Asking nicely for LoTW confirmations, and getting Northern-Ireland confirmed / 2023-08-09

As I am working towards getting 100 countries confirmed in morse I do keep an overview of countries I have at least one contact with which isn't confirmed yet on Logbook of The World (LoTW). On LoTW a contact is only confirmed when both sides upload a signed log with the same contact.

Yes, LoTW uses X509 certificates and signing, they just hide it mostly from the user.

So when I have a country in the log where I'd like to get digital confirmation I follow a few steps:

I first check the page for the callsign on qrz.com. Most radio amateurs maintain a presence on that site and may mention their policy for confirming contacts. Especially for rare entities where other radio amateurs will be interested in getting those entities confirmed.

If that page doesn't answer this question the next step is to check the call (or calls) with the 'find call' option in LoTW. Here it is possible to see what the last time is a log was uploaded and processed for that call. Or it shows that the call isn't active on LoTW at all. In that case I stop searching. Using LoTW is somewhat complicated and I don't feel the need to convince someone to start using it.

If the amateur is active on LoTW I try to guess whether regular uploads can be expected. Some have not uploaded anything in years, others seem to upload once a year in the month of January. Or the amateur uploads somewhat irregularly.

Now I am nearing 100 countries confirmed in morse I do sometimes write an e-mail to the amateur asking to confirm the contact if I haven't seen confirmation after a few months. With all the details needed to find the contact in the log so they only have to do minimal work to look up the contact.

Getting Nothern-Ireland confirmed

In amateur radio Northern-Ireland is a separate entity and I had a few morse contacts with stations in Northern-Ireland in the log but none confirmed, not even after 3 months. So I mailed two of them which are regularly active on LoTW. The first one responded after a few days with a screenshot of the confirmed contact.

So now I have 91 countries confirmed in morse on LoTW. The certificate for 100 countries in morse is getting closer!