Thursday, January 1, 2009

QSL cards

Call me old-fashioned, but I really love it when I get a QSL card that is unique - maybe the card has some interesting information about the operator, or a picture of the operator/shack, or something about the operator's QTH. My current QSLs are boringly generic. I'd like to do better on my next batch. But what to put on the card? How about the things I appreciate seeing on cards I receive:

A photo of the operator and his/her station:




Information about the area in which the station is located. Although I didn't know it at the time, Halle-Neustadt is a planned community built in East Germany in the 1960s:



Something interesting about the town/city: one of the QSLs I have from the 1970s is from a ham in the town where the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana was born (Smetana wrote "The Moldau" and "The Bartered Bride" among other works):



And then, there are the low-budget QSLs which have a sort of endearing quality:




This one is kind of interesting - it's a Hollerith card! I haven't checked if the punched data has anything to do with my QSO - I suspect it does, since the printed labels appear to have been computer-generated. This is pretty impressive, as the QSO was made in June 1977!

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