I am now swapping emails with a bunch of people overseas.

The people are other ham radio operators and the subject is QSL cards.

A fellow ham in Uzbekistan emailed me to tell me that the US Mail is screwing up. The card he sent me was returned to him. A discussion with other hams says that the Post Office has been screwing up a lot of mail coning in from overseas these days.

Anyway, he's going to try it again.

Another French ham sent me an email explaining that I have a card coming from French Polynesia.

Right now I have 173 entities confirmed on paper sitting on my desk and the big push will quit when I get 200.

For those that don't understand what I am writing about I will explain.

When 2 hams make contact they log the event in their station log. Generally most 2 way communications end there. The contact has been logged and that is that.

However, when one ham or the other needs proof of the contact he sends the other guy a postcard with the pertinent information on it and drops it in the mail.

The recipient sends the sender one of his cards. The cards are called QSL cards and may range from a simple hand written note of some sort to a fancy, fairly expensive picture card.

Rumors that some Sheik of Araby type was sending solid gold cards went around a while back but that's a crock, although the cards send by the late King Hussien of Jordan were very nice.

The most expensive one I have is made of a piece of Koa from Hawaii and the cheapest I have is a 3x5 card from Alaska with the information hand written. These two are framed together because I'm proud of both of them. They were both accompanied with a lot of work and help from others.

Both were three hour dramas of sorts and I'm grateful the guys on the other end gave of their time to work on this. The Alaskan was a GI stationed in Anchorage at the time. He sat in a snow bank for three hours trying to establish contact with me and finally the band lifted and we made contact.

Anyway, The guy in Uzbekistan just told me he's  going to re-mail my card today in his own envelope along with the SAE I sent him.

Right now I have 173 overseas contacts confirmed and when I get French Polynesia and Uzbekistan I'll have 175.

My goal is 200 even though there are about 350 entities out there. I figure that 200 is an honorable count.  The remaining 150 are pretty much uninhabited islands that only open up every so often and most of them will take years if not decades to contact.

In other news, the third Most Interesting Man in the World just got promoted to Second Most Interesting Man in the World because I shaved my beard off. I'm now just a nobody.





To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY