Royal Wedding callsigns – A minor rant

I applied for my Royal Wedding NoV nice and early on when they were announced and it came through promptly, all good.

With a couple of days to spare, I applied for an NoV for the Martello Tower Group so that we could use GR0PKT on our planned radio play night the following Tuesday.  I’d not heard anything back so I dropped an email through to the published email address to ask about the application and received the following reply:

Sir,
This was REJECTED by Ofcom earlier today; teir advice was that the NoV is for Personal licences only.
Thank you.

OK, that’s fair enough.  I don’t recall seeing that mentioned previously but I may have missed it.

During the week since the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton I’ve used SSB more than I have for a while and I’ve heard quite a few stations with the R prefix operating from clubs and didn’t pay much attention to it until I worked one of them today and that reminded me of the email that I’ve posted above.

I don’t have a problem with the rules either way, but I just wish they’d be applied consistently.  Either clubs are allowed to be issued the NoV to use an R prefix or they’re not, the situation shouldn’t arise where some clubs get the NoV and some don’t.

This isn’t sour grapes because in the end our provisionally planned radio night didn’t happen anyway so the group didn’t get the opportunity to use the callsign had it been issued but I just think it’s a mistake that there was no consistency in the issuing of the NoVs.

2 Comments

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  1. I tend to agree with you that all clubs should have been treated the same. However, have they got a NoV. I fear that a number of station have just used the ‘R’…

  2. When the GE prefix was authorised for the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 it was permitted for all stations – and there was no NoV bureaucracy (and as a result, it was probably quite a few thousand pounds cheaper to administer). Progress, what’s that…?

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