Indiana has about 16,693 licensed amateur radio operators. That is roughly 2.4 for every thousand people in the state. They are spread across 92 counties, served by hundreds of repeaters, dozens of clubs and a patchwork of nets — and until recently there was no single place that told you, for your county, which of those things existed.
That is what this site is for.
The problem with the information that already existed
None of this information was secret. Almost all of it was public, and most of it was wrong somewhere.
A club's website listed a net on a night the net had stopped meeting. A repeater directory carried a machine that had been off the air for two years. A county page said no club existed when one did, or listed one that had quietly folded. The FCC's license data was authoritative and unreadable. The Indiana Repeater Council had coordination records that were correct and hard to browse. The ARRL had a club directory with dead links in it.
Everything was somewhere. Nothing was in one place, and nothing agreed.
What is here
Every one of Indiana's 92 counties has a page. On it: the amateur radio clubs based there, the repeaters that cover it, the nets that run on them, its ARES district and its National Weather Service office, links to its county emergency management agency, and how many licensed operators live there.
Around that sit the things that did not fit a county: the question pools for all three license classes, a practice exam, statewide licensing trends going back two decades, hamfests, exam sessions, and a directory of every club in the state.
Where the numbers come from
Nothing on this site is typed in from memory, and the sources are named deliberately:
- License counts and classes come from the FCC's Universal Licensing System — the actual weekly database dump, not a screen-scrape of somebody's summary. The 16,693 figure above is every FCC-active license, including clubs and grace-period renewals; the licensing trends page tracks individual operators only (14,929), which is a smaller, different count on purpose, not a discrepancy.
- Repeater coordination comes from the Indiana Repeater Council, Indiana's recognized frequency coordinator, used with credit and linking back to their own directory.
- County emergency management links come from the Indiana Department of Homeland Security's own public dataset.
- ARES leadership status comes from the ARRL Indiana Section's monthly newsletter, and only from there.
- Club details come from each club's own website, its own Facebook page, its QRZ entry, or the FCC record for its call sign — in that order, because a club is the authority on itself.
How it is kept current
A site like this decays the moment it is finished. A club moves, a repeater changes tone, an officer steps down, a domain lapses. A hand-maintained directory is out of date within a year and misleading within two.
So the maintenance is automated. Every morning a set of jobs re-reads the sources, compares them against what the site says, and opens a pull request when something has changed. Nothing publishes itself: a person reads every proposed change and merges it or throws it out.
That last part is not a formality. On one recent run the automation proposed removing a club's Facebook group because it would not load — it was simply private, which is how plenty of county clubs run. On the same run it invented an email address that looked plausible and did not exist. Both were caught in review. An automated site that nobody reads is just a faster way to be wrong.
What it does not do
It does not publish anyone's name, call sign, home address, email or phone number. Emergency coordination roles are shown as filled or vacant and nothing more. The county emergency management links point at the agency, not at a person.
It does not copy other people's writing. News items are summarized in our own words with a link to the original, because the original deserves the traffic.
It does not read publishers who have asked automated systems to stay away. That request is made in a file called robots.txt, and it is checked before every fetch rather than remembered — along with how often a publisher is willing to be asked, which is honored too. Where a publisher offers a feed, the feed is read the way any feed reader reads it: the headline and a link, so a story is found here and read at the source.
What is still missing
A fair amount.
Thirty-eight of Indiana's 92 counties have no Emergency Coordinator, and five of the ten ARES districts have no District Emergency Coordinator. That is not a criticism of anyone; it is a volunteer role and volunteers are finite. But it is the clearest single number about emergency communications in this state and it deserves to be said out loud.
A handful of counties have no club based in them at all — see each county's page under county-by-county listings for the current list, since which counties those are changes as clubs form and fold.
And the nets are the least verifiable thing here. Most of them are listed because a club's page says so, and a club's page is exactly the kind of thing that goes stale.
Corrections
If something here about your club, your repeater or your county is wrong, say so and it will be fixed. That is a standing offer and the fastest way this site gets better.