Morsekey

Morsekey is a digital archive of QSL cards, the letters radio amateurs exchange to confirm contacts, collecting over 15,000 scanned cards from operators all around the globe, dating back to 1961.

Every uploaded scan lands in AWS S3, which triggers a Lambda function that runs the image through AWS Rekognition for both OCR and image-content labeling. The extracted text and labels are stored in MongoDB, while the scans themselves are served through CloudFront.

The Next.js front-end queries this index to offer three ways in: search by call sign, full-text search across the OCR'd card text, and search by image content (find every card with an elephant, an antenna, or a map on it). The result is a fully searchable, browsable historical record of decades of amateur radio correspondence.