Every legal radio transmission in the UK, from business two-way radios to fixed microwave links, is recorded in a public dataset published by Ofcom, the UK communications regulator. It is called the Wireless Telegraphy Register, and it holds more than 200,000 licence records covering who is allowed to transmit, on which frequencies, and roughly where.
It is a fantastic resource. The only problem is getting anything useful out of it. The register ships as a single large CSV file with dozens of columns, so answering a simple question like “what is licensed to transmit near me?” means wrestling with a spreadsheet that most tools struggle to open, let alone filter sensibly.
We thought that was a shame, so we built WTR Browser to fix it.
The idea
The goal was simple: take Ofcom’s open data exactly as published and put a fast, friendly search on top of it. No downloads, no spreadsheet gymnastics, just type what you are looking for and get clear results.
WTR Browser lets you search the whole register by:
- Frequency, as a single value or a range, in Hz, kHz, MHz or GHz
- Location, using a postcode, town, county or National Grid Reference
- Radius, to find everything licensed within a chosen number of miles of a point
- Free text, to match any licensee, company, product type or emission code
Every result is plotted on an interactive map so you can see at a glance what is licensed in an area, click a pin, and read the full licence detail including the licensee, product, emission code, antenna height and coordinates.
A few nice touches
Because a lot of our users are in the radio and monitoring community, we added a one-click export to CHIRP, the popular free radio programming software. You can run a search, then download your results as a CHIRP-compatible CSV and load them straight onto a scanner or handheld. It turns a research task into a programming task in seconds.
We also spent time making the whole thing work properly on a phone, so you can look things up in the field rather than back at a desk.
Standing on open data
None of this would be possible without a genuinely open approach to public data, and we want to credit the organisations that make it available.
The licence data itself comes from Ofcom’s Wireless Telegraphy Register and is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Our location search is powered by high quality UK reference data: mapping and grid references build on data from Ordnance Survey, postcode and place lookups use the excellent free postcodes.io service, and the maps are rendered with tiles from the OpenStreetMap community.
It is a good reminder of how much becomes possible when public bodies publish their data openly and clearly. Our job was really just to make it approachable.
Try it
WTR Browser is available now at wtrbrowser.com with one-off lifetime access, no subscription. If you work in radio, spectrum, security, events or broadcast, or you are simply curious about what is transmitting around you, we think you will find it genuinely useful.
WTR Browser is a product from Blink Web Ltd. If you have an idea for a tool that would make sense of a tricky public dataset, we would love to hear about it.
