Learn · 6 of 7 · 2 min

Licences, callsigns and "Sign in with callsign"

What the levels mean, how verification works, and why one identity for the whole hobby matters.

A callsign is public; holding it is not proven

Anyone can read the licence database and see that N2PYZ belongs to a person in Brooklyn. What no database says is whether the person typing that callsign into a website is that person. Every service in the hobby solves this on its own, usually by a volunteer looking at a photo of a licence. QSO App does it once and lets other sites reuse the answer.

The levels

• Signed in: you have an account (email and a passkey or a mailed link). You can look things up and read.
• Level 1: you claimed a callsign and a reviewer accepted an image of the licence. You can create a club, submit repeaters, log milestones.
• Level 2: you proved the callsign with an official copy of the licence or with a LoTW signature, which only the certificate holder can make. Trustees claim their repeaters at this level, and the "connect from your phone" hand-off to a node needs it, because Part 97 wants a verified control operator behind anything that keys a transmitter.

What is never stored

Addresses and emails from the licence record (the public files carry none anyway), the uploaded licence image after the reviewer decides, your location beyond a grid square you chose to share for a day. The full list is in the retention policy.

Sign in with callsign, elsewhere

Other websites can add "Sign in with callsign" the way sites add "Sign in with Google". The first is Wavelog, the open logbook. A club's own tools can do the same, and node and network operators who today validate licences by hand are the people this was built for.

Under 13

A child uses a parent's account with a supervised profile; nothing is collected from the child. The reasoning is on the youth policy page.

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