new features and the largest awards program in ham radio in that time.

Yes, the site's look and feel is somewhat dated, but I'm working on that as well with an artist, as you can see if you go to https://www.eqsl.cc/QSLCard/Home5G.cfm which is still under construction until I have fixed up all of the over 1,000 programs in the system. Many of those are administrative programs you can't see, but I have to maintain them all with an all-volunteer staff.

I travel around the country giving presentations to ham radio clubs to convince the ARRL-ONLY members that they should give eQSL a try, and usually sign up a lot of new members at each such visit. I tried to get ARRL to accept our eQSLs, but they had already invested a million dollars in LOTW and I couldn't convince them to give that up.

About 92% of our members use the service for free. I only wish I had $1 from each one of them, THEN maybe I would be rich! :) But I wanted to give ham radio back something from my 50 years of fun that I have gotten out of the hobby.

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Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong!

73,
Dave Morris, N5UP

Dear Dave

I'm very pleased you took the time to write down your answer. My "wake-up" call did the job, LOL

To be clear, many users are sharing and agree with my remarks.

I'm not the guy that's whining and sit back.
I've done a lot of projects already, even some to improve the use of eQSL. I made a tutorial for /P eQSL cards, it's published on wwff.co and on www.belgiumoutdoorshack.be
I once proposed via mail to imporve the standard eQSL cards. Never got answer on it. I'm good in graphics and made already dozens of eQSL layouts for stations (ham friends) all over the globe

1. A really big problem is incorrect eQSLs. My IN box often has too many red marks. And I'm really very correct in logging. Chasing SOTA, WWFF, WCA and lighthouses, stations sign /P /M /LH etc but send card without or just with the add. In plus some fake eQSLs etc ... I know it's the job of the posting station to be correct, the reality is different.

2. Improvement of de eQSL lay outs is a must. Not only custom uploaded layouts are compressed too much, reducing quality, also the standard eQSL cards are very poor. We are 2020, not 2000 anymore.

As said, I want to take action too.
Some good features are in hamlog.ru This QSL service is far from perfect but the quality of cards is much better (lees compressed). I also like the way they approach /P /M /AM or whatelse : you make one account (f.e. ON4VT) en WHEN UPLOADING a log, you can add /P /M etc ... no need to struggle with extra accounts etc.

Will be glad to hear from you.

ON4VT aka OT4V (/P /M)

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ON4VT DANNY VAN TRICHT

I appreciate your work with the tutorials. We always need more of those in various languages.

Concerning incorrect eQSLs, I even get those myself. Some people get the callsign wrong or have the wrong time set in their computer. The only thing you can do is reject it, and if the same person is sending you a lot of those, you can reject the sender entirely.

I have been studying the issue of JPG quality in the card graphics. We currently compress to 75% quality, and I'm experimenting with increasing that. In a system with 3/4 billion records, anything we do to make a change must be carefully thought out and tested. It's quite easy to overload the memory in our servers and end up having our Java "garbage collector" doing too many what they call "stop the world pauses", where the entire system freezes for 5 minutes or longer. We obviously cannot tolerate those, so adjusting the garbage collection mechanism has been an ongoing task for the past year.

I have also been working on the issue of highly mobile stations (such as County hunters) being able to upload their logs and have them automatically triaged into the correct account. This is much, much more difficult than it appears, because it is more than just storing the QTH of each record inside that record, but in our case, being able to potentially generate a DIFFERENT eQSL design for every QTH. So our relational database is important but also adds an administration necessity. Let's say you travel across 50 different grid squares and the system generates 50 new accounts, each one with potentially a different eQSL design to show the picture of the city in each grid square, etc. Now you must be able to maintain those 50 accounts, including the start and end dates of operation, so that when you receive the reciprocal eQSL for each of those, it must flow into the correct account so you get proper credit for any eAwards. Other web services may not have those needs, but we do, so it is a non-trivial task. I have been working on it for years, and my "acid test" will be when I fly my airplane across the country and have it upload the logs in real time into the proper accounts so the eQSLs are available instantly to the recipients. A friend of mine flew his airplane around the world a couple years ago and I used his logs to test what I had been working on. Needless to say, it is not quite ready after my testing. But I'm working on it.

TL;DR: stay tuned. I'm not resting on my laurels :)

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Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong!

73,
Dave Morris, N5UP