OQRS

What use is an F-call? When you make contacts around the world with other amateurs the traditional way of confirming a contact is with a QSL card. It's a postcard-like affair that has the details of the station, and if all is well, the details of the contact between their station and yours. Traditionally if you want a QSL card, you'd go to your local post office and buy an International Reply-paid Coupon or IRC, but increasingly this has become more and more difficult, to the point where many post offices have no idea what you're talking about and will deny any existence of an IRC. Anyway, if you did manage to secure an IRC, you'd put your card and an IRC in an envelope and send it off to the remote station and hope that they'd send you back a card using the IRC as a way to pay for their stamp. In effect you're using the postal service to buy stamps for the other station. There is another hybrid version of confirming a contact using QSL cards, the Online QSL Request Service or OQRS. It's an online mechanism where instead of sending an IRC in an envelope and dealing with the post office, you send cold hard cash - via payment, like PayPal - to the other station and they send you a card, either in the mail, or via the QSL bureau. Note that often the QSL bureau option is free. You use OQRS to request the card, but the delivery is free, so no cash involved. I should mention that online-only versions of QSL-cards have also sprung up left right and centre. The two most trusted ones are Logbook Of The World, also knows as LOTW and eQSL. Both these services allow you to upload your contact log and when the other station does that as well, matching log entries result in a confirmed contact. If you're a fiend for pretty QSL cards, you don't need to compromise, online, offline or in-between. You can still get your contact confirmed. I'm Onno VK6FLAB