Marine HF Database Search Options

Marine HF (added October 2026) is the maritime counterpart of Aviation HF: around 1,700 HF frequencies used at sea and by the stations that serve it, worldwide. It downloads with the other datasets and is kept up to date the same way.

What’s In It

• Civil — the ITU channel plan, GMDSS and distress channels, coast stations, weather fax, RTTY and voice broadcasts, cruising nets and SailMail.
• Military — navies, NATO and the US Coast Guard.
• Unofficial — fishing nets and fishing buoys, many of them logged off their allocated frequencies.
• Amateur — maritime mobile nets.

Each row carries the station, its service, the name of the channel or broadcast, the frequency in kHz, the channel number where one exists, the mode, which of the four classes above it belongs to, the area and the country. The notes give operating hours first, then anything worth knowing, then a status: Verified (official and current), Logged (recent reports) or Unverified (low confidence — older naval and encrypted broadcast tables in particular).

A few conventions to know when you tune:

• Duplex channels are listed as carrier (dial) frequencies, with a coast row and a ship row per channel.
• Weather fax rows are the assigned frequency: dial 1.9 kHz lower in USB.
• SailMail rows are centre frequencies: dial 1.5 kHz lower.
• The old narrow-band direct-printing distress set (4177.5 kHz and its companions) moved to the DSC-based automatic connection system under WRC-23; those rows say so.

In the Grid

Selecting Marine HF shows no dataset-specific filter controls in the Select Panel toolbar — you have the shared tools only (search box, Select All/Deselect All, Multi-Select). Range Search is not available for this dataset, as for Aviation HF. The grid shows the station in the User column, the service as the Description and the name as the Short Name, with the frequency in kHz, the channel and the mode; the search box matches across every visible column.

In the Fast Scanner

The same data labels Radio mode below 30 MHz: tune to a marine frequency on an HF-capable radio and the info bar above the waterfall names the station and service, with ticks on the waterfall for the stations in view. See HF Station Names.