Thanks for the comments – as usual, it’s a balancing act. Reviewing some of the recordings we took, I reckon about 30% of my TX time was spent saying my own callsign (such is life with a long reciprocal call!). In the vast majority of cases, it was phonetic; sometimes dropping to non-phonetic for alternate QSOs during the busiest pile-ups.

I’ve worked DX in the past where there’s been one ident every ten minutes if you were lucky, and we were very conscious not to let this be the case for us as we’re aware how infuriating it can be.

However, the reverse is that if we had a huge pile of stations waiting to work us, we wanted to give as many as possible the opportunity to do so – and since the vast majority did manage to copy the call, I hope we got things about right.

Sorry if it was a little quick for you; I have no problems at all slowing down for someone if they need me too, but in at least a lot of cases, it came accross more like it was people discovering a pile-up and rushing to work it without stopping to listen, or appreciate that others were waiting to work us as well.

Definitely noted on the speed during the quieter times, though – we’ll bear that in mind.

73,
Rob, M0VFC