I registered my amateur radio Foundation licence callsign today: M6DXU.
The Foundation licence callsign is denoted by the ‘M6′, and the 3 letters are a personal choice. DXU is in honour of a relation, Robert Lever, who is now a ’silent key’. Bob, as he was known, was a radio amateur from pre-1950 and had served in the RAF during WW2. Bob’s callsign was G2DXU. G is the old callsign pre-fix for Great Britain. Sadly those have all been used now and new licences mainly begin with M.
At the moment I only have a Kenwood TH-F7E dual band handheld radio for VHF/UHF but I’m looking forward to getting on HF and making some international contacts. This could become a rather expensive hobby.
For those not familiar with ham radio lingo, here is an explanation of the above title: CQ (seek-you) is a calling code, DE is French for ‘from’, and M6DXU is the station calling.
As in ‘text talk’, words can be shortened (and the kids of today think they thought of it all first!) and there are abbreviations and acronyms. DX means long distance, and U can be a shorter version of ‘you’. So the DXU in the callsign has a meaning of ‘DX’ ‘U’, or ‘long-distance call’ ‘you’. Quite appropriate for a method of communication that pre-dates the Web, email, mobile phones and cheap international telephone calls.
73 (Best wishes)
M6DXU
