PyHamCTY

Author: Andreas Schawo, DF1ASC (HamQTH, eQSL)

This package provides reading country databases (CTY files) and searching callsign related information.

Also, it provides downloading of the most recent version. Per default, it acts with CTY files but BigCTY can also be loaded.

Until October 2026 this library was part of DragonLog, but I decided to place it as a separate project and did some enhancements.

Since May 2026 I also ported the cty module to Rust in hamcty. This speeds up even more thus I'm looking forward to generate Python bindings for it.

Remarks

The longitude in the result (lon field in Country) is as commonly used from 0° to 180° to the East and from 0° to -180° to the West.

Usage

After installing the package you can simply do

import pyhamcty

cty = pyhamcty.CountryData()  # Loads integrated CTY DB
res = cty.country('DA2CDE')
print(res.code, res.continent, res.cq, res.itu)

If you want to load a more recent CTY do

import pyhamcty

pyhamcty.load_current('cty.csv')
cty = pyhamcty.CountryData('cty.csv')

If faster loading time is critical you can dump a CountryData to pickle file and restore it from there

import os
import pyhamcty

if os.path.isfile('cty.pckl'):
    cty = pyhamcty.load_pickle('cty.pckl')
else:
    cty = pyhamcty.CountryData('cty.csv')
    pyhamcty.dump_pickle(cty, 'cty.pckl')

You also can run it from console to do a simple search. Without callsign it produces the version entity.

pysearch_cty DA2CDE

or to download the most recent CTY file and use it (-c for CTY, -b for BigCTY)

pysearch_cty -c cty.csv
pysearch_cty DA2CDE cty.csv

Performance

I recently stumbled upon ctyparser and notctyparser as I examined Not1MM. So I was curious how both will compare. I measured the memory footprint, loading time and searching with 20 callsigns 100 times.

The data for the bench is the same version VER20260603 (3DA, Kingdom of Eswatini). I tested the correct country resolution with "LU1DD", "LU1ZB", "LU1ZA", "LU1ZAW".

Remark: ctyparser and notctyparser both do not provide a complete callsign resolution, so I took the function from Not1MM

The first value is for CTY, the second for BigCTY.

Copyright

© 2026 by Andreas Schawo is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

except the included CTY database files (see corresponding copyright) and some code in bench_notctyparser.py (see code comments).