Country Code Support

We are using a limited set of manual country codes at the moment and have now decided to move to using an enhanced ISO-3166 based solution

crafted as a module in its own right, this will enable us provide an API to access and recover information by callsign. Why bother to do this, well its easy we have added new charts to the site and wish now to group stations by regions in addition to countries, the DXCC lists are not actually that comprehensive and need to be expanded further to provide additional information for analysis especially in real-time which is what the charts to at this time.

The whole area of call sign / region / country is in my opinion a mess with many different interpretations of who this information should be collected, the plan is to review all of the existing solutions and provide a much cleaner implementation that will deliver what we want. it may well be the case that we need to develop our own call sign mapping solution which of course will factor in support for the alert engine we are developing so that we get alerted when DX we wish to contact is on band.

Following on from a recent outage with hamqth I am starting to design a new CallBook module that will enable us to provide our own lookup service outputting data in both xml and json format, we have the basic system working on the command line and now are are turning this into a proper PHP module. We will also be including logbook upload to enable the database to grow and may well purchase / license other callbooks for use as well delivering a high speed lookup service., There are many challenges with this development that will need careful planning.

Update

The development of the callbook is coming along very nicely now with some great features we are now testing the lookup latency and loading up the system with as many records as possible, we are also caching the data for very good performance, there is a more work to do on the cache engine to get it to its optimum level.

The new Callsign Country Lookup is an offshoot of this development its based on the DXCC lookup from Martin's (OK1RR) DXCC tables, its gives basic call information great for quickly looking up a callsign and their country.

Mark G4LCH