Earlier this month I heard 5A1AL calling CQ on 17m and managed to work him fairly quickly. My log showed him as an “All Time New One” (ATNO).
When I looked at his qrz page, he mentioned that he uses ClubLog so I checked my callsign there against his log and was very surprised to see an entry from 2013 on 15m CW which was odd because that QSO wasn’t in my log.
Without any more info apart from the year, I really didn’t know where to start. My log keeping is generally good so I searched through the log for the year which took as while as I made nearly 5,000 QSOs in 2013 but there was no sign of his callsign.
As part of my activities, I upload my QSOs to ClubLog and it gives very useful feedback on your logbook. It took me a while to work out what had happened and I had something in the back of my mind about this callsign. I keep a log file called ‘Invalid QSOs and dodgy DXCCs’ and when I checked in there, my previous QSO with 5A1AL was included.
What I think had happened was that when I originally worked him, I uploaded to ClubLog and the QSO was rejected because he hadn’t been confirmed as valid for DXCC. Because of this, I moved the QSO out of my main log.
I put the QSO back into my main log, re-uploaded to ClubLog and it matched.
So what I thought was an ATNO was actually just a new band and mode slot.