You apparently missed the updates released by ARRL on 6/4 and 6/6.

I'm studying for my license and I started getting discouraged when I heard about people like Danny boy. It's intimidating. But these videos help immensely. I'm determined to get my license, be happy ham, learn as much as possible, and as I learn I want to be welcoming and helpful to others. Thank you for this video.

The VEC is catching up on backlog. I upgraded to Extra at the beginning of the outage. There was a 2 week delay, but the FCC let me know they got it.

The ARRL is to the radio world as the NRA is to the gun world. I'm a lifer of both in hopes they would use my money to fight for our rights. Unfortunately they are both a waste of lobbying seats.

I don't think this is an organizational problem exactly. Other orgs are also being hacked right now. SBE was hit in a similar way.

Latest word I heard from ARRL is that it was not a data breach, but the network equipment itself was hacked. They're slowly bringing systems back up as they verify subnet and vlan integrty. Phones are back up, servers are intact, but LoTW side is taking longer to check out and they're being extra careful not to lose that data. FBI is involved.

Thank you so much for covering this topic, as you said, no one is talking about it! There needs to be some pressure on ARRL to release statements, keep people informed on how the digital forensics and/or data recovery is progressing etc.

I will remain a member so I can vote against the incumbents.

I have WAS, DXCC and VUCC but I continue to use LoTW as a courtesy to those who might need a contact with me for an award they are workings towards. I’m thankful for those who did so for me.

LOTW needs to be rewritten so badly. The code is so old. It needs to be updated/modernized. I don’t feel bad about it being down, even though I use it. Also, transparency on this issue has been done. They waited to say anything public including details. ALL companies when suffering the same thing do not blast out publicly what happened with zero details asap. They need to get their ducks in a row first. Make sure all the details are covered and what is being done for recovery. 73!

Down with the ARRL. Goodbye and good riddance!

ARRL has said in a Member Bulletin: “. . . the Logbook of The World® server and related user data were unaffected, we have taken the precautionary measure of keeping the service offline until we can ensure the security and integrity of our networks. “

Noticed LOTW was not working over the last several weeks. Been using it since 1990. Oh well, uploading HRD Logbook data to QRZ. Looking at other online checking logs. Any suggestions?

I am a QCWA life member and left the ARRL when they dropped publications from their standard subscription and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars as a spend thrift on office upgrades. The leaders are grifting high salaries and providing no worthwhile services to their members. Disgusting!

Suppressing some of your contented because they don't like some of things you say.. you mean the truth? The lack of information from ARRL is amazing.. Let's see, what is the saying,, " your silence speaks volumes"! I will bet however they will still have no issues asking for membership fees! Keep up the great work,, keep telling the truth!

from my point of view as a UK full license holder, i have been using LOTW since 2014 not only for my personal logs,but also SES activations i have managed,ironically the week before the crash,the ARRL emailed me to become a foreign "digital copy" member as i am already a RSGB member i saw no need to view Amercian centric ads etc etc, and as for the awards Bob, for me get the printed awards eg a DXCC on 40m digital thats 5Cents per contact times 100 plus a processing fee,then the certificate posting fee & when it arrives in the Uk a customs fee,even more expensive is the CQ Zones awards its all the aforementioned fees plus the same fees(except postage) from CQ magazine, i do not mind paying for the credits however in this day and age they could email me my certificate saving me $$$$$ and being a lot quicker too, BTW 231 DXCCs worked/confirmed + 9 bands all zones both on Digital, total QSOs circa 50K plus, why the digital modes preference??, too many "big gun ops" stepping over either me or each other trying to make a qso or questioning why my signal report to them is not 5/9 plus plus because they have "a superior system and 1.5kw",b and the downright wall of silence from the ARRL sucks tbh Bob, 73s Kevin

First joined, 1975, renewed last summer and as of jan. 2024 no qst because ive not paid the ransom fee. Now the lotw issue. Will NOT renew in a few months.

Thanks for letting me know about QST. I emailed them and as. normal with their support, no response. I will not be renewing when my three year subscription expires. Over the past 40 years I have had that love/hate relationship with them. I was verbally punished because I made the statement that they are a 1990's book club. So sad. Hopefully, others will come along side and create a modern interface for hams. N2NUT

I had no idea LOTW was such critical infrastructure. By some comments, you'd think it was. Fortune 500 companies often take months to recover from a cyberattack. Just ask AT&T. The ARRL is not a Fortune 500 company. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Seems most of the whiners are not even ARRL members.

They have said more than once the data in lotw is safe. If it turns out its lost or was ransomwared (encrypted and not usable) then I demand heads will roll for lying to the members. Not because the daya is lost but for lying. Unfortunately they do a good job lobbying on behalf of hams so we cant just replace them.

Excellent video!! Seems the ARRL is operating as a corporation, incuding non-divulsion of important information. This is killing them from the inside out. I no longer place as much trust in them anymore. Theey really need to massively upgrade their equipment, software, and policies. Perhaps this is just the wake-up they need. Russ - AEØPX

The hobby is going to the dogs in my opinion, constantly watering entry exams down and giving more privileges for less work here in the UK. Our regulator is useless Ofcom and the RSGB well they play along with every stupid idiotic thing the regulator suggests. Yep Ham radio is posh CB radio here now, it's in the dumpster.

The only reason was I with ARRL was because I wanted to focus on emcomm and ARES, and the local chapter required it. Unfortunately, no time since we have different schedules so never joined. I have zero use for a membership.

Hey bob KF0NTX here. As a rather new ham, prepper and staunch trump supporter. I thought I'd put little political talk if you don't mind. Last week verizon went out for me. Plus a so called water main break happened in lumen technologies building in des moines iowa here. I tend to think so far it's much more wider then arrl.

Aloha Bob, just back from Washington DC for 15 days and it’s good to be home again and my cats really missed me too. I just got a renewal notice from ARRL in the mail while I was gone and to be honest, I wasn’t planning on renewing it and I’ll tell you why. Over the last 20 years, just before the yearly Field Day season, ARRL always prints up these Field Day shirts, hats and other related Field Day items but it’s alway the same problems every year like clockwork. The shirts only come in extra small,small and mediums, with Large, Extra Large, 2X and 3X always sold out. That’s not the worst part because whoever picks out the colors of the shirts must be colorblind because for the last 20 year with the except of the tan Field Day shirts in 2012 and I think in 2020 when they had a grey shirt with a boot print on it, which was super dumb, all the other years has been these stupid vomit colors. I mean vomit colors, there is no polite way of putting it. It was as if they when to a printer and told them to mix up all your excess paint together and print an “X” amount of shirts in these sizes and that’s it. I call the ARRL to complain about this every year for the last 20 years and it must either fall on “DEAF N DUMB” ears and the secretary just to afraid to forward our messages to those who make the important decisions at the ARRL. So I call the ARRL last year and spoke to them at length about the same issue after they announce they were ending the printed magazine. I told to print the Field Day shirts in black with red, white or blue lettering and white shirts with red, black and blue lettering but just end all the vomit colors all together. When I asked how important the Field Day sales was, I was told that it was their main bread and butter each year. My response was, why all the vomit colors every year and I asked point blank, who decides the colors? Typical response: “I don’t know?” Two years ago, I was going to buy the lifetime membership and I decided I want to talk to them one more time about all the VOMIT colors and of course, it fell on DEAF ears again. So unless the ARRL starts listening to its membership, I don’t think I will renew my membership ever again. What makes this last statement so bad, Bob, is the fact that I just one of the few living “A-1 Op Club” members left, which is the highest award that can ever be awarded to a license Amateur radio operator in America. I just feel that the ARRL brought these hard times onto themselves and the membership dues has been severely mismanaged for a long time, this kind of crap just doesn’t happen overnight, it takes decades to go this badly in this short of time. Plus the fact that the ARRL wasn’t even enforcing their own rules when it came to their state Section Managers. Ten years ago, I bust the infamous Hawaii Jammer but because he was also the ARRL Section Manager, legally and as a retired Federal investigator, I had to get him to admit it himself and over the air. Plus I was working with the ARRL General Counsel attorney Chris Imlay W3KD because as a license Amateur radio operator, you must report these things to the elected OO’s for your state before you can approach the FCC’s Enforcement Devision but if that state’s ARRL Section Manager never picks out the OO’s, the only recourse is to approach the ARRL’s General Counsel or the best chain of command that I could use at the time. There was a lot of Big Island of Hawai’i Ham that were involved in catching the infamous Hawaii Jammer that deserves most of the credit. The really sad part was that this person who I will name in a moment had been doing this crap for a long time before I got involved. There was teams of Hams on the Big Island that would undertake the dangerous jobs of driving to the top of the two main volcanos on that island with all kinds of spare parts, batteries, solar panels to make everything work again with just a single trip up there just to discover that nothing was wrong with the repeaters, the batteries, the solar panels and everything else involved. All these trips up to the tops of these volcanoes was for absolutely nothing. These ham risked their lives for nothing and this person (Hawaii Jammer) knew this. What made the matter worse was the fact that we caught this bozo in the act and got him angry enough to admit he is the jammer. I used a part from a famous movie that we all know and love, “You Can’t Handle The Truth! You Want Me On That Wall, You Need Me On That Wall” is a famous quote but my idea had to work and it did. Even after catching this ARRL Section Manager and getting him to admit he was the infamous Hawaii Jammer, it was also leading up to ARRL’s 100th Centennial and they didn’t want this black-eye to become the downfall of the hobby, so I made a deal with the devil to keep this matter under my hat and they agreed to fire this Section Manager and he was replaced with our current Section Manager, who by the way, was picked out by the Jammer to replace him. I’ve been ham since I was a kid and a third generation ham at that, I had to think about how my late grandfather and uncle would feel if I singlehandedly destroyed the hobby that I have always loved. This famous Hawaii Jammer used his powers as the ARRL Section Manager to use the repeater codes that he was given to turn these repeaters off and on at will if he heard hams from different islands communicating on the linked repeaters system, which no longer exists today because of this same person that connected all the main islands together. He heard two hams from different islands in the middle of the day talking about the new DNLR Regulations about the size of the squares for the traditional Hawaiian fishing nets and he admitted that he turned off the links because it wasn’t Amateur radio related and that Hams from different islands shouldn’t be allowed to communicate on the linked repeaters, which is really DUMB because that would defeat the purpose of having linked repeaters to begin with. The infamous Hawaii Jammer was none other than that ARRL Section Manager Robert L.Schneider AH6J, who still has the balls to get on the air and run the Ohana Net in the afternoons on the Big Island of Hawai’i. He even tried to have my FCC license pulled for reporting him and turning over the Wave files of him admitting his crimes over the air. I will never forget him calling my home and threatening me, even told me that he knew Hams here on Oahu that he could have to come after me and Oahu is a small island like that was going to scare me out of my combat boots, lol! 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

I quit over QSL being a separate payment, where I work I can't use online. And the magazine gave me something to enjoy on breaks and talk with others and spark their interest. Lack of transparency second. This hobby is full of young folks that have enjoyed the open source software world for 20+ years and this "member" org is run at top secret levels. Bullcrap!

Just listening and learning. Thanks for the update.

ARRL = NRA. Both are out of touch with the membership. We need alternative organizations to replace ARRL just like the NRA has been over shadowed by new more dynamic group's.

Seems to me in this century there could be some kind of a system where when you upload all of your contacts and you get an award or not that you could be able to download an encrypted file from ARRL that includes everything you've uploaded and all your confirmed contacts and your awards and basically anything that pertains to you and the ARRL and your contacts and awards. Then if something like this happened again you wouldn't have to reupload all your log files that you probably don't have anymore and then wait on hopefully somebody else to do the same again so that you could reconfirm your awards and contacts. I haven't used LOTW in a while but it doesn't seem to me something like this exists but seems like it could exist. You would upload your logs periodically like you would do now, subsequently same day or weekly or monthly if you had uploaded more logs you would download some kind of a encrypted file that would just have everything you had uploaded and everything you had won and it would not depend on someone else to do the same thing. Your whole everything pertaining to LOTW could be rebuilt from your own upload. I probably didn't explain this exactly the way I'm trying to but hopefully it makes enough sense.

We know where the priorities of the ARRL are when they put out a statement that they can't tell us anything, but make a point of mentioning the renewal process is still working as is their store for purchasing merchandise. Their priorities are not in line with the members, but rather making money.

The ARRL is kind of like the NRA. They both annoy me, and sometimes, they frustrate me to no end, but I really don't like thinking about a world without them. They're both very flawed organizations, but the good work that they manage to do is necessary for both of these "hobbies" (or rights) to continue. Both also need major reforms put in place if they want to remain relevant.

Due to RU-vid and the filters I will be civil. The ARRL is about to be obsolete if they don't step up and do their jobs. Don't tell me they are all volunteers. I agree with everything you said. So is The ARRL Field Day cancelled? Seriously! They have until June 26th to get this issue fixed or I will cancel my membership. There are other organizations out there that need support also. When Dayton Convention Center cancelled Hamvention did everyone just pack it up? No they moved elsewhere. The leadership of the ARRL think they are Congress and above their financiers. Just my rant.

Never have liked LBOW that said. I hope ARRL gets it together. I like Eqsl though.

Are there any known class-action lawsuits file ARRL Members can join for breach of membership contracts?

I really hope they aren’t done. If amateur radio is to survive, we desperately need an advocacy group. Corporate, government and who knows what entities want either our frequencies and/or the free range to pollute the bands making them unusable for the rest of us. Having said that, the membership due increase is tough to swallow. Mine is due right now, and I’m not sure I can justify it in today’s economy. On the flip side, with MFJ basically gone, QST and many other businesses lost a ton of advertising revenue. Fred WB5NOE

I agree with you Bob. The ARRL should fix it. I was worried about something like this which is why I haven't signed up for LOTW. I tried to sign up twice but had problems with it and just gave up.

NAFC (fishing) and NAHC (hunting) stopped their magazines offering nothing to replace those subscriptions to those of us who bought life memberships.

I abandoned LOTW years ago because I couldn't get it to work reliably. The excessive bureaucracy required for even the simplest tasks outweighed any potential benefits.

The same happened to me with World Radio which I bought a life membership. I got a message from 73 magazine telling me that they were taking over World Radio. They pro-rated my lifetime and gave me a couple years of 73 magazine. They made anyone wanting to read World Radio pay 73 mag. a yearly fee like QST. I couldn't figure why they didn't give those of us the same lifetime for the online magazine now run by 73 magazine.

XIDEN/ OBUMA........

I'm glad I got my DXCC and WAS awards before this. As an IT worker I can't comprehend why this is taking so long! I've gotten Enterprise sytstems back and running within 24 hours after a DR event and the ARRL can't get a database up in a month? I just can't wait to hear their explanation if and when they get this working again.

The lack of transparency in a non-profit is the death knell for the organization. The ARRL has been keeping more and more from the membership and proposing things that are just not right (such as all directors MUST get behind whatever issue the board passed whether or not they were for it). The lack of frequent updates as to what happened are also an issue. My membership expires in September and isn't going to be renewed. Yes, as long as LoTW is down, upgrade it to the 20th century at least. Preferably to the 21st since we're at the quarter century mark soon.

Time for a class action suit and time to replace the board!

I don't use it I use qrz for my log

RT Systems is definitely the best. Just disappointed you did not spend more time on it. Explanation could have been more detailed. Not even interested in the other 2... What u did show was well thought out. Thank you!👍🏻 de WB9DBD Marc Franklin , GA.

The ARRL is no different than a Mafia. It collects money, has a front for said collection, and does nothing - kind of like the Government. Just sits back and talks a big game and does nothing that benefits its members.

Like , share , subscribe and become a member. Thank you.

I pay my ARRL by check but not going to use credit cards on their site due to security issues.

I still get the magazine. It is my only splurge since we don’t dine out or go to movies.

I’m a ve for our club. Our May 18 test session had 6 extra class licenses plus several technician licenses and general licenses. Still haven’t received their email , upgrade or callsigns. The process to upload to fcc by ARRL has just started back. But it is a slow process. This is not the first time that the lag in processing has happened. If it is an IT situation then it is the old saying fox one problem then 99 left to go.🥺