I've been visiting QRZ.com quite a bit lately as I look up the callsigns of stations I might try to work on HF. I noticed on their home page tonight that they are announcing a new callsign lookup designed for PDAs and cell phones. I've been looking for such a tool for quite some time. QRZ does have one of the better callsign lookups in my opinion as it allows you to look up non-U.S. stations. Until recently the only callsign lookup that I was aware of that was designed for cell phones was the one introduced by KC8KOD. I applaud KC8KOD for bringing his search to the amateur community, but sometimes the data got rather old. QRZ does update its search every day with data straight from the FCC. I'm not sure what sources it uses for non-U.S. calls.
When I acquired my LG Voyager phone (on Verizon) about a month ago, its full HTML browser was able to display the regular QRZ.com page, but that included pictures and advertisements. I don't need that on my cell phone. I have an unlimited data package, so it's not about the data, but about the time it takes all of that extra information to download and render.
QRZ.com indicates that initially this new search will be free, but will probably be part of its premium subscription service eventually. That's fine with me. It runs about $30 a year. I think I can afford it. They did ask for comments about how the search worked. I noticed what I consider a glitch when looking up club callsigns. I reported that issue in the thread that had been started.
As you may know, I was in the initial phases of developing my own callsign search on the web specifically for cell phones. I will probably abandon most of this now, but in particular I will abandon my attempt to gather the non-U.S. data I was looking for such as Canada, and Australia. I would like to still work on the U.S. search. It gives me the opportunity to learn Visual Basic .NET.
The new QRZ.com search for cell phones and PDAs is at http://www.qrz.com/pcs.
1 comment:
Ned, Thanks for the kind words about the wap callsign search. I recently automated updates to make them happen regularly and now the data is updated at the very least once every week, for both the US and Canadian database. With more work it will be updated daily. Feel free to give me an email with feedback or anything else that you would like to see, my email address is easy to find on kc8kod.com. 73 de KC8KOD Brock McLellan
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