WIA callbooks in electronic format

[VK4ADC]

Hi all,

I see so many callsigns that have been re-allocated, many of which had owners back in the 60's, 70's and 80's that I was personally acquainted with.  Subsequently I am looking for a few WIA callbooks in electronic format to use with a Windows application I am working on to provide some historical licensee details of VK callsigns from bygone years.

The current licensee/owner data from the ACMA Public Register is on hand, plus the 2007 WIA callbook disc, plus a little bit more data extracted from the AR index courtesy VK6UU.  Ideally I would like a copy of other year's callbooks in PDF or text file format that I can then process further.   Manipulating that data into a useful format is my problem.

I do have some printed callbooks from back in the 60's and 70's (maybe 80's) but do not really have the time (or willingness) to scan each and every callbook's state page listings. 

There are no plans to sell anything as all of my software is always give-away, freely downloadable from my website at VK4ADC.COM. The data would be used in an application so only a small part of the contents would be available to anyone in particular and thus not (seemingly) be a cause copyright issues ( <10%).  Whether it even happens depends on what historical data I can access.

PM me if you can help out - or use the email address on the Contact Me page on the website at VK4ADC.COM ( https://vk4adc.com/web/index.php/contact-me )

Thanks

Doug

[VK5TM]

Go here and download to your hearts content for older callbooks - note they are universal so you need to go to the VK section

https://archive.org/search.php?query=for...20callbook

Posted here for others that may find the info helpful.

[VK4ADC]

Terry

Thanks for the link. I have downloaded a few and they might be OCR-able but probably needing a fair effort to be useable. The yellowing on the earlier files/copies matches the 1978 International paper copy I have had since new but reduces the image contrast. Useable : don't know, but at least the OCR software is better now than it was only a few years ago.

Worst comes to worst, I will have to dig out some of my old WIA callbooks and OCR the callsign lists in them - if I want to continue with the project.

 In the meantime, anyone else have electronic file copies of the WIA callbooks ?  (PDF/RTF..)

TIA

Doug

PS: Edit :  Just had a go at OCR-ing from a couple of the Foreign Callbook PDFs - probably about 20% readable, so realistically not useable.

[VK5TM]

PDF is not the best option.

Using the 1995 Foreign Callbook page as an example.

Under download options, at the bottom of the list is "Show all"

That will take you to a directory listing of all downloads

In that list you will find - 1995_Foreign_Amateur_Callbook_jp2.tar (View Contents) - clicking 'View Contents' will give you a JP2 (jpeg) file listing of every individual page.
I downloaded a random page and OCR'd it - 100% readable.

It does of course mean you will need to know page numbers first to download the needed ones or download the full ~9Gb file

or

Download the ABBYY.GZ file, that is the OCR file for the book - I'm in the process of downloading it (but my service is on a go-slow at the moment, so it will take a while) - it should open in any unarchiver but I'll let you know when it finally downloads

[VK5TM]

Update on the ABBYY.GZ file - it opens in WinRar on my machine to be a 7Gb+ xml file.

Will need a hefty XML file editor to be of any use.