With my recent ticket upgrade to Extra I decided to apply for a shorter vanity call sign. The criteria that I wanted was something very short.

Both short in length and short in Morse code so that I could spend a little less time on my cq’s and all transactions. A few dits/dahs will probably add up over a lifetime.

So I wrote a few scripts to parse out the callsign info published by the FCC. I wrote a weighting algorithm for calculating the total number of dits and dahs in the morse code version of each callsign and sorted them by that weight. Interestingly the shortest callsigns in morse code terms (10 binary characters) that are currently available are the 5 character types in the General/Technician class level. Though there are only 7 of them as I post this!

Also a surprising number of A*** signs are available, around 1500 4 letter Extra class callsigns in total.

I decided to make a job of it and I added filtering so that the rules published by the FCC for no-no callsigns were respected, further reducing the junk level, and made a nice web interface for people to download them with.

Since it took me some work to set up I am charging a small fee for the service which can be paid by Paypal, after which you can immediately download the information. The callsign lists will be updated automatically every week.

You can try it out here:
http://www.geniusweb.com/callsigns/order.php

After finishing the program I noticed that I had made a number of mistakes in my own vanity application since I used a primitive version of this for my own purposes before adding any of the filtering that’s necessary to toss out signs I’m not qualified for. Still it looks like I have enough good ones in there to get something useful. Anyone downloading the polished lists will get just the right stuff and avoid the mistakes I made!