Have you ever been listening to a DX station and not recognized the country from the call sign? With the Call Lookup plugin that information is immediately available. Simply enter the call sign and hit your Enter key. If you want more detail just check the QRZ checkbox when you do your query. If the call is in the QRZ.com database an additional line of information will appear. If you select that line a small window will popup with the QRZ.com details. Installation is simple, just download and unzip. Then copy both files to the Ham Cockpit folder with all the plugins supplied by the author. The next time you start Ham Cockpit the W6OP Call Lookup selection will appear. Call Lookup is available here as a download and on GitHub which includes the source code.

Update: There is a new version available for download. Add your grid locator in the plugin settings and you will get distance and heading to the call sign information. If you only use the internal parser the returned information will be for the middle of the country or province/state. If you use the QRZ lookup it will be to the grid square listed on QRZ.com.

Note: You must have a QRZ.com Xml Logbook Data Subscription and enter your credentials in the Plugin settings to do QRZ lookups.

Don’t know what Ham Cockpit is? Here is a brief description by the author Alex Shovkoplyas V3NEA.

Ham Cockpit is a program of a new type. All of its functions are implemented in the plugins, the main program simply loads the plugins and helps them work together. Some standard plugins come with the software, a wide variety of optional and third party plugins will hopefully be available soon.

Due to the modular approach taken to the extreme, Ham Cockpit becomes an integrated environment for a Radio Amateur that every user can build according to his needs. By installing the right plugins, one will be able to turn the program into an SDR client, a logger, a cluster monitor, a propagation prediction tool, etc., etc. – or have any combination of these working together in one program (once the corresponding plugins are available).

Ham Cockpit is a great way to have multiple programs in one place. Launch only the plugins you want to use at the time. There is a small selection of plugins at the moment but it is open to all developers to easily create additional plugins. For developers my Call Lookup plugin is a proof of concept to show how easy it is to create new ones.