On Apr 2, 10:21�am, Paul W. Schleck " wrote:
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In . com "AF6AY" writes:

*[...]

* Curiously, there has been a growth of Club licenses
* granted in the last year. *I would have thought that Club
* licenses were relatively static since the overall licensee
* totals showed little growth or decline in numbers?
* 73, Len *AF6AY

I agree that this is a very non-intuitive result at first glance. *One
reasonable explanation would appear to be that there was a lot of
pent-up demand for club licenses from over the relatively long period of
time during which they were not issued, which was from at least 1978 to
1995. *The official FCC answer on the subject of club and special (i.e.,
"Vanity") callsigns during that time was that it was too much of an
administrative burden to grant them. *The FCC was also using a
relatively inflexible, legacy Honeywell system to track and issue
amateur radio licenses. *Those that held licenses during that time,
licenses that were impact-printed on smudgy carbon "burst" forms, might
note that they were only issued one day a week (Thursday, I believe).
Existing club licenses could be renewed, but if they expired and passed
out of their grace period without renewal, they could not be reissued.
I understand that the grandfathered club licenses were tracked by the
FCC manually in an index card catalog.

The period between 1995 and 2007 is twelve years.

In that interim there have been a number of abuses of the Vanity
callsign system, most notably by Roy Tucker of southern
California who once had the Tucker family holding 41 callsigns,
all at the same street-city address. That is now down to a mere
twenty or so. :-)

History of the Vanity callsign system noted, the FCC now has a
nice page on its website for applications of Vanity callsigns as
well
as renewals and other administrative changes. The FCC will
immediately accept and process credit card fees for a Vanity
call ($20.80) through another govenment agency link but they
also explain that "it may take weeks to fully process [them]."

73, Len AF6AY