2023-01-03
Getting contacts confirmed at the beginning of the new year
One of the most important ways for me to get contacts confirmed in amateur radio is via the Logbook of The World by the ARRL. I noticed the LoTW website was very slow yesterday and today, sometimes giving internal server errors. As a lot of radio amateurs should notice this, I had a look around and soon found mention at LOTW is Struggling! - amateurradio which confirms that the site is slow at the moment. There is a way to see how busy the site is processing uploads at LoTW Queue Status Page and the backlog is currently 11 to 13 hours. According to some comments in the reddit thread this is caused by people uploading their contacts once a year. I've had contacts where it took a while to confirm them because the other side wasn't uploading to LoTW on a regular basis but I never suspected some people do this just once a year. The upside is I now have a new country confirmed on several bands at once. And maybe more confirmations will show up. I do have some countries in my list with the note 'not a regular LoTW uploader'.