Part of our Getting On The Air: Modes, Operations, and Making Contacts guide.
If you chase DX long enough, you eventually run into it: a rare station, often somewhere in Africa or South America, that will not confirm a contact on Logbook of the World or send a paper QSL card unless you send money first, sometimes framed politely as a donation. For a lot of us, this feels like it violates something basic about the hobby, and it is worth taking a clear eyed look at why the practice exists, where the line actually is, and why so many operators find it so frustrating.
The legitimate version of this, and where it starts to go wrong
Real DXpeditions to rare entities are expensive. Getting a team and gear to a remote island or a hard to reach country, then operating around the clock for a week or two, can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and printing and mailing thousands of paper QSL cards to confirm contacts adds real, ongoing cost on top of that. Asking for a small donation, or a self addressed envelope with a couple of dollars for return postage, to help offset those costs is a long standing and generally accepted practice. Nobody is confirming a contact that did not happen. They are asking the people who benefited from the DXpedition to help cover what it cost to put it on the air, and to help fund return postage for a physical card.
The practice that draws real anger is different: cases where confirmation itself, whether a paper card or an LoTW upload, appears to be withheld or delayed specifically until payment arrives, especially from certain individual operators or QSL managers in a handful of countries who have built a reputation for this. When a confirmation is effectively conditioned on payment rather than on the contact actually having taken place, that stops being reimbursement for real costs and starts looking like selling paper for awards credit, which is a very different thing.
Why it matters beyond just being annoying
- It undermines the credibility of awards like DXCC, which are built on the premise that a confirmation means a real contact happened, not that someone paid for a piece of paper.
- It creates a two tier hobby, where operators who can afford to pay get their awards progress and operators who cannot, or who object on principle, get left out even though they made a legitimate contact.
- It opens the door to real fraud, since a confirmation system where money changes hands outside of normal postage reimbursement makes it much harder to tell a genuine, if commercially minded, QSL manager apart from someone selling confirmations for contacts that were sloppy, mistaken, or never happened at all.
What you can actually do about it
- Check a station’s QSL policy before you chase them hard for an award, through club logs, DXpedition websites, or QRZ, so you know what you are getting into before you invest a lot of time in the contact.
- Favor LoTW and eQSL confirmations from legitimate, well organized DXpeditions and clubs, which typically upload logs promptly and at no cost, over individual operators with a reputation for slow or paywalled confirmations.
- Talk about it openly in club nets, forums, and DX clusters. A lot of newer operators simply do not know this happens until it happens to them, and shared knowledge is the best protection the community has.
Most DXpeditions and most QSL managers, in Africa, South America, and everywhere else, are doing this the right way: absorbing real costs, running things transparently, and confirming contacts because they actually happened. The frustration in the community is aimed squarely at the exceptions, the cases where a donation stops being a thank you for a DXpedition’s hard work and starts feeling like a toll booth in front of a QSO you already made fair and square. That distinction is worth defending, because the whole point of a confirmed contact is that it means something.