What is on the air near you
Repeaters and nodes around you, nearest first, with the frequency to dial. Your position is used for this search and never stored.
Connecting through a node from the phone is for callsigns verified at level 2 (account page); QSO App keys nothing itself.
Or find nodes by place
A repeater is the machine on a hilltop that hears your radio on one frequency and repeats it on another, which is how a handheld covers a county. A node is an internet link into the radio network. A node with a frequency is a radio on the air, so a handheld in range reaches it; a node without one is a hub or a hotspot, reached from a phone app only. A repeater with a linked node is both: your handheld into it, and out of any node it is linked to, anywhere. Most listed nodes are not connected at any given moment, which is why the switch above starts on. Talking straight to another operator with no machine in between is simplex, or direct.
Everything here is FM voice. Parts of every band are set aside for Morse, weak-signal and satellite work (on 2 m, 144.000 to 144.300 and 145.800 to 146.000; on 70 cm, 432 to 438), so set a frequency from a list like this one or a repeater's record, never a round number picked by hand.
A node sits at the middle of the town its owner typed, near enough to find, never the antenna itself. Repeaters carry real coordinates. Missing one, or a detail is wrong? The repeater directory is where records are added, fixed and claimed.
Overhead, not on a hill
Some repeaters are in orbit. The same handheld reaches them, for about ten minutes at a time, and the pass times are worked out from public orbital elements.
No radio yet? Listen on somebody else’s
Hundreds of receivers around the world are open to the public on the web. You pick a frequency in the browser and hear what their antenna hears — no licence needed to listen, nothing to install, nothing to buy. It is the cheapest way to find out what the bands actually sound like before you own anything.
The list is by country, city and band. Try 40 m in the evening for voices a few hundred miles off, or 20 m in the afternoon for the other side of an ocean. Some owners ask you not to retune theirs while they are using it; the listing says which.