On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:21 AM, Dean Gibson AE7Q <hamwan@ae7q.com> wrote:

Thanks!

OK, now I need to "reinstate" my LoTW cert (actually, apply for a new one)

If you still have the username/password or email address (to receive a password reset), getting a new one signed is really fast. The slow part of the process is receiving the postcard in the mail, which you shouldn't have to do again.

We'll eventually support our own HamWAN certificate authority. ARRL was the first popular certificate authority to embed callsigns in the certificates. They put the callsign under "1.3.6.1.4.1.12348.1.1". We plan to release some instructions for generating a certificate and certificate signing request with your callsign embedded at that location. Then we'll sign certificates after verifying your license.  It's very convenient that the ARRL already does this for us, for free.

Tom KD7LXL

1. My last certificate was from 2009, and when I tried to login to the LoTW site with my name/password, it didn't know me.
2. The ARRL/LoTW sites gave no hint (that I could find) as to how to renew an expired certificate, so I downloaded the current version of the LoTW software, installed it, and attempted to load my most recent (expired) certificate.
3. The LoTW program said "Na-ne, na-ne, na-ne, you can only load this certificate on the computer it was created on."
4. The ARRL site described how to "backup" a certificate on the original computer, so that you could move it to a new computer.
   
5. Fortunately, I keep old Windows computers around for (ha-ha) sentimental reasons, so I fired up what I thought was the originating computer.  Success!  The old LoTW software was there, and when I fired it up, it found the certificate, only to say, "Na-ne, na-ne, na-ne, this certificate is expired, and we certainly won't load it for you."
6. So, I installed the new LoTW software on the old computer, and presto, there was the "backup" option.  Furthermore, the new LoTW software even deigned to load the expired certificate, so I backed it up pronto.  Further, the "renew" option was no longer grayed out.  This looked suspiciously promising.
7. So, I "restored" the backup file on my regular Windows computer, and clicked on "renew" in the LoTW software.  I only had to erase the QSL end date and change my eMail address, and I successfully submitted the renewal request.

The LoTW software gave no indication as to whether I will need to await a postcard, so we shall see ...