What use is an F-call?

In the Amateur Radio Licensing regime before the current one where we have a Foundation License, a Standard License and an Advanced one, there was a requirement to know Morse Code before you could obtain some Amateur Licenses. I don't have the exact details, but suffice to say that Morse Code is no longer a licensing requirement to be able to enjoy Amateur Radio.

You'll note that I said that it's no longer a Licencing Requirement, but that doesn't mean that your use of Amateur Radio and your participation within the community wouldn't benefit from knowing the dits and dahs that make up letters, combined making words or codes.

For example, when you key a local repeater, not for all, but the majority of them, you'll hear a series of beeps. If you spoke morse, you'd be able to discern what call-sign is being transmitted and you'd know what repeater you were keying up.

Across the globe is a network, in-fact multiple networks, of beacons which transmit a series of beeps at different power on a particular frequency. So, for example one network, a beacon in Venezuela transmits its call-sign, followed by a beep at 100 Watts, then a beep at 10 Watt and finally a beep at 1 Watt. Then in the next 10 second block, the next station at the United Nations does it, followed by one in Canada, the United States, Hawaii, New Zealand, and so on, until a whole range of beacons have beeped around the world.

Why should you care? Three Words, Propagation, Propagation, Propagation. If you can hear a beacon with a known power level, then there is an excellent chance that you can transmit with similar power to a station in the same area as the beacon that you heard. Of course in our technology dense world, there are iPhone and Android apps that will tell you what beacon is transmitting right now, but if you knew morse, all you'd need to do is tune your radio to the appropriate frequency and listen for the call-sign.

Ho-hum you might say. Of course, but you don't need to wait for a beacon. You could tune to a CW calling frequency and see what stations you might hear. You'd get a higher density of propagation information and you might get a QSO out of the experience.

So, even though you no longer need to know about dits and dahs to get your license, doesn't mean that the skill is obsolete.

My morse is up to 8 letters and with those letters I can already say 262 words. It's not much, but it's more than it was last week.  dit dit dit dit  dit dit, dit dit dit dit  dit dit

I'm Onno VK6FLAB