Yeah, it’s wet, wet, wet. But I’m grateful to have done two activations (between the rain showers) this week and both including 10m.
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Yes, very quiet today on HF from Knock of Crieff GM/SS-264. Nothing on 40m , 15m or 17m and only a couple of takers on 20m. Four qso’s on 2m though including s2s to GM4YSS/P on GM/CS-100 which turns out to be a complete for me.
Today was a memorial activation for me, last year I activated this hill with Moxie the station labrador and it turned out to be the last hill she did.
Andy
MM7MOX
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Which qualifies you to go on the 80m breakfast net (06:00 daily because you can’t sleep) and compare notes on the latest change to your medication… plus moan about the effects of aging. However, at this pointvin time, I don’t thing that is your thing Andy. 
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Oh I’ve got that… up at 5am today which seems normal now. Got up watched Netflix till 7am when I had a fistful of drugs, back to Netflix then finally asleep on the sofatill 9.45.
My body’s in a rhythm of waking early, doing stuff, having a snooze in the afternoon, then awake till bed time. Lather, rinse, repeat. 
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Well there is something special about the early bird G8Axx calls: For the first year that the “B” licence existed the lowest frequency band available to us was 70cm - and there was literally zero commercial ham transmitters available for the band. We had to homebrew our rigs to get on the air. I think Tom Withers marketed a tripler-amplifier a couple of years later, and it wasn’t cheap! We were the only group of hams post-war who had to homebrew to get on the air, and if that isn’t worth a few bragging points I don’t know what is! To be clear, we had to build a 2 m exciter, tack on a tripler/amplifier, and build a modulator to apply high level AM to the output stage - for the first 12 months even the use of CW was denied! So to my mind a G3, let alone a G4, was the intended destination of many G8As but the “A” licensees could buy their rigs, construction was fun but unnecessary for them.
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Brian, I thought your license dated from the time where one was permitted to transmit only into dummy loads. By the time we G8Cxx young dudes got on the air the 2m band was permitted, but even then 144MHz homebrew rigs were a struggle for us non experts.
Re callsign prefix snobbery, it’s so small minded, like - in my youth - the attitude of some Class A licence holders to us Class B types (because they had passed the Morse test and we hadn’t) or in modern times, on-air condescension from some ‘full’ license holders to Foundation, etc. My preference for “G8” over “M0” is purely practical, it has a nicer rhythm in Morse and probably more memorable to chasers due to its relative rarity.
Nice burn! 
The AA (artificial Aerial) licence was the 2+3 letter calls from before 1939. As you had to be 14 to hold a licence, then Brian at the youngest would have been born in 1925 or before making him 99. Now Brian has quite a few turns on the coil of life but he hasn’t got 99 turns. Well not yet… but here’s hoping he does.
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Just a bit of fun. I suspect Brian’s not so much older than me. I tease a couple of my old school classmates the same way even though they are only a few months older than me.
On the recycling of old callsigns, there are some genuine issues, e.g. for recently SK’d licenses. Even if I heard my relinquished callsign on air I would be spooked, It’s almost like identity theft. Now that our antics are forever stored and searchable on the Internet it could lead to confusion between the activities of the new and previous holder of that callsign.
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It’s only an issue because the concept is new to the UK. People in the US and Oz will be shaking their heads and wondering what the fuss is if they read this.
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If amateur radio is a big part of your life and you’ve operated for decades with a particular callsign, it becomes part of your identity within the AR community. You are known primarily by the callsign and you get an attachment for it. I would think many in the US and Oz would feel the same. But I invite them, or from anywhere else, to comment.
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It wont bother you if someone gets your callsign because you’ll be dead.
We have plenty of people in SOTA who have been reallocated previously used callsigns that have also been used in SOTA. The most famous being the reallocation of ZL3CC which was supported by the many people who remembered a previous holder of the call Andrew who went SK quite young.
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I was initially sorry to hear that G3BA had been re issued, but then I read the QRZ page of the new licencee. It has a very interesting write up about Tom Douglas the original holder, which I think is a fitting tribute.
I still have Tom’s old 6ele 4m yagi, but that’s another story!
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Hi Andy,
Exactly that problem already occurs in the US with their special event call signs. these 1x1 calls are only allocated to a group for the period of the event but the record of that callsign being on the air is “burnt” into Internet history and callsign lookup sites such as qrz.com are sometimes unreliable as the previous user of a call does not always release the call for re-use in qrz.com in good time - so the next event is impacted in not being able to get their information up there.
Even when an SK call is released years after the OM dies - the new holder can be accused of being a pirate - I know it happened to me with my VK2JI call.
73 Ed.
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The problem isn’t the number of turns, its the corrosion of the wire!
Totally agree!
I’m glad you wrote that, it saves me from the shock of hearing the callsign on the air, if I hear it. I well remember Tom; one particular memory was the surprise of hearing him pop up one day with SSB, when everyone else was rockbound on AM he had built a transverter (the first I had heard of one) and could net on us using a VFO, and then proceeded to train us in the use of VOX!
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