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Author Topic: Thoughts about organizing a free radio QSL Museum  (Read 445 times)

Offline ChrisSmolinski

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Thoughts about organizing a free radio QSL Museum
« on: August 11, 2018, 1303 UTC »
I was going through some of my QSL binders, thinking about uploading scans of the older classic pirate QSLs. I've done this a few times in the past, but never in an coherent way. Which let me to thinking about how we can put together a collection of everyone's QSLs.

QSLs get posted to this board, as well as to the HFU Wiki https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/index.php/Pirate_QSL_Collection

This board is a great way to see new QSLs, but it does not lend itself to browsing through older QSLs. The HFU wiki page is one giant list of QSLs by station in alphabetical order. It's going to get out of hand if expanded. I do like the idea of using the wiki in some way to organize the QSLs (and overall I think the wiki is a potentially powerful but underutilized part of the HFU, but it's never gathered enough critical mass). Plus many stations have several QSL designs, ideally you want to include all of them. Older QSLs need to be scanned, eQSLs are of course much easier to deal with.

So I'm looking for suggestions. One thought is to tie this in with the existing list of stations on the wiki: https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/index.php/Pirate_radio_stations  Create an entry (page) for each station, where QSLs for that station are displayed.  This list is also somewhat out of date, and missing a lot of stations both new and old. It really needs to be updated each time there's a new station, plus going back to older stations that never got an entry (which could be done as QSLs are added).

This also ties into another idea, which is some sort of a history/chronology of (mostly shortwave) free radio here in the US. Europe is another story altogether. If we can get enough people interested, we should be able to cover much of the history, including details about each station. Dig out those old logbooks!

Ideas? Suggestions? Volunteers?
Chris Smolinski
Westminster, MD
eQSLs appreciated! csmolinski@blackcatsystems.com
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