Forked Tongue

Woe on the man that speaks with forked tongue! That’s the only reason I can see for the enormous uprising of bad log entries, and Lord knows, I’ve had a bunch of them lately.

I don’t write down a callsign (and leave it intact) if I am unsure of the callsign. About the only time I cannot guarantee what I heard is when I am listening to someone with a seriously heavy foreign accent. Heck, I do side-work for a local tech company simply because I am able to have a full conversation with the Indian tech folks that provide support for some of his gear. I have no issue working with them over the phone, so I continued to get work from this guy because I would interface with his tech support folks and help solve issues. I have a little quirk about me, I am pretty accurate at determining the region from where a person originates based on their accent. I can usually narrow it down to a State, but many times, I can get it down to an area within the State. Martha’s Vineyard area for instance. Same with Baltimore, North Cacalacky, Alabama, most parts of Texas. The midwest is a bit tougher, so many areas have similar accents. Minnesota is easy. And so on.

Over the course of my very limited ham career, I have thus logged into QRZ a huge number of amateur radio callsigns that have denied validation through QRZ because I wasn’t in their log books. There’s several reasons this could happen:

1. I logged the callsign incorrectly. Considering how much of a stickler I am for verifying the proper information before writing it down and making sure by hanging around someone else’s pile up to make sure, I seriously doubt that the sheer number of denials could be attributed to me having cotton in my ears.
2. People don’t log or mistake my callsign. This could be a valid and widespread issue. I know lots of people that don’t log properly. I’ve seen it first hand. Most of the people I associate with are no where near the stickler for details on a log entry that I am. I am to the point of being rather anally retentive when it comes to logging, especially compared to the hams I associate with off the air.
3. There are people out there that are using someone’s callsign. I think this may be more prevalent than what I previously considered. It could very well be a wide spread issue.
   1. If a operator is using a valid callsign and working the bands on a particular day, an unscrupulous person could work another band at the same time, utilizing the same callsign and be rather safe knowing that the owner of the callsign would not know.
   2. An unscrupulous person could use a dormant callsign, or a callsign of a person that only operates on 2m/70cm normally. But this would probably not be the case because the average 2m/70cm guy doesn’t normally check on his QRZ account. Because I get a lot of denials via QRZ, those folks doing the denials are probably active on HF.

This may in fact be the reasoning behind the desire for so many hams to stick by “snail mail” confirmations of contacts. Could this actually be as wide-spread to cause such a number of denials in QRZ confirmations? It appears to be so. What is the reasoning behind this? All of these contacts that I have made, none of which stick out to me as being non-compliant with applicable rules when operating on the air. I mean, I haven’t had as much as a single conversation on 7.207 and only one on 14.313 (and yes, I had a reasonable QSO with that Canadian nut). Which means, those that I have had conversations with, seemed to be reasonable people, operating within the law and using valid callsigns. Now, there’s been select few callsigns that did not properly appear on QRZ. I’ve noticed that from time to time. Rather infrequent, but it happened. But these were limited to a select few, not the sheer number of denials that I have received.

Also of note, these denials were not strictly with my current callsign. They were also from my previous callsign and that of my club calls, as I am the steward for that callsign on QRZ. So, when I request confirmation, I do so over all of the callsigns in my trust. When a denial happens, it will notify me as to which callsign I was seeking confirmation upon.

Why then, I must ask, do these “reasonable” people, seemingly to operate properly (other than not have a license or using someone else’s call) seek to do such? Lack of ability to pass the tests? Not wanting to get on “the list”? I have no idea, but it’s a tad irritating to find out that this beloved hobby is yet another hobby (I am also a computer gamer) chock full of smacktards and cheaters that game the system.

It’s just like everything else in life, and I do mean everything, our population is full of those without any scruples.