Privacy

Saved in your browser

CQDeck saves the following in your browser's local storage. None of it is sent to us unless we say so below, and clearing this site's data in your browser removes it all.

• Your station settings: license class, grid square and call sign.
• Your call sign and first name for Key Up.
• Your Refresher choices.
• Your welcome-back plan progress.
• The tuning-click sound setting.
• Your display preferences, like whether ham terms are explained and which tips you've dismissed.

If you sign in, your station settings, welcome-back plan progress and display preferences are also saved to your account, so they follow you to other devices. If someone else later signs in on the same browser, your settings are cleared from it first and never copied into their account.

Your location

When you choose “Use my location” on Today, your browser asks you first. The position is turned into a 6-character grid square on your device. The coordinates are never sent to us.

License lookups

The Refresher and “Fill in from FCC” send the call sign you type to our server, which asks callook.info, a free service built on public FCC license data. We show only the license class, dates and a 4-character grid square. We never show names, addresses or exact locations from FCC records, and we don't store lookups.

Key Up

When you use push-to-talk, your browser's speech recognition turns your voice into text. In Chrome and some other browsers, that audio is processed by the browser maker's servers (Google, for Chrome) under their privacy policy; typing instead avoids this.

The text of your practice contact, plus the call sign and first name you enter, are sent to our server to get the next reply. When the AI practice partner is on, that text is also sent to Anthropic's Claude API to write the station's replies and your coaching. Anthropic says API data isn't used to train its models by default (see Anthropic's privacy policy). We don't keep transcripts. Nothing in Key Up is ever transmitted on the air.

The AI practice partner is only available when you're signed in. To keep costs down, we count how many AI replies each account gets per day and keep those daily counts for 30 days.

The waitlist

If you join our waitlist, we store your email address, the group you picked (new, returning, active or studying) and when you signed up. We use it only to tell you about new features and the launch. We never sell or share it. We'll add a contact address before launch, and you'll be able to ask us to remove it.

Accounts and sign-in

If you sign in, we store your email address, when you joined and when you last signed in, your station settings and welcome-back plan progress, and your active sign-ins (kept in scrambled form, not as plain text). Sign-in links work once and expire after 15 minutes. Sign-in emails are delivered by Resend, an email delivery service. To limit abuse, we keep a scrambled form of your network address with each sign-in request for about a day, then delete it. To delete your account, contact us; we'll add a contact address before launch.

Cookies

cqdeck_session keeps you signed in for up to 30 days and can't be read by page scripts. cqdeck_signed_in only tells the page to show “Account” in the menu instead of “Sign in.” We don't use any other cookies.

Live data

Our server fetches space weather, park spots and satellite data from NOAA, POTA and CelesTrak. Your browser only talks to CQDeck for this data. Your location is never sent anywhere for it; the filtering happens on your device.

Hosting

Once the site is live, our hosting provider will keep standard server logs, like IP address and pages requested, for security and reliability. We'll name the provider here at launch.

Children

If you're under 13, use CQDeck with a parent or guardian, and don't join the waitlist.

Changes

We'll update this page and the date at the top whenever anything changes.