There was a discussion on the QRZ.com forums about ham radio callsigns and call areas that got me thinking about facts vs assumptions. The FCC provides the US ham radio callsign data that it uses on its ULS site as downloadable data – see http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/index.htm?job=transaction&page=weekly . I downloaded the full data which is just under 100MB (zipped – 370MB unzipped) and using the MySQL database which is on one of the webservers I host sites on, I loaded up the relevent info.

In a quick look at the data, I cared the most about the callsign, active records, the state associated with that callsign based on the current address the FCC has on file, the FCC assumed call area based on that address and whether the callsign was systematically assigned or a vanity call. With that info I noticed that there were a few ‘states’ associated with military users such as APO/FPO so ignored those for these results. I then pulled the call area out of the callsign taking into account Alaska, Hawaii and the islands such as PR and Guam. I am now able to easily compare whether an individual’s home call area based on their address with the FCC matches the call area represented in their call sign.

I only had a little time to run some queries against the FCC data and here are the statistics:

731,258 total records ignoring military addresses
644,387 match the call area based on address vs callsign- 88% of total
86,871 don’t match the call area based on address vs callsign – 12% of total

Split of data by service code (HA = FCC assigned / HV = Vanity):
HA 645,136 (88.3% of all records)
HV 86,122 (11.7% of all records)

By service code where call areas match:
HA 573920 (88.9% of all HA records)
HV 70467 (81.8% of all HV records)

By service code where call areas don’t match:
HA 71216 (11.1% of all HA records)
HV 15655 (18.1% of all HV records)

It does show that vanity callsigns have a bit higher rate of representing a different call area then the actual address on file.

Before I left for work I did a quick search by state and it looks like FL represents the state with the largest number of licensed ham radio operators that list their residence being in FL but don’t have a 4 call area callsign.

More to come…
K2DSL