Re: callsign limit

[Ralf Baechle DL5RB <ralf@linux-mips.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