What Is a QTH Locator

Anyone who has ever operated on VHF is usually well familiar with the QTH locator. As good radio equipment became available and VHF contacts reached longer distances, a new QTH locator system was introduced on January 1, 1985.

The whole globe is divided into 324 fields, labelled with two CAPITAL letters of the Latin alphabet. Each field measures:

• 10 degrees of latitude (1114.28 km);
• 20 degrees of longitude (1560 km).

Each field is in turn divided into 100 squares, labelled with two DIGITS. Each square measures:

• 1 degree of latitude (78 km);
• 2 degrees of longitude (111.42 km).

Each square is then divided into 576 subsquares. These are labelled with two lowercase letters of the Latin alphabet and measure:

• 2.5 minutes of latitude (4.64 km);
• 5 minutes of longitude (6.5 km).

For example, the QTH locator for the center of Stavropol is LN05xa.

Today almost every modern electronic logging program uses this QTH locator system to work out antenna bearings and distances to the stations you work. Plenty of programs for DOS and Windows have also been written and widely shared. They convert geographic coordinates to a QTH locator and back, and calculate distance and bearing between two locators.

You can look up your QTH locator on this site: http://qthlocator.free.fr/index.php