[44net] Re: Postal address verification

During the early discussions about the portal it was mentioned that the way of validation would be like sending a postcard with some number on it to the specified address and then require you to enter that number on a page of the portal to validate your address. Similar to how phone numbers are validated by sending a number via SMS (TEXT) and require you to enter the received number. I did receive my SMS and my phone number is now validated, but I never received a postcard. My address is OK on QRZ.COM but of course that is not a validation. It appears that callsign validation is done by requiring to send a scan/photo of the license. That is of course a quite weak validation, as it is not possible to verify that the license is stil valid, and it usually quite easy to photoshop another license. It also takes a lot of man-hours to validate all licenses this way (we have 400 callsigns with IP addresses in our small country alone, and some tests indicate it takes quite some time to get them through the procedure. also the situation is complicated with repeater- and club callsigns). Another system here that requires "callsign validation" uses a trick via EchoLink: the system has an EchoLink node online, and when you want to verify your callsign you receive a code and you need to connect to that EchoLink node and send the code as a text message. The system can thus verify that you have a validated callsign at EchoLink (which has the same problems as described above, but when you have already gone through it, at least the validation at that system is instaneous). Rob On 2024-05-12 15:59, Dave Gingrich via 44net wrote: