Q Joe, WT7V, asks, “Over the past two years or so, I have received dozens of QSL cards from DX stations that I’ve never worked. In fact, many of these QSLs confirm contacts supposedly made when my rig was completely off the air for weeks at a time. Do you think someone could be bootlegging my call sign?”
A Bootlegging is always a possibility, but it is rare. If the
cards seem to arrive in spurts, there is a more likely explanation.
It is not at all unusual for a call to be consistently misrecorded in contests. For example, K0NS gets several cards per year intended for K0DI, a very active CW contest operator. If you sound out the suffixes of both call signs in Morse, you can understand how someone could blur the two together. Early this year, NT1A inquired about some cards that were apparently meant for our own Dave Patton, NT1N, here at Headquarters. In the heat of a contest, missing or transposing the individual letters is easy to do.
From QST June 2001
