Learning from listening...

What use is an F-call? As an F-call, working DX, you'll spend many hours looking for that elusive contact, or you'll turn on your radio, tune around, hear a station, call back and bag a new country. It's all there for the taking, one contact at a time. As you operate on HF, you'll notice a whole range of operating skills, from amazing to atrocious and everything in between. You'll hear stations who keep calling two letters of their callsign, or those who run a pile-up for 40 contacts without once uttering their own callsign. You'll hear people who are not sure about their microphone and seem afraid it might bite, and those who are seemingly completely deaf to the world. As you listen around you'll begin to discern those operators who are doing an amazing job, who, apparently without effort, pull your callsign out of the muck and come back to your first call, and you'll hear those who say all the letters of your callsign, but never in one sentence or in the correct order. The difference between you and all those operators is that hopefully you have no habits yet. You don't yet know how it's done and you're yet to learn about the ins and outs of what's going on. So, starting at the top. Listen. Then, listen some more. Understand that if a station is giving out 5 and 9 for everyone, that unless the bands are amazing, it's likely that all they're doing is collecting callsigns and yours can be one in the mix. They don't want to hear about your dog, or your antenna or your radio, and often they don't even care about your name. So, jump in with your callsign, give them a 5 and 9 report and move on. KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. While you're at it, don't get into the habit of calling part of your callsign. You have no idea what part of it they recognized, since you're transmitting at the same time as everyone else, you might find that your F-call ends later than most and ends up being the last few letters they hear. Finally, the prefix, the VK6 part of your callsign is just as important as the suffix, the FLAB part. Arguably much more so, since it tells people roughly where you are, so don't swallow the VK6 when you're giving it out. I'm Onno VK6FLAB