Cross posted from BookFace.
I recently attended the NZART AGM and Conference held in Christchurch and held a copy of their 2024 callbook in my hands.
Made me think about putting effort into bringing the callbook back for VK.
It won’t be easy and most likely be an online document to keep it as up to date as possible.
Who is interested?
Cheers,
Peter - VK4EA / KQ4PS
VP WIA
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Peter
I have to ask how a publicly available VK callbook will comply with privacy considerations - the very thing that caused the demise of the original printed versions (as I understand it), and given that the listing data has to originate from an ACMA data source so therefore has to be compliant with their data privacy requirements.
Alternatively, is is likely to be from WIA records ? Is everyone going to listed ?
Doug VK4ADC
PS I have no concerns about my data being listed, it has been publicly available for 50+ years !
A genuine question - given I have pretty much always had things like the callsign database and QRZ.com available since I have been licenced, I do not see the purpose of a callbook.
What am I missing?
(05-06-2024, 05:31 PM)VK2CSW Wrote: [ -> ]A genuine question - given I have pretty much always had things like the callsign database and QRZ.com available since I have been licenced, I do not see the purpose of a callbook.
What am I missing?
I don't think you are missing anything.
A hard copy callbook is not the best idea in my opinion, but a searchable online database, as a single source of truth, would be a good idea.
You could also export it as a PDF for those that wanted it.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is ever going to be possible.
The current new
ACMA callsign database is not very useful.
Even if you used the data from that database, you would have to rely on everyone voluntarily going to a site and updating their own information.
Experience tells us that this is never going to happen.
I used to buy the callbook occasionally, not for the callsign data, which I could get from the ACMA site, but for the other info it contained.
Yes, the info is now available online from various sources - probably 98% from the WIA site - but it was a one-stop-shop for useful stuff, particularly handy to take when traveling.
Attached is a scan of the 2017 contents page to illustrate what I'm referring to.
Perhaps if the callsign data will not be available in the future, it could be released as a 'Yearbook".
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Some newish? maybe callsigns are not listed on the ACMA search page
https://web.acma.gov.au/rrl/register_sea...dispatcher
I have found a few of these not listed but genuine calls over the last few months.
And some newish calls are also not on QRZ com
This may or may not have started with the new class license start date
in february 2024, but i suspect it did.
So some hams may prefer to be not listed?
It will be a problem for the likes of QRZ as they used to scrape the data from the ACMA, so data no longer available means no updates to the QRZ database.
In this privacy centric world, getting a callbook up, even on an opt-in basis, I think would seem to be a very long shot at best.