#radio #notes _If you’re looking for a QSL card from me, I don’t have them yet. This page is just some notes about why I like physical QSL cards and me attempting to design one. This is not a complete post, but rather an ongoing note I keep so when I come back to this project when I’m distracted I have context._ Somewhere early on in the radio journey, I couldn’t have been more than 20, I found out about QSL cards via some probably now defunct ham radio magazine and I was fascinated. While what we think of as the Internet was still early in what was probably 1998 or so it was still useful and here were people contacting each other via the radio and confirming their contact by mail with a postcard. These postcards are known as [QSL cards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QSL_card)(wikipedia). It wasn’t just amateur radio service that was in on QSL cards, you could actually write different commercial radio stations such as ones in the shortwave space and get a permanent memento in the mail, complete with a postmark from some far away place you’d probably never really go to. The cards themselves went from very basic reception reports back in the early days of them, to cartoonish, to what I can only describe in the 90’s as “bad photoshop, clip art aesthetic”. Try a google image search for QSL card, you can look at the good and bad design all day. Now that I have a general class license I can participate in some of the activity in bands where I can be heard around the world and I’d really like to make one of my own. I find it more fascinating than the radio hobby by itself but I am AWFUL at this art thing. So I decided to ask ChatGPT for some help and it generated the image below. I like it a lot but of course it’s unusable in its current form. I’ve been looking for some sort of app that would make this slightly easier than the learning curve of something like Photoshop or Inkscape and stumbled upon [Assembly](https://pixiteapps.com/apps/assembly-vector-graphic-design-app/) for the iPad and may give it a shot. Turns out I also own [Graphic](https://www.graphic.com/ipad/) and I seem to like it a little better. I should use a QSL Bureau, this is the one for my area: [Eighth Call Area Incoming QSL Bureau](https://www.arrl-greatlakes.org/8th_bureau.html) ![[Pasted image 20240822184610.png]]