Wednesday, March 5, 2014 — If you are involved in traffic handling (or listen to traffic nets), you undoubtedly have heard license renewal “friendly reminders” from N1IQI (and 
others) that your Amateur Radio license expires on such-and-such a date. Well at the hamfest I attended Saturday, one of the state’s top traffic men delivered that message to me.
Hard to believe it has been 10 years since I won this callsign. Won? That’s right, won — as in a contest. Ten years ago, getting a hard-to-come-by vanity call sign required a good deal more than a simple application.
After more than 15 years as N4SRT (a sweet CW call), I submitted multiple applications for the vanity callsign KY4Z. At the time, submitting multiple applications was a legal way to improve the odds that you would win the vanity call sign “lottery” that FCC played when more than one person applied for the same vanity call.
I had analyzed the practice nine ways to Sunday, and individuals who submitted multiple applications for a vanity callsign were successful in a very high percentage of cases. Naturally, the greater the number of total applicants, the lower the odds of success — but if one submitted enough applications it would still tilt the odds in your favor.
That was my plan, too — submit a suitcase full of vanity call sign applications and then see (the following day) who my competitors were. For whatever reason, there wasn’t a great many competitors for my call. In the 4th call district, 2×1 and 1×2 calls are rare as hen’s teeth, and every one that came available invariably because a race between applicants with multiple call signs.
At the time, in the event of multiple applications, the FCC randomly selected one from the total applicant pool. My odds of success were right at 90 percent, so I was pleased. I also had to pay for each of my multiple applications in order for them to be valid, so I had several hundred bucks tied up in the process. Once one application from a lucky applicant was accepted, the FCC would (if requested) issue refunds to the unsuccessful applicants. While the multiple application method tied up hundreds of dollars, it only did so for a couple of months. I still have the stack of FCC refund letters from the rest of my unsuccessful vanity applications.
The Vanity HQ website had a community of users on its forum who apparently considered themselves the “vanity call sign police” … they bitched, whined and moaned about those of us who (legally) used the tools afforded us to improve the odds we could get the vanity call we wanted (note that the majority of these call sign cops had already received their own vanity calls using whatever methods they chose). They complained about those of us who submitted multiple applications, and cheered when the guy submitting multiple applications wasn’t the random “winner” of the vanity call lottery drawing.
One of them even maintained a list of the “worst” offenders of the multiple application method (I proudly held a spot in the Top 10 for quite a while). And to their credit, it was the constant lobbying from this group of guys that eventually led the FCC to prohibit multiple vanity applications. The way it works now, each single application has the same weight in the random “lottery” that selects the winner. Ultimately that’s fair of course … but I would have been a fool to not take advantage of the tools to give me a competitive advantage for the call sign I wanted. Of course, one can ask the question, “Is it cheating to take advantage of an existing loophole?” My answer is “no.”
Anyway, my renewal for my ticket and vanity call were entered today via the FCC ULS, so I won’t need to worry about a call sign change for another decade. The real loss to the ham community and vanity calls is the closure of VanityHQ, which was the clearinghouse for information about the process. The message board was a great resource, while “my kind” were in their crosshairs at times, they did a great service by patiently answering people’s questions about obtaining a vanity call and the application process. They often pointed out vanity applications submitted with non-U.S. call signs — and at times, no valid U.S. callsigns listed … apparently a few people missed the call sign allocation table in the licensing manual, lol!
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