An amateur's legal operating authority in the USA comes from the data in the FCC's ULS database (see FCC rules,
US Title 47 CFR §97.5(a) & US Title 47 CFR §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:
Remember that the generated license page (from either the FCC or this site) is a reference copy only
intended for display where an official copy is not required. The information is extracted from data
in the FCC downloadable license data files; the result is not intended to be an exact copy. In
particular, some minor or specialized information may be different or missing from any reference copy.
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 generated license page (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.
Firefox users may want to adjust the printing scale factor (I suggest 100%).
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!
I am not your vanity application private consultant! Private messages (regardless of whether
you feel there is a special reason for your application) on these and associated topics will be
ignored, rebuffed, and/or made public.
An amateur's legal operating authority in the USA comes from the data in the FCC's ULS database (see FCC rules,
US Title 47 CFR §97.5(a) & US Title 47 CFR §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: