Managing Your Requests for Confirmation
After you send out a QSL card to request a QSL that will confirm an unconfirmed entity, entity-band, or entity-mode, you must wait for it to arrive. While you're waiting, you might work another station from the same entity on the needed band or mode; if that happens, DXKeeper's Add Needed function will not automatically generate an insurance request for confirmation of this QSO. As long as the original QSO's status remains Requested, Add Needed will assume that a confirmation will someday arrive and therefore will generate no new outgoing request.
At some point in time, however, your confidence in receiving a response will drop to the point where one of two actions is appropriate:
- send a second request for confirmation
mark the QSO as unconfirmable so that if another QSO's confirmation will provide the needed entity/entity-band/entity-mode, then a request for its confirmation can be generated by Add Needed
DXKeeper makes it easy to periodically check the status of your outstanding confirmation requests: invoke the Card Aging function in the DXCC, Challenge, TOP panel on the Main window's Check Progress tab. This function will produce a report showing each outstanding confirmation request, along with its age -- the time interval from when you sent the request until now. This Aging Report enables you to decide when to re-issue or give up on a confirmation request, taking into account the means by which the request was conveyed (QSL buros can take years).
Should you choose to issue a second request for confirmation,
set the QSL Via panel to cards or labels on the Main window's QSL tab
in the Log Page Display on the Main window's Log QSOs tab, right click the QSO and select either the Add entry to QSL Queue (to print a card/label with the next outgoing batch) or Print QSL Card/Label (to immediately print a card or label)
Should you instead decide that receiving a confirmation of the QSO is unlikely, change its QSL Rcvd, LotW Rcvd, and eQSL Rcvd items to X -- for expired. QSOs so marked remain in your log, but are considered unconfirmable. Thus the next time you invoke the Add Needed function, a confirmation request will be issued if confirmation of another QSO would yield the needed entity, entity-band, or entity-mode.
You can if desired configure the Card Aging function to automatically expire any QSO whose age exceeds a threshold you specify; specify this threshold in the Expiration age (wks) box in the DXCC/Top Bands & Modes panel on the Config window's Awards tab.
Should a QSL finally arrive for a QSO marked as expired, simply click the CFM button in the QSL tab on the Main window's Log QSOs tab, and all will be forgiven.