I get so few QSL through LoTW that I usually go to LoTW about once a month and write manually into the logs. This is not a big deal for me to do. After all after being a ham for almost 30 years I have less than 1900 QSOs (I don't do contest). A couple weeks ago I did my monthly check and found out that I had 7 more QSL than I had when I checked the previous month. Normally the new ones are on top, so I wrote down the information on the top 7, but when I got ready to mark them in DXBase I found that 5 of them had already been marked as confirmed way back in April last year. These 5 were dated last month so I sent them an email and they said if a person sends in a dupe then it overwrites the old entry. So then I started wonder where are the news at? Anyway, I created a report the other day to give me a list of all stations that were confirmed via LoTW. I exported it as a comma delimited file so I could import it into Excel. Then I downloaded the LoTW adi file and edited it into a comma delimited file. The first thing I noticed is that LoTW said I had 173 QSL, but the adi file only contained 172. So one was missing. (Bare with me, please.) So then I imported both the modified adi file and my report file into Excel. I found that I had maybe 10 QSO where I marked the LoTW confirmed, but failed to put a date in the LOTWREC column, so fixed that. Ran my report again. This time it said I had 175 confirm. That was 2 more than LoTW said I had and 3 more than the adi report contained. Anyway, I was able to match everything except for those 3 calls. So I figured, alright I marked them wrong in DXBase, not a big deal. To be sure I went to LoTW and did a search and it found all 3 missing calls. The interesting thing is these three were not in the adi file.
So why am I so concerned? Sure it is only 3 QSL, but that is out of my poor 175 QSLs (and there may be more). What concerns me is what about you that have thousands confirmed, how many are you missing? I sent them an email about this to see what they have to say. By the way, I did find my S01R that I didn't know was confirmed and that gives me a new country. Thought you might want to know, Bob KB4CL
