I happened to mention to Ken W6HF on Saturday morning that I was kind of interested in seeing which JARL awards KL2R qualified for. After over 22k contacts in four years, I had quite a few cards from JA stations. I had read some information previously about the various Japanese awards. They were a bit of an enigma, and I had already started to comb out the JAs from the boxes of KL2R QSL cards. Before you knew it, we were sorting and entering JA QSL information from 350 cards. Saturday became a blur of on-air action as well as (mostly) playing CSI to figure out JCC, JCG, and other codes. Ken and I became far more enlightened than we ever thought about Japanese administrative districts, from prefectures to -kus.
In the end, KL2R remains two prefectures short of worked all. I have a QSL in the mail to hopefully close one gap in Kyoto. JCC is a slam-dunk. Many challenges lie ahead.
Suddenly, I find myself a it obsessed with paper collecting. DXCC mixed and DXCC 20m are awarded, and various certificates roll in for the usual contests. Now I am looking at various bits of glitter to be added to the shack walls. In part, building and operating KL2R has been a Herculean effort by N1TX and KL1JP, and the results speak for themselves. Those CQ certificates and ARRL plaques on the wall demonstrate the payoff in a well-rounded combination of technology and teamwork. Now I wonder what other achievements we have made, so I dig, as a paper-chaser does.
