What use is an F-call?

Amateur Radio in Australia today is licensed with three primary license types, the Foundation or F-call, the Standard and the Advanced license. If you're familiar with how they differ you're likely to know that they each have a different power privilege, 10 Watts, 100 Watts and 400 Watts respectively.

You might also know that an F-call isn't allowed on 20m and you're not allowed any digital modes.

For me, that was basically where my knowledge ended.

Last week I started writing down what other differences there are between the licenses.

In overview, the F-call is allowed on 6 bands, 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. The standard call adds 20m, 6m, 23cm, 13cm and 6cm bands, a total of 11 bands.

The advanced call adds the WARC bands, that is, 30m, 17m and 12m, it adds 160m, and many higher frequencies, a total of 23 bands. There are some slight changes in the band-edges for the advanced call for a couple of bands, for example, an extra 10 MHz at the bottom of the 70cm band.

So, Foundation, 6 bands, Standard, 11 Bands, Advanced 23 bands.

There are other things. For example, an F-call is allowed one digital mode, hand-keyed Morse. Other licenses grant privileges to run repeaters, use different modes or allow computer control. The kilowatt trial is only open to advanced calls for example.

I'm sure I've left out some distinguishing features, so if you know of one, get in touch. I'm in the process of making a timeline of amateur licenses, that is, show the history of where licences came from, the origin of the h-call, the k-call, the z-call and the n-call to name a few and if you have things to share on their origins, please don't be shy, the more I dig up on the topic, the more there is to learn.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB