Monday, 19th June, 2023

My wife applied to her first job in 10 years, after a being (and still is) a stay at home parent. She’s not very confident about it, hopefully she gets an interview at least.

My paperwork has finally been processed and now I get to pick my full callsign. This will be the one that I keep for life. So no pressure.

The one I first thought of and checked availability was for GM5ALX. I feel like I should just go with it, you know, your first answer is usually the right one. It’s nothing more than my name.

I then got sucked into “but is it a good CW callsign” as one day I might learn. I really might, as it looks like a good way to get long distance contacts but doing it yourself vs. the computer. People tell me ALX is a little trickier to copy, but has a nice rhythm to it. A local ham suggested something with repeating letters or maybe something recognisable but not confusing, such as DX. Meaning long distance contact. DDX looks good on morse, is recognisable, maybe not the greatest over voice “delta, delta, x-ray”. The two deltas run into each other? but supposedly double letters then a single is easier to copy than single and double letters. However, it’s also meaningless to me.

Then, whilst chatting in this small matrix server I joined, we got talking about finding out what was and wasn’t available. I used G7UFO’s callsign as an example and said the only ones free are likely to be G5UFO and G3UFO (although G3 is listed as silent key but a few years old so probably up for reissuing). Then everyone said I should get a UFO callsign and we can be united that way. We could even make QSL cards which are like a UFO jigsaw, and if you make contact with all UFO callsigns you can make the full picure. I then found the .radio domain offers cheap domains to hams, and we could get ufo.radio, and then do g5.ufo.radio, and g5@ufo.radio etc. It’s also fun to have a callsign which has an emoji 🛸. It’s sci-fiy and generally quite fun all round. Morse isn’t amazing and phonetic is uniform, foxtrot, oscar, which is a bit of a mouthful. But people often adjust those and could be united foxtrot oscar. I like united more than uniform.

Having said that, you get used to your own callsign and it ends up rattling off, in fact a slower one keeps you from rattling it off too fast. Could say “Golf Mike five uniform foxtrot oscar, UFO!”

I’m now wondering if there are other three letter words/acronyms, with accompanying emoji 😅, that I could look for instead…💭

As it’s for life, I do worry that I’m drawn to the ufo by the silliness of it, and the whole orchestration of ufo callsigns, and domains etc. It does say something that nearly every single UFO callsign is taken though.

We could also make a club and use the final remaining UFO callsign as the club’s one, and then other people can use it. I like that idea as we could dedicate it to the sk’s memory. I reckon he would like that. Nothing is stopping us from making the club callsign regardless of what I pick though.

In fact, there are a lot of UFOs around the world, 218 according to QRZ. Notable being the Roswell radio association, although poor showing of their bio page. We could do some special event stations for UFO related things…the list is endless.

Of course this is a lovely thought exercise, but would I actually do anything, and similarly, I can do all this without the UFO callsign myself.

I asked a non-ham friend and they thought ALX was best. Others like UFO. No-one has remarked on DDX…probably as it’s boring.

So I don’t know…