And no doubt a “back-up” copy is held on servers in Beijing.
73,
Walt
That was exactly what I did, and found both my licences listed correctly.
I got the impression that the records are now indexed by email address, which begs the question: how do they cope with people who do not have an email address?
73,
Walt
My impression from the conversations I’ve had with them while sorting out my own issues is that they have a back-end database which they can see, and the web site we see is just a portal to that. I would assume that licences which have been issued by the paper application process are in the former but not visible from the latter.
The primary key is probably the licence number, but obviously that is only a guess.
Martyn
Emboldened by Mark’s experience, I gave it a go… the process went very smoothly, apart from the confirmation e-mail dropping into my Spam folder.
Unfortunately though I fall into the “you have no licences” category… although bizarrely it does show the correct mobile contact number that I provided when I applied for my original 5MHz NoVs.
Guess I’ll wait awhile and see if it gets sorted… has anybody else found the problem to be self-resolving?
73 de Paul G4MD
Hmm, that’s bizarre. Looks like a phone call might be needed - all the best with that! I registered and all my records are correct, so it is not the MD-OIG gremlins at work. I couldn’t see where to re-validate licences, but no doubt that will become clear when I get rid of my current bout of sinusitis (who’d have grandchildren?).
73, Gerald G4OIG
The nice man I spoke to said a little about how the system worked. The problems seem to be typical of moving to a new database in that importing the old data to the new and verifying it is always hard and error prone. The new system you have to reregister with uses the email address you give it to find your old account. If you have changed email address or give a different one then the match fails. At this point you need to get someone at Ofcom to manually match the old and new and it works from there.
At first thought, using the email address seems silly because people change ISP etc regularly and so email addresses do change. It looks like a system designed to fail. On further thought, you don’t want someone to come along and claim your licences so if the old system registered your email address and you reregister with on the new system with the same email address then it can match the two accounts and send you an email to the original address for you to verify and there’s a fairly good chance that you are who you claim to be. When that works, you get a system matching the right people with the right accounts for no human intervention. That’s quite a nice advantage. For everyone else you need to push buttons.
Well it never did. I finally got a chance to give Ofcom a call today, very friendly and helpfull feller took my details and looked into it there and then. Turns out back in the mists of time my ISP had changed my e-mail address but retained the functionality of the old one, so although I still receive e-mails directed to the old address my current one was not the one I used when I registered with Ofcom originally. New address was associated with my account, and whizz bang ten minutes and a re-registration with the portal later my two licences are there 
Moral of the story is if it says you haven’t got any licences there’s probably a fundamental reason behind it rather than a system failure and it’ll take a bit of intervention to sort it out…
73 de Paul G4MD
I helped someone get re-registered over the weekend. We used the same email address to re-register as he used in 2012 and it worked perfectly with an email to confirm everything being sent to the same email address. Clickity-click on the link and his licences appeared in the window. Can’t fault it for re-importing existing info. And if, unlike me, you don’t have more email addresses in use than there are quarks in the universe, it does work.
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