SV: [HCDX]: How QSL? (was: Why QSL?)

["Henrik Klemetz" <dhv599n@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> It's sad, but true.
> 
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> This is a message from "Elmer D. Escoto R." <eescoto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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I sympathize with you, Elmer.  But in my experience (over a couple of decades now), I know that there is no station manager that you cannot convince in the end.

The report you deliver may be devoid of value to the station, but you may still
sell it. It´s up to the messenger to attach the "price lable" to the report. 

Now, please get me right. I have never experienced that money was an object when trying to obtain a verie. Actually, I think money, or enclosing a green back dollar, has ruined the whole thing.  But as a roving QSL-manager you should have plenty of time and patience to spend as well as abilities to do some talking.

On one occasion, I had to wait for more than an hour and a half for a manager to turn up at his office. When he showed, at 11 am, and finding a distant visitor
(I had written previously to say that I was going to see him) waiting for him in the lounge, he told his secretary that he would take me out to have a cup of coffee with me in a cafe "so as not to be bothered by other callers".

As it happened, this gentleman was not to return to his office that day.
We had an "aperitivo" and then lunch. Later, in the afternoon, he took his car to show me some of the nice outskirts of the town.

This happened well before the era of cellular phones, so no one "bothered" the
man with any call, but it did cross my mind that he might be missing one or two appointments that afternoon while he was entertaining me.

This happened in Colombia.

To be sure, there was no money in there, only the money and time the station
manager spent, just for the fun of it, on his occasional visitor.

In neighbouring Ecuador, I had several consecutive meetings with two wellknown broadcasting executives in order to get The Thing done.
One of them was later to be elected Mayor of Quito, and the other one was the President of the Asociación Ecuatoriana de Radiodifusión, later to become the owner of the Tele Amazonas network.

I am talking of the managers of Radiodifusora Tarqui and  Radio Nacional Espejo, respectively. At one point, during the second meeting with Gerardo
Brborich, of RNE, he showed me a drawer bulging with reports from abroad. "Why don´t you prepare this QSL letter yourself and send it out to some of these people. There are plenty of those coupons in there (=IRC´s). You can use them in your country, can´t you?"

So I picked out a dozen good reports and sent out the QSL´s to them. Some of the reporters even received pocket agendas and/or wall calendars with the station logo in them.  There were sufficient IRC´s to pay for the postage. And to me, this was great fun.

Upon receipt of their letters, some of the addressees, although not all of them, came back to say thank you to their ad hoc QSL manager 

I still have copies of the blank QSL letter the manager signed for me, if someone is interested. That was in 1974.

I have similar blank form letters from other stations, too.  What about Radio
Chinchaycocha, in Peru?

The average Latin American is interested in people, and so he may be 
prepared to do a favour, whatever it is, either to give you a pennant or to
acknowledge a message devoid of any commercial value to him. So if you start to talk about money in this connection, this will probably ruin the whole thing.

To the middleman it may take a while to explain to the executive what someone else may or may not have heard.

"Well, I happen to know this guy. He is a friend of mine. Now, he is not very fluent in the language, but I believe he tries to say that.. (etc). As you can see, he is making a real effort...(etc)"  Such talking will reassure the v/s that he is not being had. Sometimes the gibberish listed as programme details might give a wrong impression. At least, I have seen this kind of talking work.

A Latin himself would probably not mention a lot of programme details in
his letter, only the name of the programme or some other tangible reference
to the programme content.

Sometimes one may face problems even with a reasonably good report. Once,
in Mexico, I gave the manager of a wellknown MW station a tightly written
one-page letter with all of the usual stuff in it, and the details, not too many,
were quite in order, too.

However, having glanced through the letter, the manager looks at me,
not without some impatience,  saying, "So what´s the thing this chap wants from
me?"  

His question made me review what the DXing hobby was all about.

In other words, to "fetch" a QSL for onself is one thing. To get it for someone else in an altogether different matter. Now, when you learn that QSL´s brought back by intermediaries are less valuable than normal QSL´s  (a common
viewpoint among fundamentalist DXers), you suddenly realize that no one
appreciates your effort.. It´s not just that you deliver a letter. It´s much more 
than that. If you wish to pick up an answer, you have to fight for it.

Nonethless, during the past few years in Colombia, I  accepted to clear a couple of reports. Those were special cases. Just as grammarians would say, there is no rule without an exception. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a message from "Henrik Klemetz" <dhv599n@xxxxxxxxx>
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