Message: Today is the 2-year anniversary of MARAC's first ever USA-CA assignments (500 through 2000) to N1EN on 10/24/2024. With the demise of CQ Magazine, this began a new era for the club, so this is a good time to ask for the help of MARAC members (and anyone else who reads this!) who have USA-CA assignments from CQ Magazine between September, 1961 and October, 1997 and for which MARAC still has missing (i.e. blank) assignment dates.

When I built the first electronic DB for MARAC's newly USA-CA program, out of the 12,988 USA-CAs that were assigned by CQ Magazine between September, 1961 and September, 2024 there were nearly 3,950 lower level USA-CAs that had missing assignment dates due to an irretrievable loss of hardcopy records in November, 1997 when they were being transferred from WA3RTY to K1BV. And since October, 2024 we have already recovered approximately 350 assignment dates with the help of MARAC members and an email-contacting campaign which began during the winter months of 2024-2025 and continued through early 2026. MARAC now has just under 3,600 lower level USA-CAs left with missing assignment dates!

In March, 2026 K3IMC and I worked together to merge the newly created electronic USA-CA records directly into the MARAC DB, and now all USA-CAs that were ever assigned are searchable in the MARAC DB, but the club now needs to recover more missing assignment dates for the lower USA-CA levels during the CQ Magazine years. Please help if you can!

All you need to do is look yourself up in the MARAC DB. Simply enter your call sign in the [Call Lookup] field in the search form and then press the [GO] button underneath that field. Your profile record will be returned to you and underneath that are listed your MARAC awards records, including those in all levels of the USA-CA programs. If you see any [Date] fields for the lower level USA-CAs in your profile record that are blank, then that means the club has not yet retrieved your original assignment dates for these awards.

During the CQ Magazine "years", most of us received the large USA-CA-500 certificate with an original assignment date on it plus stickers for the higher-level awards, along with paperwork (usually a letter from the USA-CA Custodian) that indicated the dates that those stickers were assigned. MARAC will be most appreciative if you can provide any missing assignment dates for these lower level USA-CAs. Please be certain (and don't guess!) about your assignment dates. For the integrity of the record-keeping part of the program, it is very important to have a single accurate date for each USA-CA lower level assignment that is missing one. Please remmber that a blank date is "better" than an incorrect or guessed date.

And while you are at it, if you see any any data in your profile record that is no longer correct, please feel free to contact me at my email address below to correct it. Thank you to all for your help over the past 2 years and I am looking forward to hearing from more USA-CA recipients from the CQ Magazine years who can help the club to "fill in the blank assignment dates". :)

Call: K2MF 10/24/2026