The radio amateur who felt compelled to abandon his own call sign

If you mention that you are a radio amateur to any Norwegian who was old enough to watch TV in the mid 70's then he is bound to respond with LA8PV. This was the callsign of the fictious figure Marve Fleksnes in the comedy the "Radiot". To bad for the poor guy who actually was given that callsign some years later. I had contact with him on CW (= morse) in 2002 just after I got my license and I just couldn't believe that anybody actually was using that particular callsign.

It was in 1976 that Rolv Wesenlund (1936 - 2013) one of Norway's most popular comedians, played Marve Fleksnes. As radio amateur LA8PV he talks with his friend JA1NQ in Japan. He also speaks with TF3XU on Iceland in a mixed Icelandic/Norwegian dialect which is always a hit with a Norwegian audience. He then converses with Norwegian/American WONBF (no zero) in Minnesota. He has to handle his angry neighbor who suffers from interference (RFI) and finally LA8PV gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he hears the emergency call, Mayday, in the 15 meter band.

Why do Norwegian callsigns end in A?

Well actually not all end in A, but almost all of the recent ones do. Amateur callsigns in Norway are not so well documented on the web, so here is a short explanation.

Norwegian callsigns are used in these territories:

• LA-LN for use in mainland Norway
• JW is used on Svalbard and close-by islands Hopen and Bjørnøya
• JX is used on Jan Mayen
• 3Y is used on Bouvet Island, Peter I Island, and in Antarctica (Queen Maud Land)

Depending on where I go, my callsign may be LA3ZA, JW3ZA, JX3ZA, or 3Y3ZA. We don't have districts so the number does not mean anything, except for 0. Callsigns with 0 are were reserved for non-Norwegian citizens, but this has stopped so LA0 callsigns are no longer issued.

Usually the callsign starts with LA, but why do so many of the LA callsigns end in A?

Nostalgia from LA3ZA in 1949

I wasn't even born when this LA3ZA QSL-card was issued in 1949. This is because I am second generation LA3ZA after my father. When the callsign was reissued to me in 2001 it had been inactive for 40 years or so.

I still have the Hallicrafters S40A receiver which my father used with a 2 W input homemade tube transmitter. The S40A (image below) was what introduced me to shortwave listening during the good conditions of the solar peak in the late sixties, despite its mediocre performance I would say.

A history lesson from call signs

World empires and colonies in 1914, also at
the time of the 1. Int. Radiotelegraphic Convention.
Source Wikipedia Commons, user Andrew0921

There's a lot of history to read out from amateur radio call signs. Being interested in history as well as amateur radio I found that for some countries you can actually figure out which time period it got independence just by looking at the prefixes of the call sign. But on the other hand the history of the international conferences and the call sign allocations is as complex as politics can be so this short blog post can only scratch the surface of this complicated topic.

I have always been envious of those radio amateurs who have a call sign starting with a letter that reflects their country's name. This seems to be the privilege of big and powerful nations, or countries that were just lucky in having names that didn't overlap too much with those of other nations. Among the 1913 call signs one can find: