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
Hello Alan,
Congratulations on the call and welcome to the hobby. Remember it doesn’t have to be an expensive hobby: my station is all about keeping the whole thing “low profile”: low power, simple antenna, cheap but quality used gear. I always wonder where the big gun stations with their linear amps and towers and beams get their element of excitement from. After all with that sort of equipment you start to expect exotic DX.
Anyway, enough of that. Hope you get years, no decades of enjoyment from this great hobby of ours. When I reply to a CQ call and hear the other side read back my callsign, even after over 500 contacts I am still excited! And amateurs of many more years of experience have said the same thing. Nothing beats it. Best wishes, Adam