Parks On The Air Logging | LOTW

I’ve recently noticed an uptick in emails from concerning former contacts that are interested in Worked All States. Most of these emails are asking me to confirm a contact we’ve had so they can achieve WAS or whatever award they’re targeting.

I’m not one to disagree with chasing awards. I do it quite a bit myself but I thought it important to explain my operations here and why you might not see my state as confirmed in LOTW.

First things first…

I REALLY need to watch my fingers when logging. I’ll work on that and I apologize to anyone waiting on a contact that you’re not seeing, I probably fat fingered your call sign. These emails are starting to make me realize that my workflow in the field is probably not the best and I need to figure that out to accurately log contacts. If you’ve worked my station, be in portable POTA, or my home station and are missing a confirmation. Please reach out and we’ll work on it.

A little about my operations

Currently, I primarily operate portable Parks-on-the-Air (POTA). The bulk of my operations, you’ll find from different parks, in different states across the country as I travel for work. I don’t get much time at home to operate with my other duties and responsibilities that need tending when I am home. Sometimes I’ll get on the air at home but it’s usually a sked (Scheduled contact) with someone or some type of antenna testing I’m doing for my next work/POTA trip.

Reading the above, some might now understand where I’m going with this.

Logging

Recently, I’ve noticed that some might not be aware of how Logbook of the world operates fully. So I figured I’d offer a brief primer with concern focused on the nomadic portable operator.

Your Call Sign Certificate

Your callsign certificate (the digital certificate) is the “key” to signing your logbook for uploading. These certs work similar in nature to how encryption works on computers but with an emphasis on “signing” your logbook when you upload it. This confirms the person uploading the logbook is you, not someone else. This adds a great deal of security to the system and ensures we’re all operating within the rules. By contrast a username and password type system is far more vulnerable to access by third parties access was not intended for.

To put this into context: Say you were a smart ham whose been chasing a DX entity and you just can’t work them anywhere. Say you missed your shot at a DXPedition. In theory (and practice) it is far easier to brute force a username and password login system and inject your own callsign into the DX station’s log than it is to hack (yes hack) into their computer and steel their signing key. I assume that’s why the ARRL has decided to utilize keys instead of passwords. Personally, I agree with this decision. It ensures the validity of contacts uploaded to the system and provides a greater barrier to cheating. Yes, I said it, people cheat. It’s life.

This is part of the reason it’s kind of a process to get that certificate in the first place but it is justified and it provides for validity in the system.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to do this at all but it’s much harder to obtain that key than it is to brute force a password.

Your location

You may recall when setting up your LOTW and logbook program that you configured a station location inside TQSL.

This station information including callsign, DXCC, Grid, County, State, and a few other details (drawing from memory here) is where attribution is given. For most, once you’ve setup your home QTH, you’re done. You use one single location and upload contacts with that location. It’s fairly simple to this point but…

What about people who travel and operate from all over the country or for those that travel across country boundaries.

You can create additional locations inside TQSL for those operations. I do this regularly for my operating locations. This means that when I upload contacts from POTA activations, you won’t receive a confirmation for my state (Delaware). You’ll instead receive a confirmation for what ever location is included in that configuration. Yes, this does add a bit of work on my end but it ensures you’re receiving confirmations for the appropriate location that I’m operating from.

Some might think they worked Delaware simply by my home address but in many cases that’s just not the case and doesn’t tell the full story. You could also think of it like this. Say for instance you operated from Florida and are originally from Canada. Anyone you contacted didn’t work Canada, they worked Florida.

Still some will probably say I’m being hyper critical and it doesn’t matter it’s just a hobby but it does indeed matter. Flip the coin for a second and consider this: You worked a station operating portable in RI. It’s your last state you need to work for WAS but that operator uploaded his contacts with his home station location in TQSL. Well, you did indeed work RI but LOTW isn’t going to see that, LOTW thinks you worked his home state. Depending on where you live this could be a big issue for those chasing different entities.

Think of this on an even larger scale: States, Grid Squares, Counties. Hams chase all of these entities. So, for me, I feel that uploading my logs with the accurate station location is not only in the best interest of everyone I contact but is the correct and morale thing to do.

Summary

This short post is really just about awareness. I didn’t put a lot of time into it or make it a how-to. Maybe one day I will expand on this a bit but I figured it should be out there for others to understand why they’re not seeing Delaware as confirmed in LOTW.

As an aside, your logging program might tell you you’ve confirmed a state simply based off the call data (if you’ve configured it to pull in state information from QRZ or call log). This can be a bit misleading if an operator is out of state and uploading contacts from different locations. Your logbook only knows the callsign and can pull the state from the callsign data but doesn’t know any different unless you tell it.

I rarely have a reason to ask for comments here but I’m curious, for those POTA operators out there, how do you handle this and for the hunters (POTA and otherwise) how do you feel about this?