The first and most accurate, long-standing internet site for hams who were seeking to make a bid for and garner a new vanity call sign has shut down. Dean Gibson AE7Q, who founded the site in 2003 has decided to move onward with his life—and pass the task to others.
Gibson cites escalating issues with website and server security—with his site inundated with attacks, bots, crawlers, and AI scrapers. Others seeking to develop their own parasitic sites relentlessly scraped and collected information from his platform. Then there were the hackers that took down that platform. Combine this with the publisher’s desire to complete his life journey in another direction, finalized his decision to end his twenty-five-year free service run for the ham community. See AE7Q’s announcement and resulting discussion here in the QRZ.com forums:
https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/future-of-ae7q-com-callsign-tools.992780/
Dean has provided two other ham-centric internet developers the foundational template for his site, and these are now running as W5YI-VEC and AJ8U.net. Of the two, the former is the most in-depth for general use—and provide an accurate look at competitive applications. The latter still needs a lot of work.
Meanwhile, CQDX gives the best tools for researching upcoming callsigns. Paired together, these lend a powerful tool for amateurs to gain a new callsign. The following are a list of currently available call research resources, in order of accuracy and functionality:
- https://callinfo.w5yi-vec.org/query/
- https://cqdx.io/vanity
- https://vanities.k2cr.com/index.html
- https://www.aj8u.net/query/
For more information on vanity calls and the process, check out these resources:
https://www.arrl.org/vanity-call-signs
