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...

I'm now MØIZZ!

After a fair amount of wrangling with Ofcom, including being issued G2KS for a period of 49 minutes, they have finally ignored my request for M5MAT and issued me MØIZZ. This callsign breaks a few of my self-imposed rules, notable it has a repeating character (Z) and also the twitter username @M0IZZ is not available, so on twitter I'll be @M0IZZ_Matt.

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...