Is anyone else getting tired of the proliferation of new callsigns, particularly those with long strings of meaningless numbers and acronyms? OK, we've lived with this trend for several decades, but it is surely getting out of hand now. Personally I'm not a big fan of cw, but it must be a pain sending reams of text/numbers instead of conventional calls of up to six characters. My particular beef concerns FT8, of which I am a big user. I am now forced to hold QSO's devoid of the contacts maidenhead locator information as the software cannot accommodate string lengths containing both location and the silly callsigns. Can we please stop callsign inflation and return to sanity?
Do you have an example? Just saw AM370XXX go by on my ft8 screen. See this type of call at least every minute scroll by when 20m is open.
Not a legitimate call? There are loads of these AM calls on the air now. AM is Spain. Most of these have a two digit numbers, I'm guessing that the three digit number of this call that I saw might be a special event. (AM370 was the prefix, I put XXX as the suffix because I don't think it's fair to identify the specific station, particularly as the call may well have been imposed by the licensing authority, and not chosen by the amateur). I've also seen these 8-9 digit calls from several other European countries so this isn't specific to Spain.
I just thought of another possibility, maybe I read AM370XXX in mistake for what was AM37OXXX. If this was the case I apologise, but it doesn't affect my original argument that several countries are now using callsigns of 7,8, or even 9 characters and the maidenhead location of these stations is not being transmitted on FT8.
70th Anniversary of the URE (Spanish national radio club). They are using AM and 70 in the callsigns. I think AM370XXX would be EA3XXX in real life.
Such call sign anomalies have always existed. Never have they been problematic on CW. Apparently, the only change is that FT8 can’t accommodate the length. So to review, what exactly is the real problem?
