One box that searches whatever you actually have
Type a call sign, a site name, a licence number, a licensee, a postcode, an ABN or a client number, and the tool works out which of those it could be and searches them all at once. The official register makes you choose a field from a dropdown first and then matches only that one, so a wrong guess returns nothing and reads as an empty register. Here the box states what it is searching at the grain you are on, and when nothing matches it says what it looked in rather than leaving you to guess.
Four answer grains, chosen separately from the filters
A row can be a site, a licence, an assignment, or a client, and that choice is independent of what you filtered on. Ask for every assignment between 148 and 174 MHz in New South Wales with the site, the licensee and the expiry on each row. Or ask the same question back as sites, to see where they are. Or as licences, to see who to write to. The official register makes the grain and the filters the same entity, which is the single reason a normal engineering question has to be answered by exporting two files and joining them in a spreadsheet.
Client lookup, with what each holder actually has
Search a licensee by legal name or trading name and get one row per client, carrying the client number, ABN, client type, postal address and the number of licences they hold, sortable by holdings. Because filters and grain are independent, the same list narrows to "clients with a VHF assignment in South Australia" without changing what a row means. Note that one organisation is routinely several client numbers: the ACMA records Telstra under more than one, so two rows sharing a name is the register being precise rather than a duplicate.
Columns a grain cannot fill are hidden and explained
A licence has many assignments across many sites, so at licence grain a frequency has no single value and neither does a site name. Rather than showing those columns with every cell empty, which reads as "the register holds nothing here", they are removed and the header says how many were hidden, why, and which grain will show them. A blank cell is a claim about the register, and it should only ever be made when the register is genuinely blank.
Empty sites look empty
Nearly 56,000 of the register's 129,000 sites carry no assignment at all, so a site list is 43 per cent empty shells that are indistinguishable from live sites until you open them. Every site row therefore carries a count of the licences actually at it, sortable, so the busiest sites in an area come first and the empty ones are visible as empty rather than having to be opened one at a time.
Search the licence conditions themselves
The register carries 461,293 condition and advisory note attachments, renders them on a licence page, and gives no way to search them. So "which licences carry this wording" is a question nobody can currently ask, including through the ACMA's own interface. Because the conditions are heavily repeated boilerplate, only 8,184 of those attachments are distinct texts, so they collapse into a browsable catalogue: one row per condition, the number of licences carrying it, and the full text, searchable by any phrase in it. Open one and see the licences that carry it.
See what the register has actually done
The official register is a snapshot with no history in its interface. It publishes daily change archives as zip files to download and diff yourself, which is not the same as being able to ask a question. This records every renewal, status change, new issue and withdrawal it observes, searchable by licence number or licensee. It is also the only place a lapse survives at all: the ACMA removes lapsed licences from the register within about three months, so the live register is 98.9 per cent Granted and a status filter finds almost nothing. Every result states the window the history actually covers, because it begins when the watching began rather than when the register did.
Antennas, read backwards
The register catalogues 8,658 antennas but only 5,680 are pointed at by any assignment. One row per model with its manufacturer, type, gain, size, beamwidths and front to back ratio, plus how many assignments run it across the whole register. Open one and see those assignments with their sites, so "which sites run this model, and on what frequencies" is a lookup rather than an exercise.
The term finds its own view
A term names a thing, not a view. Type a client name while looking at links, or a call sign while looking at sites, and rather than an empty table the tool finds where that term actually lives and takes you there. Where the term clearly names one kind of record it moves you and says so, with a way back. Where it genuinely names several, as a place name that is also a company name does, it says where it found the term and how many, marking whether each view is named by the term or merely mentions it, and lets you choose.
Point to point links, both ends on one row
A link is not in the register. The register holds assignments at sites, so a link exists only as one licence with two sites and has to be reconstructed by pairing them. The Links grain does that for 45,039 links, giving both end sites and states, the path length, the carrier at each end, the band, the bandwidth and both azimuths on a single row. Both carriers are named separately because 43,809 of those links transmit on a different frequency at each end, so one frequency column describes half the link and which half depends on which site identifier happens to sort lower.
The transmit carrier at each end, not whichever is higher
A duplex link carries a transmitter and a receiver at both ends, so both ends see both frequencies. Taking the highest carrier at each end returns the same number twice and makes every link read as though it were simplex. The pairing takes the transmit assignment at each end instead, so Frequency A is what the A end actually radiates and the pair of columns is the real duplex split. Expanding the link shows all four assignments and confirms it: each end transmits on what the other receives.
Every row expands into what sits under it
Open a client and see the licences they hold. Open a site and see the licences with an assignment there. Open a licence and see its transmitters and receivers, paired so both ends of a link sit together. Open an assignment and get every field the register holds about it, grouped as assignment, power and geometry, antenna, site, licence and holder. Scope carries down as you go: a licence opened from inside a site shows its assignments at that site, not the several hundred it may hold nationally, so the row you opened never stops describing what you opened it from.
The record says how much of itself it holds
Each group on the expanded record states how many of its fields the register actually carries, for example ten of fifteen. Empty fields are left out rather than shown blank. The register is sparse by design, with 28 per cent of transmitters carrying no EIRP and most assignments no tilt, and a card of forty labels with half of them empty reads as a broken query rather than as a partial record.
Narrow by clicking, not by filling in a form
The summary strip counts the whole result set by service, subservice, licence status, licensee, band, state and expiry month, and every bucket is clickable. Clicking narrows the result to that bucket, using the ACMA id underneath rather than the name on the chip, because the register's names do not survive substring matching: no licence category contains the word Maritime, and one subservice name can belong to two different services. The chips you have applied show above the table and clear individually.
The shape of the answer, not just the rows
A facet strip above the table counts the entire result set, not the current page, by service, subservice, licence status, licensee, transmit or receive, frequency band, state and expiry month. Each bucket carries its count and each is clickable as a filter. Where a list is topped rather than complete it says so, so a licensee absent from a top twelve is never read as absent from the result. The official register offers no aggregate of any kind.
Real pagination and an exact count
Every search returns the exact number of matching rows alongside the page, computed from the identical WHERE clause so the count can never describe a different set than the rows beneath it. Page numbers, first and last, and a page size of 50 to 500. Sorting is always tie broken on the underlying key, so paging through a sorted result cannot show one row twice and skip another. Where paging is capped the tool says so and points at export rather than degrading quietly.
Derived columns the register does not carry
Frequency band, channel label against the relevant plan, decoded emission bandwidth and meaning from the ITU designator, and signed days to expiry. The register stores frequency in hertz and bandwidth in hertz; every column here names its unit in the header and converts once, at one place, so a frequency never leaves as 148062500 and a 12.5 kHz channel never reads as 12500 under a column labelled kHz.
Export that stays attributable
CSV of the whole result set at the grain shown, not just the page. Every file carries a preamble naming the source, the register snapshot date it was computed from, the row count, and an explicit note when the result was larger than the file. A spreadsheet forwarded to a client with no source and no date is an unattributable claim the moment it leaves the app, and the preamble is what stops it becoming one.
Snapshot date on every page and every file
The tool reads its own currency from the refresh log and states it as a date and an age, and it flags itself when the copy is more than a week behind. The date is never taken from the build time or the clock, because a build stamped date is always today and is therefore always reassuring and sometimes wrong. Where the log cannot answer, the tool says the age is unknown rather than guessing.
Shared filter grammar with the ACMA Database Map
Both surfaces read the same query string the same way, through one parser. A search here opens on the map with a single link, and a filtered map view opens here. Every search is a URL that restores the grain, the columns, the sort, the page and every filter, so a query can be bookmarked or pasted into an engineering note without being rebuilt.
