Amateur radio logos used on my QSL card (and on this website)

General amateur radio

For a QSL card design in 2010, I was looking for a freely usable, nice drawing of the amateur radio symbol. I found an appealing, well-proportioned drawing in the Wikipedia, in SVG format, licensed under CC BY-SA.

I'm gladly mentioning an artist's or copyright holder's name wherever his name can easily be added, but such a note simply doesn't look very nice on the picture page of a QSL card. So I contacted the artist DENelson83 (David VE7NDE) explaining my wish, and he instantly released his drawing into the public domain.

Specific ham radio topics

In May 2015, I was once again looking into creating a new picture page for my QSL cards and wanted to illustrate the respective topic of some photographs by adding easily recognizable symbols or logos. The topics in question were Hamnet, APRS, and ARDF.

Hamnet

I couldn't find any sort of official Hamnet logo, and the logo (or is it this one?) of the American equivalent AMPRNet didn't appeal to me either. Then I remembered that several years ago, someone giving a talk at the IPRT conference had used the HamnetDB logo on the cover page of his presentation on the state of the Hamnet. It's a simple drawing, easily recognized, looks friendly, and should be quite well known to anyone involved in the topic.

The artist, Flori DL8MBT, grants permission to use a lot of his work related to amateur radio under a creative-commons license (mostly CC BY-NC-SA, as far as I could see) or under the GPL if it's source code. He promptly granted permission for me to use the HamnetDB logo on my QSL card.

APRS

The official APRS logo in my opinion contained far too many details. The logo of the aprs.fi website however is simple, has a friendly look, and is probably widely recognized as related to APRS. So I asked Heikki OH7LZB for permission to use it and quickly received a positive reply.

ARDF

The story behind the ARDF logo goes a little further back in history: Dieter DF7XU informed me that he designed the “ARDF man” (and other logos) in 1999. Since then, many people have apparently used the image as a basis for other versions. Dieter told me that he does not claim a copyright on this piece of work and invited me to use it for my purposes.

These days it seems fashionable to draw the man in dark red (instead of blue) or place a green antenna (instead of a black one) into the ARDF man's hand, while the orienteering flag might be present or not, often coloured in orange (rather than red) — I went for the original shape with more lively colors. ☻