WIA QSL Bureau

Did you know that the WIA maintains a QSL bureau? For those of you new to amateur radio, The International QSL Bureau organisation is a loose group of bureaus largely operated by each country’s national amateur radio body, whom collect cards on behalf of its members and send them in bulk to the bureaus of other countries, where they are eventually distributed in bulk to the appropriate members.

In Australia, this service is carried out by members of the WIA and on behalf of the WIA. Each state as well as the Northern Territory and ACT has a local bureau which distribute cards to its local members. On a national level, cards are received from other bureaus, separated and sent to the states and territories approximately every 3 months.

This service is free of charge to WIA members however it is not offered to non-members. The policy of the WIA is that non member cards are disposed of once sent to the local state Bureaus. There is some leeway for local bureaus to hold cards for non members but this is wholly at the discretion of the local bureau. Over half the cards sent to the VK6 bureau are for non members. The costs of these cards being sent from the originating bureau to the final bureau is borne by the two organisations regardless.

Alek VK6APK is the WA WIA QSL bureau manager. He tells me he spends 3-4 weeks a year on average managing the bureau and this is completely volunteer based. He receives and distributes around 10Kg of cards per year, half of which are for non WIA members. While the WIA funds a single send-out of cards to each member per year, Alek does also bring cards for club members occasionally in conjunction with any trips to Perth he may make for personal reasons, and if you sent him some SASEs he is happy to send them more often. As a red undy wearing card carrying member of the WIA who enjoys chasing DX, I’m certainly a beneficiary of his volunteer efforts and for this I thank him very much. 

The difference in costs of sending cards via the bureau when compared to sending a card direct to an overseas ham is significant. I tend to send cards to the national outgoing card bureau in NSW 3-4 times a year. The postage cost is $3-$4 and I typically send around 100 cards at a time, so the cost is around 3 to 4 cents a card. To send a card direct to Europe is in the order of $3.80 per card so around 100 times more expensive. With the annual membership of the WIA sitting around $90 or so dollars, if you sent 40 cards via the bureau a year instead of posting direct, financially you are now better of as a member than not. I probably send around 300 cards a year so I’m certainly feeling the love! 

When I first received my ham license in the early 80s, Jim Rumble VK6RU was the VK6 bureau manager and the process then was you bought a bunch of 2 cent special WIA QSL Bureau stamps from Jim and as I lived in Pt Hedland at the time, I sent him a bunch of Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes along with a bunch of outgoing cards and when there was enough cards for me, he would post them up. I think in 1981, I received my first cards within 2-3 months of getting on air. Amateur Radio was super popular then with the advent of CB and the new Novice license tied with the peak of a really big sunspot cycle, which meant the bureau had a significant economy of scale. In those days, if you had enough cards for a particular country, it may have been worth sending cards direct to the overseas bureau, hence saving the local bureau some postage and time. From memory I sent most of my Japanese and USSR cards direct to the relevant bureaus (who remembers when all Russian hams were “near Moscow” and would “QSL via Box 88 Moscow”?). 

After that huge sunspot cycle in the late 70s/early 80s, and with the advent of electronic verification of cards, the volume of cards travelling via the bureau had significantly reduced. Many hams just didn’t bother with hard copy cards anymore. It seemed that the days of sending a card via the bureau for every contact made on HF were well and truly over. In the late naughties, it wasn’t unusual for a card from Europe to take a couple of years to make its way to an Australian Ham.

This was the case of course until the amateur world discovered FT8! Love it or hate it, but the shear volume of contacts possible on FT8 where around 80% of all HF contacts now occur, has brought the QSL bureau network right back into relevance, and the trip time from contact to receipt of card is back to a similar time as the early 80s. I’ve noted some cards from Europe being sent to me within 3 months of the contact.

Well! so having a bureau is all very well, but how do you get cards printed? Australian printers these days just don’t seem to be set up to print cards at a cost that compares with overseas printers. In the mid 90s, I did play around with printing cards on good quality paper that could be put in a standard photocopier (this was before colour printers were a thing). It worked OK and I think I was only sending out a few dozen cards a year. For a while up to about 3 years ago, I was using an outgoing service from Israel that would take a log file and print the cards with the contact info already on it and send it to incoming bureaus world-wide in no more than 3 month intervals. This was very convenient and cost around 10c US a card. The same service would also print blank cards and send them to you in lots of 100 which seemed fine given that most of my outgoing cards were via the bureau. Unfortunately this service fell victim to COVID and ceased to exist a few years back.

Lately I have had cards printed by Gennady UX5UO in Kyiv, Ukraine. I produced the artwork using an application called CANVA and I have to say, the quality is superb. Looking at his website, you can get 1000 cards printed on both sides for around $100 AUD delivered. As an added bonus, using Gennady is a great way of supporting our Ukrainian ham brothers and sisters.

There are other printers around as well. Putting “QSL Card Printers” into Google flushed out a few competing printers (as well as Gennady) and some were very competitively priced. One thing is for certain, it is a lot cheaper to get printed cards today than it was in 1981! 

On a final note, For me personally, I tend to only send cards when I receive one first (either direct or via the bureau), or if I am specifically asked for one, or I need it for an award. I think I made just under 5800 contacts on HF last year, sending a card for every contact is just not something I want to do. Having said that, I really do enjoy receiving hard copy QSL cards (but just not thousands of cards), so I hope this part of ham radio continues to survive.