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 the £20 fee Ofcom were happy to confirm that I had been issued the callsign G2KS. Err, wot?!?

That's obviously not the callsign I requested, but it's also not from the M0 range which they should have issued if the callsign that I had requested was not available. This didn't make any sense, so I phoned them up.

I've always found the people on the phones at Ofcom to be really helpful and this time was no different. I explained what had happened and that I was confused about the callsign I had been issued. They dug out the paperwork and confirmed that I had requested G2KS and had therefore been issued it. I told them that this simply wasn't the case and I suspected that paperwork may have been inadvertently shuffled so could they please compare handwriting or something. Apparently whoever had applied for G2KS had sufficiently different handwriting to me to make it obvious that the paperwork had been mixed up somehow. They informed me that they'd need to go via their policy people to get it resolved. Lo and behold, a couple of days later G2KS was revoked and I was issued with M0IZZ. This was still not what I had requested but obviously M5MAT was not available for some reason so they had issued me with the next available M0 callsign. I was annoyed that I didn't get my choice but there you go.

All sorted.

Or was it?

A tweet from 2M0SQL alerted me to a more recent FoIA response from Ofcom which was published in September 2019. M5MAT didn't show as assigned in this list. The chance of that callsign being issued in the period between the list being published and me requesting it was pretty small, so I phoned up Ofcom and re-explained the situation. They confirmed that M5MAT was still available and that they would have to speak to their policy people - I guess their policy department must be one of the busier departments there.

A couple of days later I received a slightly concerning email.

My full license had been revoked.

No other explanation, nothing about another one being issued or anything like that. By the time I had the email and phoned them up their helpdesk was closed too.

I logged in to the licensing portal and my old intermediate license was there but nothing about a full one. It dawned on me that when I was originally issued with my G2KS callsign I had to pay an invoice via the licensing portal. I didn't get an email or any other notification to tell me that I needed to pay, the invoice just silently appeared and sat there. I eventually found my way back to that part of the portal (it's not very obvious) and there was another invoice for me to pay. I had hoped that I wouldn't need to pay anything extra - I'd already payed the £20 fee once - but at least its not too much. Once I paid it I was issued M5MAT and there we go, 4 callsigns (including my intermediate one) in 4 months and the reason why I've popped up during UKAC contests in multiple different guises recently.