Skip to content

Join a net

Find a net that's running, watch it live, and check yourself in. Watching needs no account at all; checking in needs a verified email and a callsign.

Time: ~3 minutes

Prerequisites

  • Nothing, to watch. Live sessions are publicly readable.
  • To check yourself in: an account with a reserved callsign. You can start watching first and set that up when you're ready.

Steps

Step 1: Find a net

Open the instance's landing page. The active now hero lists every net running at this moment. Below it, the upcoming list shows scheduled nets. You can filter it by name, band, mode, connection kind, geography, category, and net type, and sort it by time, name, category, or net type. A net matches a band, mode, or connection-kind filter when any one of its ways in does — so a net you can only reach over EchoLink, which has no band and no mode, is found by choosing EchoLink under Connection kind. Each upcoming net shows the first couple of lines of its description under the title when its owner wrote one — open the net's own page for the whole thing.

The filters and sort you pick go into the address bar, so the list you are looking at is already a link: bookmark it, or send it to someone and they open the same filtered view. If a link you were sent carries anything the page does not use — a tracking parameter, or a misspelled filter — the page still loads and says which parameters it ignored.

Times render in your local timezone as relative values — "in 2h", "40m ago" — not raw UTC.

If someone sent you a link to an unlisted net, open that link instead. Unlisted nets never appear in discovery. See net visibility.

Step 2: Watch the session

Open a live net. You see every way the net is reachable, the roster of stations that have checked in, and the working-station highlight showing who net control is working right now.

The connection status pill tells you whether you're live, catching up after a reconnect, or out of sync. It always shows a colour, an icon, and a label together.

Step 3: Check yourself in

Choose Check in. Your entry appears immediately as pending, then settles once the server confirms it, and everyone watching sees it with a Self source badge.

If you haven't created an account or reserved a callsign yet, NetRoll routes you through that and returns you to the check-in — you won't lose your place.

Step 4: Set your staying status

Tell net control what to do with you:

Status What it tells net control
Staying for comments Come back to you in the rounds. You'll be worked again after the initial check-ins.
In and out Log the contact and move on. You're not waiting around for comments or traffic.

Change it at any time, or check yourself out entirely — both apply to your own entry only.

Everything else on your entry is staff-only. Signal report, notes, precedence, and role are set by net control or a logger, and the server refuses your attempt regardless of what the UI shows you. That's deliberate: the log is net control's record of the net, not a self-service form.

Verify

Your callsign is in the roster with a Self source badge. When you are the next station net control will call, the your-turn indicator lights on your row — a cyan left bar, a You chip, and "You're next up". If net control has worked stations sinking to the bottom, that is the top of the group still waiting, even when it sits above the station being worked right now.

Next steps