Having passed my full license exam, and now that you can essentially pick whichever (unissued) callsign you want, my mind has turned to trying to work out how to define a 'good' callsign. What I settled on is...

1. Callsign should not contain character combinations that are used for other purposes, e.g. 'CQ'

2. Callsign should not end in 'K', as that could be confusing in Morse.

3. For Morse, shorter (i.e. fewer dots and dashes) is better, and dorts are shorter than dashes.

4. Callsign prefix should have originally been issed during a plausible time period. G3xxx was originally issued between 1946 and 1971 - it might be odd for someone who was born in the 1980's to be issued one of these.

Other considerations include:

• Is the callsign should be available to register on social media/other online services such as Twitter?

• Is the callsign available as a personalised number plate?

• Would having a newer-style 'short call' cause more problems than it's worth? More likely that people ask for repeats, believing that they have not copied the whole callsign, or refusing to work me believing me to be a pirate. Also some of the 'old timers' might be of the opinion that short calls shouldn't have been issued and refuse to work it.

Given all this, my shortlist at the moment is:

1. M5MC (-- ..... -- -.-.)

2. M0MC (-- ----- -- -.-.)

3. M5MAT (-- ..... -- .- -)