QSL & I

Cards or towers? How tall is a regular tower? Let’s say about 60 feet? Yes, it makes sense: 60 feet is a size that we can easily find in most backyards. The next question: How many towers have you seen in the largest contest station you ever visited? Once I visited N5AU and I counted over 20 towers, but there were bases for about 28 and they probably used all of them during N5AU’s golden era.

Now let’s do some math: 30 towers times 60 feet each equals 1800 feet of tower. If you live in Europe where we use civilized measuring units, it equals about 540 meters.

Well, to give you an easy-to-visualize picture of what I do, I will tell you that in the year 2000 I handled about 18,000 pounds (8200 kg) of QSL cards. This means that if you put the cards one on top of the other, you would make a pile 2420 feet high, which equals about 40 towers of 60 feet each—ten towers more than the largest station in the world!

QSL Bureaus around the world

All IARU member societies are required to run a QSL Bureau, and sometimes this is a real pain for them. Quite often it happens that a society is "too small to be a big society and too large to be a small society" and this means that budget is the most important consideration. Therefore, it’s not easy to decide if the bureau must be handled "inside" or "outside" the HQ. Currently, all the societies are losing members, but the quantity of cards to handle doesn’t change a lot. This is because the very active stations are still in business, so the cost to the bureau is not changing in accordance with the number of members. Electronic cards probably will not change the numbers very much, because people still like having a paper card in their hands, so the amount of cards that will cross the world via mail is and still will be quite high.

Each society handles its bureau according to the number of members. Basically, however, all work in one of two ways: using volunteers or paying someone to handle the cards. A bureau based on volunteers usually works in relatively small countries where the load of cards doesn’t require a great deal of time or where the number of volunteers is enough to ensure fast service. I don’t think there are many people around the world who make a living sorting cards—maybe a total of 20 or 30 on the entire planet. Hmmm... it seems quite a unique job, doesn’t it?

Some societies require its members to pay extra for a bureau service, while in other countries the cost of the bureau is included in the annual membership fee. Paying by the quantity of cards that one sends and receives or paying just a fix amount of money without considering the amount of traffic you generate? It’s a dilemma that makes those on the boards of societies crazy.

How it works in Italy

In Italy we have about 18,000 members who pay an annual subscription fee equivalent to 53 US dollars to get a monthly magazine, a small amount of insurance for antennas, and the right to send and receive an unlimited quantity of QSL cards (both inside and outside of Italy) at no additional cost.

The QSL bureau in Italy is split into three sections. One section is for the outgoing cards, while the Incoming Bureau is split into two parts. Since 1995 I have handled about 60% of the Incoming Service, and since 1996 I have managed all the Outgoing Service, both of them for all of Italy. Since our society (A.R.I.) is one of those which is too small to be considered big (you know the story), the bureau is not at the society’s HQ in Milano, but rather is located in my house and in the house of IK2HKT, who handles the remaining 40% of the incoming cards.

A.R.I. has about 300 local clubs, and each member goes to his respective club to get his cards and leave the cards that he wants to have sent out. The club officers collect the cards, sort them, and mail them to A.R.I. HQ in Milano once a month or so. If a member wants to receive his cards at home, he has to pay a little extra, equivalent to about 36 US dollars a year regardless of how many QSLs he sends and receives.

We ship cards to each club eleven times per year; we do not ship in July because in July and August "all Italy" is closed for holiday. Shipment is done no matter how many cards we have to send: one card or 20 pounds of cards, it doesn’t matter. Shipments to foreign bureaus are done when boxes are full and ready to go.

Weekly Trips to Milano

The HQ of A.R.I. is in downtown Milano; that is where the foreign bureaus, the Italian clubs, and whoever wants to send cards sends them. Several times a day the postman visits our HQ bringing all sorts of boxes, bags, envelopes, and packages. Sometimes packing is very poor, so after a long trip a package may arrive broken open.

I live about one hour south of Milano and I drive to HQ once every week, usually on Wednesday afternoon, to take home the cards. I drive a compact car that fortunately cannot speak, as I cannot imagine what it would say after transporting a heavy load of cards. I have never been stopped by the police during one of these trips to Milano. This is a good thing, since I wonder what they would say about a car full of mail, still sealed, that is not addressed to me! Usually I take home about 220–330 pounds (100–150 kg) of cards each week, but we have had peaks of 660 pounds (300 kg).

How I handle it

I’m lucky enough to have quite a large house, but it seems never to be large enough. Currently I use four full rooms for cards (about 240 sq. ft.), plus some more corners here and there that I temporarily fill with cards, not caring too much about the meaning of the word temporarily.

This is a real full-time job. Usually I work about eight hours a day for six days a week with the part-time help of my mom. Occasionally I get some help from other people. Since the Incoming Bureau’s shipments must be done within fixed deadlines (usually in the last week of each month), it happens sometimes that I have to work on Sunday or during the night to get everything ready to go. On the other hand, this job is quite flexible, as I can decide to take some days off if I can get everything ready in advance for the next shipment. I am paid by the weight of the cards that I ship.

The Outgoing Bureau

Unfortunately, my house is on three levels, so each time I have to move hundreds of pounds up and down. In the basement there is a large room mostly dedicated to the Outgoing Bureau. Here I store the boxes that the Italian clubs send us.

Two sides of the room are full of compartments, about 190, one for each existing bureau. I set up 40 large boxes for the countries where we send more cards, such as the eleven U.S. bureaus, DL, F, G, EA, SM, UA, UR, VE, PY, and so on. These boxes contain 22 pounds (10 kg) of cards each. Smaller boxes are for all other countries. These boxes hold a little more than 2.5 pounds (a little over 1 kg) of cards.

Sorting time changes a lot depending on how the sender pre-sorted the cards. We require the clubs to sort cards by country, but this is just a dream that never comes true, so each time I have to check some packets that contain mixed cards. I already know where I can find most of the mistakes, but our members always find new ways to mix things up. Usually WA4 and KP4 are mixed, as well as W3 and KP3, W6 and KH6, W7 and KL7, BV and BY, SU and SV, and others.

This is the easiest job, as usually I take in hand each card only once, and if I’m lucky enough, most of the cards are somehow pre-sorted by the clubs. Shipping takes more time because the boxes must be sealed with care to ensure they will not break during their journey, which can take up to four months.

The larger boxes are shipped "Surface Mail" so I asked a friend to write some software to print customs forms and the other papers that the post office requires. Smaller boxes are sent "Small Package" so they don’t need any paperwork except a special label stating what the contents and the weight are. A couple of times a year I send out cards for those little countries for which we cannot fill up a box, even in a year. I put all the cards I have in a bubble-pack envelope and mail it by regular mail.

The Incoming Bureau

The Incoming Bureau is split among the three levels of my house. This work takes the longest, as each card goes through my hands at least five or six times to go through the entire process. Each shipment must be at least 660 pounds (300 kg), but I usually process 880 to 1100 pounds (400 to 500 kg) at one time. This is because processing a smaller quantity in the end will result a big bunch of unique cards.

The first step is mixing cards coming from Italy with those coming from other countries; you always have to offer your customers a good variety of cards! Then starts the work of sorting the cards by the first letter of the suffix. It is not necessary to sort the cards by call areas because each callsign is "unique" so if I2UIY exists, it means that there is no I3UIY, I6UIY, and so on. During this phase I put on one side only cards addressed to SWLs and to 2x1 contest callsigns; all other cards are processed together. Cards are temporarily stacked in 1 kg packets and put on one side. This phase requires some room, as I must put each pile of packets in a separate stack.

When this phase is over, I take all the cards addressed to a suffix with the first letter "A" and sort them by the second letter of the suffix, and so on. The third step is sorting each packet by the third letter, and during this phase I sort the cards by their prefix. At the end I have a small stack of QSLs addressed to each callsign.

Cards for SWLs, due to the nature of their callsigns, have to be sorted by themselves, as do the cards addressed to 2x1 contest callsigns, which have to be sorted first by call areas because these callsigns are not unique as are other Italian callsigns.

At this point I have a small stack of QSLs (at least two cards) for each callsign, and I have to type each callsign using a dedicated software to check if the addressee has paid the annual fee and to see to which club he belongs to. Each club is identified by a four-digit number that I write in light pencil on the upper right-hand corner of the first card of the stack.

During these processes there will come out a lot of cards addressed to unique callsigns. These callsigns have to be typed one by one to make sure it is really a unique callsign that gets on the air very rarely and not a broken callsign (it seems like log checking, doesn’t it?). This process takes a lot of time, and the result is that the majority is junk.

Now it is time to carry everything upstairs, where I have another room full of about 500 compartments—one for each club, plus about 200 for those who pay the extra fee to get the cards at home. Each compartment is labeled with the code of the club, and it takes about 8 hours to put all the packets of cards in the right compartments. Then it usually takes almost three days to pack all the cards into boxes and bubble-pack envelopes.

A given number of boxes must be left open for a while because each month we put together a bulletin with DX, contest, award, and QSL news that usually is 24 pages long (bulletin?). I’m in charge of editing the bulletin, which is then printed in Milano. About 80 copies of it are enclosed in the boxes with cards.

At this point I only have to print papers for the post office. As of last year I don’t have to put stamps on the papers anymore because I made an agreement with the postal service. They gave me a rubber stamp that makes the work much easier. You will understand that I’m the best customer of the local post office, as I spend over 20,000 US dollars every year for postage. Three years ago they even gave me a watch as a present for Christmas!

To carry to the post office all the cards takes at least a couple of trips, always using my "mute" car that never complains about the load. These cards are shipped in three sizes of boxes (1, 2, and 5 kg) and three sizes of envelopes (20, 100, and 250 gr).

Problems

Each time I tell this story to someone, I always am asked the same question: "Why don’t you find a way to do it faster?" The budget and the room are the main problems. I guess that in Japan and Germany the local societies have some kind of machine that cuts short the handwork. These machines obviously are expensive and require a lot of room. These two points usually are insurmountable.

Sorting so many cards every day, I don’t even pay attention to the (sometimes) nice pictures on them. What makes me angry sometimes is the size of the cards. Oversize cards are a real pain. Finally A.R.I. decided to reject cards larger than 3.5" x 5.5" (9 x 14 cm). Unfortunately, we still get a lot of these "XXL" cards from foreign countries.

Another point that is not easy to understand is why so many people keep sending envelopes with 30–50 cards instead of delivering the cards to their club. Processing 50 cards takes more time than processing 1 kg of pre-sorted cards, but these guys still believe that if they bypass the club their cards will take less time to be mailed.

You will not believe this, but every day I get cards for countries such as A61, A5, YA, 3X, 7Q7, 8Q7, S79, 9Q5, 9U5, 9X5, E30, D2, and so on. How can people even think that in Bhutan there exists a QSL bureau? I know that there are some small QSL bureaus that research the QSL Managers for these kinds of cards. We cannot do it because it would take too much time and it would be too expensive.

Someone gathered some statistics and found out that only a relatively small number (80–90) of the 190 existing QSL bureaus send out cards, so the cards sent to these other countries are almost doomed. This is probably due to the fact that in these countries there are very few stations, so the budget of the local society does not include starting a bureau service. Another reason could be the social and political situation of a country. People should evaluate the situation before sending bureau cards to some "strange" countries. This would save money, time—and tempers!

So...

I know that the about 250 volunteers who work for the U.S. Incoming Bureau will not believe that I’m paid to handle the QSL bureau here. However, I’m doing it for the entire country and it’s because of the large quantity of cards that I handle.

It’s a good job which allows some flexibility, and it only makes me angry a few times a year. Sometimes it is funny, too, especially when you get cards addressed to AP1RIL, PH0NEY, F0OL, plus other callsigns that cannot be listed here!

Next time you send cards through the bureau, please remember that before the addressee gets your card it has to be handled by someone else, and probably more than once. Try to show some care and write in a reasonable way, and put the callsign in a place where it can be seen without the whole card having to be read. If you use computer labels, next time you buy a new transceiver please save some money to buy a new ribbon cartridge for your printer, too!

(by I2UIY - 2001)