The ARRL's decision to end funding for the bureaus at the end of this year has a lot of hams talking. However, this support ended on December 31, 2024. It seems that the ARRL Board of Directors chose this budget-cutting move in light of the increasing use of electronic QSLs. How is this affecting your QSL operations? I use the bureau system regularly and wondering if the fee increases will push more people to electronic-only QSLing. What are you folks seeing in terms of response rates between paper, LoTW, and eQSL these days?

I've been tracking my QSL statistics and the direct QSL method seems to be the most effective (63% success rate so far). The second most-successful method was LOTW, although way down at 18%. In fact, this number was double the rate of eQSL (9%). Bureau delays might push more toward electronic.

QSL bureaus were/are a great way to save on postage costs. The cost of a stamp – especially to overseas countries – has risen steadily. That may not be a problem for occasional use, but could become an unreasonable expense for active stations. The fee increases are unfortunate but probably necessary.

As a bureau volunteer, this caught us completely off guard. My reader was a little upset about this because this decision was made with little or no input from the bureau managers, and they were quite caught off guard by this decision. Even so, I do sympathize with the volunteers who were not asked for any input. We're doing our best to keep costs reasonable for users.