I tried to keep my hands out of this but... :-)
> > Just put GB50BO in the callsign field...
>
> Thereby contravening the regulations in just about EVERY country I've
> ever operated in! Certainly, doing that is against the British
> regulations, the US regulations, the Canadian regulations, the French
> regulations...should I keep going?
If my interpretation of the Finnish regulations is correct, there really
isn't anything that says that the AX.25 source and destination addresses
need to be valid callsigns. As long as you make clear what your real
callsign is at least every 15 minutes. Just like on phone, you don't need
to say the callsigns on every over, it's quite ok to go "ok Riley, perfect
copy here in Helsinki, thanks for the report, yours is..."
Anyway I do agree that valid callsigns should be used as AX.25 addresses,
and here it _is_ considered very bad practise to use anything else...
> > But those celebration-callsigns are IMHO rare and therefore a
> > minor "problem" :-)
>
> You obviously make little use of amateur radio then.
My question is: Is it _really_ necessary for a special event station to
be able to use the special callsign on packet radio? Do people want to
send for example QSL cards for packet radio QSOs? Isn't that sort of
stupid?
Here in Finland we don't have the problem though as our TAC refuses to
give callsigns that don't comply with the IARU/ITU/whatever
recemmendations. Special event stations get either a single letter suffix
or occasinally a special prefix (we have OF-OJ).
> > And this only for GB50BOB?
>
> Since you clearly don't use the amateur radio bands, you equally
> clearly won't be aware of just how many callsigns are in regular use
> that can not be used in the AX.25 protocol due to this stupid flaw in
> the protocol.
IMNSHO that callsign and other similar are as much illegal or at least
against established practises as Walters proposal so those special event
stations get what they have coming...
In some future link layer protocol that fixes many other things as well
this issue should be taken into account. For now I don't see the big
problem. And whatever people do, don't create a quick and dirty,
almost-but-not-quite backwards compatible hack to AX.25 to get around this
"problem"...
> Add to that the fact that several countries have already proposed
> allocating ham callsigns with a four letter suffix since they are fast
> running out of callsigns to allocate, and you soon see just how daft
> your comments are...
Really? What countries?
--
--- Tomi Manninen / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / OH2BNS @ OH2RBI.FIN.EU ---
