About

I originally created this site to challenge myself to see if I could. It worked out well, so now I'm obsessed with constantly making it better.

Technical Information

We maintain a local database of all ham radio operators locally. The database is updated (mostly) weekly from the qrz.com database.

Incoming request via SMS or IM is processed via Tropo and sent to our main ruby on rails application
Call is looked up in the local database
If Lat/Long/Gridsquare data already exists locally, send the response to the original sender
Otherwise, the address is geocoded using a combination of Google, Yahoo, and Geocoder.us, a gridsquare is calculated from the lat/long, and everything is saved back to the database for future use
Distance and bearing are calculated from the SMS sender's city & state sent from tropo. Since these calculates are based on where your phone number is registered, it could be wildly inaccurate.