Foundations of Amateur Radio

Radio amateurs like to do new things, celebrate, remember, bring attention to, and overall have fun, any excuse to get on air. One of the things that we as a community do is setup our radios in weird and wonderful places, on boats, near light-houses, on top of mountains, in parks, you name it.

Another thing we do is create special callsigns to mark an occasion, any occasion.

For example, to mark the first time the then Western Australian Chief Scientist, Professor Lyn Beazley was on air she used the callsign VI6PROF.

When Wally VK6YS (SK) went on the air to educate the public about Rotary's End Polio Now campaign, he used VI6POLIO. More recently the Australian Rotarians of Amateur Radio operated VK65PFA, Polio Free Africa. When it's active, you'll find VA3FIRE to remind you of Fire Prevention Week in Canada, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club operates B0CRA through to B9CRA which you can contact during the first week of May each year as part of the Chinese 5.5 Ham Festival.

We create callsigns for other things too.

Datta VU2DSI commemorates November 30th, the birthday of Indian physicist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose named by the IEEE as one of the fathers of radio science, by operating a special callsign AU2JCB in his honour for a couple of weeks around the end of November.

I mention this because it's not hard to achieve. It's called a "Special Event Callsign" and many if not all amateur licensing authorities have provision for such a callsign. Rules differ from country to country, some say that the callsign must be for something of special significance to the amateur community, others require that it's of national or international significance. In Canada for example, if you're celebrating an anniversary, it must be a minimum of a 25th increment.

Different countries have different formats.

The USA for example issues temporary one by one calls consisting of a letter followed by a digit followed by a letter.

The UK offers GB and a digit followed by two or three letters. There's also "Special" Special Event Stations, which can have a format like GB100RSGB.

In Canada there's a whole system based on what kind of event, what region it's significant to, who's operating it, and so on.

In the Netherlands you can have a normal prefix followed by at most eight characters and an overall maximum length of twelve characters and you can have it for at most a year and only one at a time.

In Germany you can use a standard callsign pattern with a four to seven character suffix, but only for a limited time.

In Australia there's the traditional VI and a digit followed by any number of characters, but remember if you make it massive, getting it in the log is not always easy and using a digital mode like FT8 might not work as expected.

What ever you want to commemorate, celebrate or bring attention to, remember that your callsign is only one part of the process. Consider who's going to actually operate the callsign, if you're going to issue QSL cards, if there are awards or a contest associated with the callsign, if there needs to be a website, if this is a regular thing, or a once-off.

Another thing you need to consider is how you're going to publicise this callsign. There's no point in going to the effort of obtaining a special event callsign with nobody knowing about it, that's the whole point.

No matter which way you jump, there's always a large range of special event callsigns on the air at any one time and making contact with one is often a massive thrill for the person operating the callsign, not to mention the person making the contact.

So, if you have a chance to have a go, I'd encourage you to get on air with a special event callsign and make some noise!

I'm Onno VK6FLAB