TERMS OF SERVICE

Last updated: September 2026.

Shortwave (shortwaveradio.online) is a personal project run by one person, not a company. These terms are written in plain language so they can actually be read. By using the site you accept them. They are a description of how this station is run — they are not legal advice, and nothing here is a substitute for it.

What the service is

Shortwave is a browser-based simulation of a field radio. It lets you key Morse, hear it, and relay it live to anyone else who happens to be tuned to the same frequency. It is free, it has no paid tier, and it is provided as-is and as-available, with no warranty of any kind — no promise that it will work, that it will keep working, that it will be free of faults, or that it is fit for any particular purpose. It is not a communications service and must not be relied on for anything that matters.

No accounts

There is no sign-up, no password and no account to close. The callsign you choose is stored in your own browser and means nothing to anyone else. A callsign here is a handle, not proof of identity, and you should not treat another operator's callsign as proof of theirs.

Using the relay

The relay is shared, small, and open to anyone. Keep it usable:

Do not transmit content that harasses, threatens or abuses another operator. Do not transmit anything unlawful where you are, or anything that infringes someone else's rights. Do not attempt to disrupt, overload, flood or otherwise degrade the relay, and do not probe it for weaknesses or run automated clients against it at a volume a human could not produce. Do not use the site to impersonate a real station, emergency service or licensed operator.

Because nothing is stored there is no moderation queue and no way to retrieve or remove past traffic. The practical remedy for abuse is blocking access or taking the relay down, and both are available.

What happens to what you send

Your key events and callsign are passed straight through to the other operators on your frequency and then discarded. Nothing is stored, logged or archived, which also means nothing can be recovered. Treat everything you key as public to whoever is listening on that frequency at that moment. The privacy policy sets out the detail.

Availability

The relay may be taken down, restarted, rate-limited, moved or changed at any time, with or without notice, including permanently. Features may be added or removed. There is no uptime commitment and no obligation to keep any part of the site running.

The code

Shortwave is open source under the MIT licence and the code lives on GitHub. The licence governs your use of the source. It does not grant any right to the site's name or branding, and it does not entitle you to use the hosted relay in any particular way — that is what this page is for.

Advertising

Advertising on this site is served by Google. Those ads, and the data handling behind them, are governed by Google's own terms and policies rather than these. The advertisers are not endorsed here and their content is not reviewed here.

Reference pages are not operating authority

The learn, chart, prosign, Q code and history pages are educational material about a mode of communication. They are not a licence and they confer no authority to transmit. Operating an amateur radio transmitter on real hardware requires a licence from the relevant authority in essentially every country, and in most of them unlicensed transmission is an offence. What you do in a browser is a simulation; what you do on the air is regulated. Check your own national rules before you key anything that radiates.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the operator of this site is not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of it, from its unavailability, from anything another operator transmits through the relay, or from anything a third party serves onto the page. If some part of that cannot be excluded where you live, then the remaining parts still apply.

Changes

These terms may change. The date at the top of this page is the only version marker, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms.

Contact

Questions, objections or reports of abuse go to info@shortwaveradio.online. More on how to reach the station is on the contact page.