An amateur's legal operating authority in the USA comes from the data in the FCC's ULS database (see FCC rules, Part
97.5(a) &
97.7(a)), and not from the paper license that the FCC prints and mails, which is just a legal notification
of that data (although the paper license may be required by foreign governments if you travel outside the USA). In fact, the FCC provides a web
page for printing a "reference" copy of any FCC license:
Go to the .
Search for a callsign.
Select the callsign to display the license data page.
Click on "Reference Copy".
However, neither the FCC's mailed copy nor (especially) their web page reference copy is very attractive. For a high-resolution (1200 dpi)
color license reference copy suitable for printing, enter your callsign below (change the fonts & watermark color if you wish) and click "Generate".
Important considerations:
By default, a light blue FCC seal watermark is generated for the license. You can adjust the color and intensity of the watermark
for your printer by adjusting the value of each color component in the watermark between 0 and 255 (increase ALL the values to give
a lighter color). To not print a watermark, either clear each color value, or specify a color of white ('255' for each color value).
In order for the watermark to print, you must set the Print Background Colors and Images option in your browser:
Internet Explorer: Tools; Internet Options; Advanced.
Firefox: File; Page Setup; Format & Options. WARNING: Versions of Firefox prior v2.0 will not print the
watermark, and sometimes hang (or takes a very long time) when attempting to display a license with a watermark.
The resolution of the printed copy (1200 dpi) is much greater than when viewed as a web page (72 dpi), and the alignment of items on the
reference copy is designed for printing, so select Print Preview in your browser to view your license as it will be printed.
You may need to eliminate headers and footers and/or adjust the margins in your browser's Print Setup. Netscape/Firefox users may
want to adjust the printing scale factor (I suggest 125%).
This page now requires that you have Javascript enabled in order to select fonts. On Internet Explorer 6 and later, the fonts listed
are the fonts available on your computer. For other browsers, the fonts listed are those that are common on Windows systems; some
fonts may not be available on your system.
When selecting a license data font, you may want to select a fixed-pitch font such as "Lucida Console", "Monaco", "QuickType Mono",
"OCR B MT", "Letter Gothic", or "Courier".
The license and application databases are replaced at the beginning of every week (usually Sunday morning around 08:30 ET) with new data
from the FCC, and infrequently at other times for database configuration changes. During these periods (usually about ten minutes each),
access speed may be quite slow. Each database is also updated several times each day with the previous or current day's data from the FCC,
but these updates only affect access speed for about two minutes.
Please do not (except for private use) link directly to the generated license page or copy the FORM submission HTML. Such actions hide the
actual author (me) and web site, and are also subject to breakage when I change the underlying HTML. Please link to this page instead.
Please let the webmaster at AE7Q.com know if you have any problems or suggestions!
An amateur's legal operating authority in the USA comes from the data in the FCC's ULS database (see FCC rules, Part
97.5(a) &
97.7(a)), and not from the paper license that the FCC prints and mails, which is just a legal notification
of that data (although the paper license may be required by foreign governments if you travel outside the USA). In fact, the FCC provides a web
page for printing a "reference" copy of any FCC license:
Copyright © 2004-2009[-01-08 @ 02:48 UTC] by Dean K. Gibson (38.103.63.57/4.167 on 2009-07-03 @ 03:12:39 UTC + 0.001). Privacy policy.