Tough going again with not a very good spread of squares.

I was going to post the following to the UK VHF Contesting group, until I thought better of it and decided not to poke the hornet's nest...

A bit of a warning to those who intend to upgrade or otherwise change callsign, and care about your UKAC results... You need to do it at the end of a year.

I upgraded to a full license a the RSGB Convention last year. Due to errors at Ofcom I've been issued a few different callsigns over...

In September 2019 I passed my full license exam. Yay me. After the result was confirmed I filled in a paper application so that I could request a specific callsign - M5MAT (the online system doesn't allow you to request a particular callsign).

As far as I could tell that callsign was available - it wasn't registered on QRZ.com, it didn't come up as being assigned in recent Ofcom FoIA responses and nothing showed up when searching for it on Google, Twitter etc.

After paying...

This was the first (update: and also the last) use of my new Full callsign M0IZZ. I got off to a slightly late start but once under way the rate was reasonable. The final squares tally was also reasonable - not as good as last month but not the worst it's been either.

Following the contest and the callsign confusion I contacted the RSGB Contest Committee to highlight to them that I would need to enter future contests under a new callsign. More on that Read more...