Today I did something special – I uploaded the logbook of our amateur radio club station DF0VL to qrz.com. The exciting thing about it? This logbook goes all the way back to 1982! A few amateur radio operators will have been surprised to suddenly receive confirmations for QSOs since 1982 in 2024.
Of course, the import did not go smoothly straight away. 464 QSOs first had to be analysed and corrected. In some cases, callsigns were misspelled or the frequencies of the calls were entered incorrectly, leading to import errors which, interestingly, were acknowledged by qrz.com with a ‘mode’ error.
After the correction, 3,296 QSOs could be uploaded, of which 51 were confirmed.
The oldest confirmation we received was particularly exciting: A connection from 1986 from American radio amateur Timothy, W3YQ.
I’m excited to see how many more confirmations we get and look forward to possibly using other platforms like the ‘Logbook of the World’ soon.
In the old logs, I even stumbled across the QSOs that my parents, then members of N52 Vlotho, made with the club station DF0VL to apply for their “Burg-diplomas”:
A big thank you goes to my colleagues from the DARC local association Vlotho, DOK N52, for their support with the digitisation. A few years ago, a group of radio amateurs set themselves the goal of digitising the handwritten logbooks – a prerequisite for uploading them to portals such as qrz.com. It was a lot of work, but it’s worth it to preserve all these memories and share them with others.
I also recorded the entire process on video: