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qgrid

Maidenhead grid square calculator with a map and a compass

What it does

Converts between Maidenhead locators and latitude and longitude, computes distance and bearing between two squares, and draws the result -- a map with the path on it and a compass rose showing the heading. It will take a list of squares and work through them.

Why you would want it

wwl, which this catalog also carries, answers the same question in one line of text and is the better tool inside a script. This is the one to use when you want to see the path: pointing a beam, checking whether a claimed contact is plausible, or explaining to somebody why the short path goes over the pole.

Before it will work

A desktop session. It talks to no hardware and needs no network.

How it installs

  • source (qmake) from https://www.qsl.net/on4qz/qgrid/downloads/qgrid_3_2.tgz
  • build dependencies: build-essential, pkg-config, qtbase5-dev, qt5-qmake, qtbase5-dev-tools, qtmultimedia5-dev
  • Built in a Debian 13 container on 2026-08-28: qmake exits 0, make exits 0, and make install exits 0 and puts the binary in place. AHRL lists libqt5widgets5 and libqt5multimediawidgets5 as build dependencies; those are runtime libraries and the build needs the -dev packages, which is what is listed here. Its .pro hardcodes target.path=/usr/local/bin rather than reading PREFIX, so a non-default prefix is silently ignored. Our default prefix is /usr/local, so this lands correctly today and would not if that changed — recorded rather than discovered later. It also declares a dox install target that runs doxygen over the manual; the install succeeds without doxygen present.

Binaries this produces:

  • qgrid

Known problems

Great-circle paths are the right answer for a beam heading and not always the path a signal took -- long path and skewed paths near the auroral zones are real and this does not model them. A six-character locator is a square several kilometres across, so distances between nearby stations carry inherent slop. Not packaged by any target, so source is the only route.

Toolkit risk

  • qt5: unknown, checked 2026-08-28 — Builds against qtbase5-dev. No Qt6 plan was found by this check; recorded as unknown rather than guessed. Same author as qsstv, which is also Qt5.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: rebuild
  • Released irregularly from a plain download directory with no index and no feed, so there is nothing to probe. Check qsl.net/on4qz/qgrid/ by hand.

Where to get help with the software itself

Johan Maes, ON4QZ -- the qsstv author. The project page is the only route; there is no tracker. The sha256 is ours, computed from that download, since upstream publishes no checksum.

Source: catalog/packages/qgrid.yaml