Ham Radio - A contact sport

I’ve created a (free) ham radio toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox that may be of interest to other hams. I’d found some shortcomings in some similar toolbars so I produced this one… The Hamlinks ham radio webbrowser toolbar.

At the moment, the HamLinks toolbar looks like this:

It is very easy to install (and uninstall) for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  

My ham radio toolbar has several features that will be of particular interest to hams:

• A very powerful search box. Simply enter some text in the box or select it in your browser, then use the search menu to quickly search any of the following:
  • QRZ.com (great for callsign searches from the toolbar)
  • DXwatch (spot searches from the toolbar)
  • QSL Manager (lookup dx callsigns from the toolbar)
  • FindU.com (APRS location information with a call search from the hamlinks toolbar)
  • Ham Radio Links (search the links directory)
  • Product reviews (select a ham radio product and instantly find reviews for it!)
  • Ham Radio Classifieds at eHam and QTH.com (select a product and see if there are any for sale). Of course, you can also find ham radio products at eBay as well further down the menu.
• Links to popular ham radio websites.
• Access to the DXpedition Map.
• Ham Radio Blog Feeds
• Customizable email notifier and weather icon
• UTC Time
• WWV gadget to show propagation bulletins
• Podcast player with ham radio related podcasts

Here is an example of the hamlinks toolbar in action. In this screen shot I have selected text from a product review for the Bencher BY-1 key. That automatically places that text in the search box. Next, I’ve pulled down the search box to see my options. You can see that I could instantly jump to the eHam product reviews pages for that product, or I could check out the classifieds to see if one is for sale. Pretty cool huh?