About
August 2026
EM50 and EM60 are Maidenhead grid squares. Together they cover the Gulf Coast from eastern Louisiana through south Mississippi and Alabama into the Florida panhandle. This site collects radio and technology information for that area.
What we’re about
Honor those who came before. Accurately document the history. Encourage and inspire people to get active with their radios — POTA, RaDAR (Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio), and whatever else gets them on the air.
Two pieces of that history are written down so far, both on AE4JC’s own site. Remnants of RaDAR traces where the POTA Rover award names used here came from, and The Mast Jerry Built remembers VE6AB.
Why a grid square, and not a club or a callsign
A grid square names a place. It doesn’t belong to anyone, it doesn’t require membership, and it doesn’t go stale when people move. That makes it a better container for a shared local resource than any one operator’s site or any one club’s roster — and it leaves room for activities beyond amateur radio, since the boundary is geographic rather than hobby-specific.
The practical consequence: pages here are built from public record wherever possible. The POTA leaderboards, for example, come entirely from POTA’s own published park and log data. Nobody opts in, and nobody has to be added by hand.
Where the line falls
The boundary between EM50 and EM60 is longitude 88° W, which runs down Mobile Bay across the causeway. Parks a few miles apart sit in different grids because of it — the USS Alabama Battleship Park is in EM50 and Meaher State Park is in EM60, even though they sit 5.6 miles apart on either side of the same causeway. That’s why this site treats the two grids together by default rather than splitting them.
The dashed line on that map is 88° W. Every dot is a real park at its published coordinates.
Who runs it
Currently Matthew Foutch, AE4JC. The site is deliberately built so it can be handed to someone else in this area later — its own domain, its own content, nothing that depends on any one operator remaining here.
Corrections
Something wrong, out of date, or missing? Corrections are welcome.
Start here
The POTA Leaderboards are the first thing built on this idea — every park in both grids, ranked, updated daily, with nothing to join. If you have activated one of them and uploaded your log, you are already counted.