Start here
Three walkthroughs. Each one has a single path through it, no decisions to make, and ends with something you can point at.
They are deliberately narrow. A tutorial that pauses to explain every alternative is not a tutorial any more, it is a reference with a friendly tone, and it takes an hour. These do the smallest complete version of the job and link to the fuller pages where the real choices live.
Pick the one that matches why you are here
Check into your first net — about five minutes. You have been told your club runs its net on ECTLogger, or somebody sent you a link. You will get an account, find the net, and put your callsign on the list.
Run your first net — about fifteen minutes. You are taking a turn at Net Control, or you want to see what the job looks like before you volunteer. You will create a net, open it, log a few stations, and close it out, and the log will arrive in your email.
Set up a recurring schedule — about twenty minutes. Your club has a net every Tuesday and somebody has been creating it by hand every week. You will turn it into a schedule that creates its own nets, reminds the people running them, and rotates Net Control.
Do them in that order if you are starting cold. They build on each other in the sense that the second assumes you have seen a net running, but nothing breaks if you skip ahead.
What you need
- A callsign. ECTLogger is built for licensed amateur radio operators, and your callsign is your identity throughout: it is what you log in with, what appears in the net log, and what everyone else sees.
- An email address you can read right now. The normal way in is a magic link: you type your email, we send a link, you click it, you are in. There is no password to invent unless you want one, and signing in covers setting one later, for the night email is not working.
- A browser. Anything current, on anything. A phone is fine. A phone is what most people in the field are actually using.
You do not need to install anything, and you do not need permission from anyone. Anybody with a callsign can create an account at app.ectlogger.us and check into nets straight away, and run their own once the account is a week old and has checked into a net (the defaults; an instance’s admins can change them), which keeps spammers off the dashboard.
After the tutorials
Each tutorial ends by pointing at the path that covers the same ground properly:
- Operators — everything about taking part in a net
- Net control — everything about running one
- Net managers — everything about owning a net or a schedule
If you would rather look something up than be walked through it, Reference is the complete lists with no narrative: the station statuses, who can do what, the check-in fields, and the speed-entry syntax.