Yuk!

I don't know what but on the spur of the moment I typed Erbas's call sign into Google ...

Oh, I probably ought to start out by explaining what the call sign is for those of a non-nautical or non-HAM radio persuasion. Nearly* every radio station in the world has a totally unique call sign composed of letters and numbers. Older call signs were usually four characters, at least for maritime stations anyway, but they ran out years ago and now they're five characters.

(This, by the way, is the origin of those classic American radio stations such as "this is W-O-K-Y, the official Elvis station" etc. I made that one up by the way but you know what I mean! US law requires, or perhaps required, all US radio broadcasters to broadcast their official call sign regularly)

* I'm not sure whether this still applies to the big broadcasters in the UK and Europe. Certainly they used to have a call sign assigned - the first precursor to the BBC was a station called 2MT followed by another called 2LO, but things have moved on a bit since then!

Anyway, to get back on track, our call sign is an older four character one "2JDA" or Two Juliet Delta Alpha in phonetics. All well and good but typing it into Google I discovered that "2JDA" is apparently the designation of a "novel periplasmic polygalacturonic acid binding protein" (whatever the hell one of those is!" from the Yersinia enterolitica bacterium.

That didn't sound good! (My historical antenna started twitching for one thing, some sort of Yersinia baceria was, if my memory serves, otherwise known as the Black Death - cue horror music, pause for effect ......)

This one isn't quite that bad but if you get it you'll definitely become very familiar with every knothole on the back of the privy door (that's one for the Pratchett fans - for the philistines it means you'll be spending a lot of time in the smallest room)

I'm never going to feel quite the same about our call sign ever again

Happily, these days we can always be bang up to date and use the modern digital equivalent. The truly unmemorable 9 digits of our MMSI number 235077379

What's an MMSI number I hear you ask? It's effectively our VHF radio telephone number

I am utterly utterly hopeless at remembering telephone numbers!

Oh and all of this was sparked by the arrival of our lovely new calling cards ...

These will be handed out to anyone who needs or wants to know our email or blog address

I reckon a hundred of them should last a couple of decades then!