Just found:
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2014/september/amateur_radio_licence_consultation.htm
and:
http://rsgb.org/main/operating/licensing-novs-visitors/licence-review/
The closing date for responses to Ofcom’s latest consultation is October 20th. Ofcom have said they will put much weight on the number of replies they receive. It really doesn’t matter who poked the wasps nest or woke the dog; too late to worry about that now.
The Ofcom pages are here:
There’s been some discussion on the RSGB forum here:
http://www.thersgb.org/forums/index.php?forums/ofcom-licence-review/
…and the RSGB have some suggested responses to a few of the issues here:
Whatever you think of the RSGB and Ofcom, if you hold a G*, M* or 2* callsign then it would probably be a good idea to tell Ofcom what you think of their proposals. The on-line response form is here:
https://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/amateur-radio-licence/howtorespond/form
73, Rick M0LEP
I have read and failed to understand this document but it looks like bad news and I think it might be worth individuals endorsing the RSGB response.
73,
Rod
Yes, please, as a minimum send in a response that says yes to each of the questions except the ones the RSGB have commented on. For those just cut and paste the RSGB suggested response.
Colin
It certainly wouldn’t win any positive “Plain English” awards; makes it difficult to figure out what Ofcom actually intend. From a SOTA point of view, the one most likely to cause confusion is the change Ofcom seem to want to make to the use of regional secondary identifiers (covered by questions 6 and 7). It seems they’re expecting folk to use the one appropriate to their home address, wherever they’re operating…
73, Rick M0LEP
I have read the document fairly carefully, drafted a response in my own words, and will be submitting it shortly. I’m not convinced it is a good idea to cut and paste the RSGB text; they will spot this a mile off. If you don’t have time to write some original words, I’d say it was best to be honest and just write “I agree with the RSGB on this matter” (assuming, of course, that you do).
The majority of the proposals seem uncontentious,
Most of the fuss seems to be about callsigns and the regional secondary locators in particular. The arguments in the consultation document are muddled in the extreme, but I think it is important to see this from Ofcom’s point of view. If they make a regulation, they have to be able to cite an objective justification for it. The use of fhe regional prefixes is a long standing part of our culture, but it is not necessary as far as Ofcom is concerned. It does not help to identify the station - in fact it hinders because everybody who might interpret a callsign needs to be trained to recognise the possible variants. It is not an ITU requirement because the 2, G and M series are allocated to the United Kingdom as a whole - any subdivision is a local matter.
So you can see that Ofcom’s default position would be to remove the regulation. You would imagine that we might welcome this, but one of the curiosities of amateur radio culture is that we rather relish being regulated. Many of the conventions we adopt are pretty arbitrary, but they set us apart from other activities such as CB.
It is far from clear what Ofcom actually intend the final state to be. My best guess is that they want to make changing the prefix optional, but if you do elect to change it, then it has to be “right”. So I could activate Ben Nevis as M1MAJ or MM1MAJ (with optional suffix) but no other prefix. The other possibility, which is more logical, is that they do away with prefix changing altogether, so that I must always use my home callsign M1MAJ.
Would this be the end of the world? I don’t think so. I must admit to a certain degree of excitement when I first got the opportunity to use a different prefix, but it wears off after a while, and it’s actually a bit of a nuisance. Having to send envelopes to umpteen different QSL submanagers is certainly a pain! It would be a major upheaval with world-wide impact, but ultimately we’d just get on with it.
All that being said, on balance I am in fact in favour of retaining the current rules, and have said so in my rather long response.
By the way, can anybody here tell me how the long-standing prefix allocations were originally chosen? W for Wales and I for Northern Ireland seem fairly obviously mnemonic, but where did M for Scotland and D for IoM come from? J and U are of course far more recent; when I first read an amateur licence in the 1970s it was C for Channel Islands.
Martyn M1MAJ
I got told it was M for Mac/Mc and D for Douglas Isle of Man. I cannot expand on the origins of that explanation to me. When doing my foundation licence it was not the most pressing thing on my mind 
73 Gerald
Whatever the legal standpoint might be about doing away with the regional identifiers, the fact is that the United Kingdom is made up of separate countries - the recent Scottish “neverendum” emphasises this fact but the Welsh, Irish, Manx and Channel Isles people are equally protective of their separate identity - and so are the English, in their habitually muted way. For this reason I expect the regional identifiers to be jealously protected, I certainly would feel little short of devastated if they vanished. If we set aside mere emotional attachments, we still have to consider what the effect of such a change would be on the DXCC status of the separate countries of the UK. Would they lose their status as entities? Surely not - the administrative qualifications would not have changed, leaving us with several entities that cannot be distinguished by callsign if this change occur.
Brian
I was told the same thing when I was studying for the RAE back in 1962. I can’t help thinking that this is a myth but know of no better explanation. Logically Scotland should be GA (Alban), Wales GC (Cymru) and the Isle of Man GV (Ellan Vannin).
Brian
The more I think about the regional secondary locators (RSL), the less sense they make to me, at least for the UK “proper”. At first I, too, thought “Let’s keep them”, but if you look at the UK from the outside, you do not really “see” the different countries that it consists of. Mail from abroad, for instance, is not addressed to England, Scotland, …, but to the United Kingdom. The RSL system has been hollowed out already by the recent use of country-wide secondary locators such as O, Q, R, and V, anyway. It is a bit like having four different national football teams in the UEFA cup, but only one for the Olympic games.
The Crown dependencies, however, are separate entities, what with customs regulations, their own postal administrations etc., and having completely separate radio callsign series for them would actually be more plausible than the current situation with RSLs. A comparable situation exists with Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
Maybe a better solution from the beginning would have been a “district” system, such as it exists in a number of countries, where different parts of the country are marked by numbers, and if you operate from another part than your home region, you just append the appropriate district number to the callsign (I might e.g. sign as M70CEF/3 if my home region has number 7, and I am operating from region 3, whichever this might be); but that, while perhaps offering a possibility for a fresh start, might be too much of a change to digest for many. Still, it makes sense to me that Ofcom is trying to streamline the callsign system which currently is rather wasteful.
The QSL bureau, of course, has got nothing to do with Ofcom; however, I also believe that having different submanagers for each and every combination of prefix and RSL makes things more complicated than they have to be, namely because the RSL are secondary. I suggested to the QSL bureau in the past that disregarding the secondary “locators” altogether might be more convenient for the recipients of incoming cards, but they, in turn, told me they found the current system easier to handle. Well, so much for that.
73, Jan-Martin
I don’t think CW operators would relish having their contest portable callsigns suddenly gaining extra characters! M70CEF/3/P would have a significant impact on the QSO rate.
Brian
Living in Northern Ireland which is a seperate DXCC country as are all the other regions, I cannot see how a “rx” station could possibly identify which country the “tx” station was located in without the RSL. I for one will continue to use my cherished GI prefix.
Victor
GI4ONL
There is no such thing as UK as a single entity, it is a grouping of countries. As Victor says, GM is a separate DXCC just like GI. Without differing prefices how will someone know which of the countries I’m operating from.
Victor, DXCC has got nothing to do with Ofcom regulations. It is just an award scheme (albeit a popular one) of one of the many amateur radio societies in the world, and DXCC status of an entity has no meaning beyond this scheme (and maybe a few others that have borrowed the concept). It is not like the German Bundesländer or all the federal states of the USA have got separate callsign prefixes. If the DXCC scheme were started now from scratch, with its current criteria being applied to all and sundry, the UK would be just one entity. Even if the RSL were replaced by numbers, why should some of the numbered regions not coincide with the smaller of the constituent countries? It would only make sense to follow administrative divisions, and then you would still be able tell your DXCC entities apart if you wanted.
MM0FMF, you forgot the BERU contest in which the whole of the UK and the Crown Dependencies (!) count as one entity.
Brian, I rarely use any other mode than CW. Consider this: there is an international trend to make the /p suffix optional (per regulation), and if you listen to, say, Russian stations in CW, you hear exactly the type of identification you mentioned, and these people are racking up QSO counts like there was no tomorrow. If you want to stay closer to the SOTA topic, think of the visitors to Switzerland or Liechtenstein using callsigns with up to 12 characters from a mountain top …
73, Jan-Martin
Be that as it may, Jan-Martin, the proud inhabitants of Scotland, Wales etc would see your approach as a centralist denial of their individuality and would resent it. This is not the time to appear to be trying to suppress national identities, and that is how this change would be viewed. As I see it, this is an attempt to fix something that really isn’t broken.
Brian
It can’t. Obviously.
You can’t always tell the DXCC of a station from its prefix, You usually can, but there are exceptions all over the world. Changing the rules would make the UK one of those exceptions - possibly the biggest exception in the world - but still just one exception of many.
Yes it would be dreadfully inconvenient, but that’s not Ofcom’s problem,
We need to explain to them why it matters to us, and in particular why it matters that prefix changing is mandatory rather than optional. They do have to take account of the “impact” on “stakeholders”,
1 Like
Including the long-standing problem of special event stations using the “GB” prefix, irrespective of which country within the UK they are operating from. It does cause confusion to DXCC chasers and also in contests.
There was just one exception to this, in 1959, when the Post Office mistakenly issued the callsign GBM2KR to a special event station in Kilmarnock! They belatedly realised their mistake and sent a corrected NoV in the post. Unfortunately it did not arrive until the day after the special event had ended.
73,
Walt (G3NYY)
That sounds more like a mnemonic constructed after the fact than a likely origin. But I suppose stranger things have been true!
Brian, you have a good point regarding the identities of the constituent countries, and the feelings connected with them. They are perhaps the best argument in favour of the RSL, although to me these secondary locators are still more a decoration than anything else. If they are kept, I hope they let all English stations use one, too, never mind the slightly longer callsigns.
However, I do not agree that the callsign system in the UK is not broken. It reminds me of the state of a buffet table after a roaring party, or a cake that has been cut into many pieces, most of which have been nibbled, and only a few have been completely consumed. There are not many prefix blocks left in reserve, while others have not been used to full capacity; callsigns that have expired many years ago are not re-issued; Walt just brought up the issue regarding the GB prefix; and if there are to be special RSL for special events which present the same problem, the choice is much restricted by the separate RSL for club callsigns. Much potential for improvement, as a teacher would say …
73, Jan-Martin
Well said Brian, those are exactly my sentiments !!!
Victor GI4ONL