From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ralf Baechle DL5RB Subject: Re: callsign limit Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 02:40:48 +0100 Message-ID: <20060601014047.GB27504@linux-mips.org> References: <200605310927.56706.vk3heg@iinet.net.au> <20060531093716.GA21395@cloud.net.au> <620c90570605310403o1e4b94bcgf4ab922ef26983e4@mail.gmail.com> <20060531111919.GA22980@cloud.net.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060531111919.GA22980@cloud.net.au> Sender: linux-hams-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hams@vger.kernel.org On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 09:19:19PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > > I believe (I maybe taking one in the wind but so far my digging around the > > web would show this correct) that the ITU format for amateur calls is a max- > > imum of 6 alpha-numerics, > > I think that's no longer true as of WRC 2003. It's a bit late to change > AX.25 though! Indeed. And the problem isn't even new. The ITU has always assigned callsigns blocks with three characters (such as DAA-DRZ to Germany). It was just a courtesy to the ham community that only 1 and 2 character prefixes were ever issued with Swaziland (3DA) as the only exception I know of. One of my crazier ideas to deal with the issue of the longer callsigns was using a hash value instead. The probability of colissions is low but how to do the reverse mapping from hash to callsign ... Ralf