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⚡ What’s New — September 2026
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Since the last letter in March, the QSL World idea has grown into a small family of tools. Here is the short version:
✅ Ham Browser — a real web browser with the whole station built into it. Logbook, QSO globe, spots, CW room, QSL cards, contest check, mail, radio programmer and rig control, in one program. macOS and Windows.
✅ FT8 Hero — run your FT8 station from your phone. Free. Works beside WSJT-X or JTDX, no screen sharing, no VPN, nothing opened on your router.
✅ Hamilton Auto FT8 — works the FT8 band for you, with filters for who to call and who to skip. Windows, with an experimental macOS build.
✅ QTH Page — your callsign as a real web address, with a station page and an email address at your callsign.
✅ QSL World keeps growing: the operators dashboard, the card design studio, the cards album, one-click sending to all your contacts, and Logbook 2.1.
✅ Every one of these talks to the others. A contact made with Hamilton or FT8 Hero lands in your QSL World log; your QSL card rides on every contact; your grid squares become a game in Ham Browser.
Dear fellow ham operators,
A year and a half ago QSL World went on the air as a map. Upload an ADIF file, see your contacts on the world. That was the whole idea. I want to sit down with you again, operator to operator, and tell you what that idea turned into, because I could not have predicted it myself.
The map brought thousands of you in, and with you came the questions. Where do I keep the log itself? Can I see the band from my phone? Can the card I designed go out by itself? Can my callsign have its own address on the web? Each of those questions became a project, and I built them the way I built the first one: on my own, at night, with your feedback as the specification.
There is still no corporation behind any of this. It is one operator, a lot of coffee, and a community that keeps telling me what it needs. That has not changed and it will not.
This is the biggest thing I have ever built. Ham Browser is a real web browser, with the station inside it. Open a tab and there is your logbook, with eleven templates for the kind of operating you are doing, from POTA and SOTA to satellites and contests, with import and upload to LoTW, QRZ and eQSL, and club logs that several operators can share. Another tab is the QSO globe, with five projections, including the azimuthal map centred on your station that shows the true beam heading to every contact. Spots from the DX cluster, POTA and WWFF, with a watch list that emails you from your own mailbox when a callsign you care about is on the air. The grey line, thirteen satellites and band conditions at your QTH.
Then the parts that make me smile. Grid Rush turns your logbook into a game over the 32,400 grid squares of the world, with badges and a ladder against every operator on QSL World. The CW Room is forty channels of live Morse over the internet, sent and copied by ear, with HAMilton, an AI operator, ready to practise with you in a private channel. Your QSL card is drawn on demand for every contact the moment it is logged, and the album collects the cards other operators drew for you, with real page turns.
And the practical ones: a mail client for any IMAP account, a contest checker that reads your Cabrillo before the sponsor’s robot does, the Hamilton Radio Programmer with 551 radio models over a USB cable, and a CAT console for 67 rigs. Every picture on hambrowser.com is the actual program. It runs on macOS and Windows, 64-bit and 32-bit, and it is signed. Download it here.
Your radio stays in the shack. You don’t have to. FT8 Hero is a small program that sits beside WSJT-X or JTDX and puts your station on your phone: the decodes, the activity map, the waterfall when you want it, one big button to call and one to stop. It presses your program’s own buttons on the shack computer, so the station behaves exactly as it would with your hand on the mouse. It is not screen sharing. A few kilobytes per update, it works on one bar of signal, and nothing is opened on your router. Every contact goes straight to QSL World and QRZ Logbook. It is a free download for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Hamilton works the band by itself: hears the CQ, calls, exchanges reports, confirms 73 and logs it, with filters for signal strength, continent, CQ zone, LoTW status, callsign pattern or what you need for an award. One signed installer, nothing else to install. I have to say this clearly, because it matters: automation is allowed, unattended operation is not. Hamilton is an autopilot, not an auto-driver. Stay at the station, be ready to stop transmitting, and know that POTA and SOTA do not accept automated contacts. The responsibility for every transmission is yours, and mine is to say so on the front page, which I do. Download it here.
Your callsign, on the air with a real domain and a real email. Search your callsign, pick a .com, .net or .us, and QTH Page registers it, builds a clean station page from your QSL World data, and sets up mail at you@yourcallsign, in minutes, with nothing technical on your end. It is backed by QSL World, and if you ever cancel, the domain is still yours. See if your callsign is open.
The platform that started it all keeps moving. The operators dashboard, the QSL Card Design Studio, the album of your sent and received cards, the one-click sending to all your contacts with the duplicate protection I promised you, the QRZ extension, the WSJT-X integration, and Logbook 2.1. The AI powered log book is still marked experimental, and I mean it: it is there for you to try and to tell me what is wrong with it.
None of this is finished, and some of it is rough. Five projects built by one person will have corners that were not sanded. When you find one, write to me. Almost every improvement of the past year and a half came from a message from one of you, and the fastest way to get something fixed is still to tell me it is broken.
Running all of this is also not free. Servers, databases, code-signing certificates, the domains, the email infrastructure. There is no company paying for it. It is paid for by the operators who decided this was worth keeping alive, and every donation goes straight back into the projects. The plan has not changed: keep QSL World free for every ham, forever, and keep building tools that sit beside the ones you already trust, not in their place.
If any of these tools has added even a little to your time on the air, I humbly ask for your support. A donation of any size keeps the servers on and the work going. Download Ham Browser, FT8 Hero or Hamilton and tell a friend at the club. And if your callsign deserves its own address, QTH Page is waiting for it.
Click Here To Support Keeping The Project Alive ❤️
73, and thank you from the bottom of my heart.
KO4ZHL — The operator behind QSL World
A year and a half in, and more on the bench.
I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the following supporters who have generously helped make QSLWorld a reality.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and encouragement. Your involvement allows me to keep working on QSLWorld, and I’m excited to see what we can build together in the future.
PS. Contact me at any convenient time: andrei@overdrv.com or postman@qslworld.com – +1.305.615.6267