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By Justin Cord Hayes, Staff writer 
- Al Waller's hobby involves 400,000 or so of his closest friends from around the world. 
Mr. Waller, a contract engineer with NASA by day, is the "Web guru" for QSL.net once he arrives home from the office. QSL offers free e-mail and homepage accounts for amateur, or "ham," radio enthusiasts. He currently hosts 54,000 Web pages and more than 400,000 e-mail accounts.

On an average day, he gets 300 requests from ham operators around the world who would like to have e-mail accounts on QSL. Mr. Waller estimates that there are approximately 600,000 ham radio operators in the United States and about 2.5 million worldwide. That means about 20 percent of the world's ham operators have accounts with QSL.

QSL, by the way, is "hamspeak" for "Are you receiving this transmission?" There are, in fact, an entire series of "Q" messages. They're useful for allowing people who speak two different languages to communicate over their radios. QTH, for example, means "What is your present location?" QSY means "Can you change frequencies?"

The attraction of QSL.net, Mr. Waller explained, is that it standardizes e-mail addresses for ham enthusiasts worldwide. All 2.5 million operators have unique ham "call letters" by which they are identified, and their e-mail accounts on QSL are: call letters@qsl.net. Consequently, ham operators can communicate via radio or the Internet using their call letters. Likewise, Web sites that are hosted by QSL have standardized addresses as well: www.qsl.net/"call letters."

One local organization that is just starting to use a Web site courtesy of QSL is the Sussex County Amateur Radio Association. 
"Al gave a presentation about QSL at our club meeting last month," said Bill Hammond, president of the organization, "and soon we'll have a page that will contain club information and information about our newsletter."
 
Mr. Hammond called QSL "very handy" and thinks it will allow his club to get more exposure since the page will be readily available for other ham enthusiasts. 
"It's amazing that you can have, right from little old Sussex Delaware, an idea spring up that's gone global," he said.

QSL began four years ago when Mr. Waller became interested in the newest form of worldwide communication, the Internet. 
"With my insatiable curiosity of how things work, I got rather deeply immersed into figuring out how the Internet worked," he said. "I contracted with a company to host a little Internet server and became my own Internet provider, just as a hobby. Some of my friends asked if they could have a Web page or e-mail address, and it just kind of grew." 
For Mr. Waller, QSL.net has become "a hobby gone out of control." It's now become all but a second full-time career.

For NASA, Mr. Waller has traveled to the North Pole to study the polar ice cap, to Iceland to research volcanoes and map them out with radar and lasers and to California to study the effects of storm-causers El Nino and La Nina. For QSL, the world comes to him. Users of QSL span the globe.

With so much Web activity comes considerable costs. Hardware, including high-speed connections, will lead to expenses of approximately $50,000 for Mr. Waller this year. Much of the cost is offset by donations from those who use his services, but they do not cover the entire cost of the operation.

Justin Cord Hayes can be reached at 644-6320 or email J Hayes

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