I often find myself looking up call signs on QRZ.com when I come across them on the web or even from within my own logging software. The normal routine has been to highlight the call sign with my mouse, hit ctrl+c, open a browser to QRZ.com, and ctrl+v to the search bar and hit enter. Not a huge time sink but I thought there might be a quicker way to get the info I wanted.
That’s where AutoHotKey comes in. If you’re unfamiliar with it, at it’s core it’s software that lets you map keys on your keyboard to scripts or macros that perform complex actions for you automatically. In our case, to open QRZ.com to a highlighted call sign. Thankfully, this is actually very easy to do with AutoHotKey. The complete script is below:

F1::
 {
 Send ^c
 Run http://www.qrz.com/db/%clipboard%
 }

The basic break down is the F1 key (normally used for opening software help pages) is replace by sending the ctrl+c to copy whatever you have highlighted to the clipboard. Right after that, the run command launches QRZ.com and opens directly too whatever call sign is currently on the computer’s clipboard.
If you’d like to try this out, you can download a simple bundled version here (http://www.kk6nlw.com/downloads/qrz.zip), it’s built into an exe so you don’t need to install AutoHotKey ahead of time, just download and run the app. It will appear in your task tray, from there highlight a callsign and hit F1 on your keyboard. If you have any questions or have other suggestions for cool utilities be sure to let me know!