Why validate before you upload

LoTW and eQSL silently drop records that fail their field checks. You upload 800 QSOs, 742 confirm, and the rest vanish with no explanation. TQSL (the LoTW signing tool) surfaces some errors, but debugging after a round trip is painful. This guide walks through what each service rejects, what the validator auto-fixes, and what you still have to correct by hand.

LoTW vs eQSL

LoTW is stricter on the field vocabulary: 2-letter USPS state codes, Maidenhead grids, submodes placed in SUBMODE instead of MODE, and 8-digit YYYYMMDD dates that aren't in the future. Pick LoTW unless you only care about eQSL.

eQSL is looser on dates and DXCC details but rejects any hyphen in MODE that isn't a recognized submode — PSK-31 fails, PSK31 passes. Use Both to see the union of rules before a dual upload.

Rejects to fix first

These drop records outright:

• Submode in MODE — put variants like FT8, JS8, PSK31 in a SUBMODE field and the parent (MFSK, PSK, …) in MODE.
• State full names — Colorado fails, CO passes. US contacts only.
• Callsign shape — must be at least 4 characters with one letter and one digit.
• Invalid grid square — must match Maidenhead (two uppercase fields, two digits, optional two lowercase subsquare characters).
• Date / time format — QSO_DATE is 8 digits with no separators; TIME_ON is HHMM or HHMMSS; future dates fail on LoTW.

Warnings worth checking

• Band vs frequency mismatch — FREQ=14.074 with BAND=40m is almost always a typo in one field or the other.
• Grid casing — convention is uppercase field, lowercase subsquare (FN31pr). Importers accept both, but the cleaned output normalizes it.
• Unknown band — value isn't in the ADIF enumeration. Uncheck Strict mode to hide this if you're intentionally logging experimental bands.
• User-defined fields — non-standard fields are silently discarded by most importers. Enable Keep user-defined fields to suppress the warning when you know the importer you're feeding is tolerant.

Auto-fix vs manual

Download cleaned .adi applies every fix the rules know how to make: mode-to-submode splits, state normalization, grid re-casing, and band reassignment from the detected frequency. Rules without a fix (bad callsign shape, malformed date, future date) you still have to correct yourself — the tool can only flag them.

Privacy

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