The (temporary) return of M0VKG

It’s been almost two years since I got my Canadian amateur radio licence, but before then I was licensed in the UK as M0VKG. When I first moved to Canada in July 2012 I operated for a while as M0VKG/VE7, but since then – other than a visit back to the motherland in February of this year – my UK callsign has been mostly dormant.

Mostly.

International agreements can be complicated affairs, and amateur radio doesn’t escape this fact. The CEPT agreement is probably the biggest, and generally allows an amateur radio operator from one country to operate temporarily in another country, and in some cases actually acquire a licence in the other country based on their existing one.

Another agreement, which is much closer to home, is that between Canada and the US, which allows most amateur radio operators of both countries to operate in both countries. I say most, because the agreement states that it applies to citizens of both countries. This means that technically, if you aren’t either a Canadian or a US citizen, you’re not covered by the agreement. As a British citizen, this means it doesn’t cover me!

I recently had my application for permanent residency in Canada approved, which meant – for boring immigration reasons I won’t go into – that I had to leave the country and reenter again. From here, that means the easiest way is to drive to the US border, which is what I did. However, as explained above, I can’t legally operate as VE7CXZ in the US, so I had to fall back on M0VKG. Luckily, the Kenwood TM-D710 has a features which lets you store different ‘profiles’ in the radio, while sharing the same channel memories. This means that I was able to set up a profile on the TM-D710 that instead of using my usual callsign and SSID of VE7CXZ-1, I could quickly switch to using M0VKG-9 at – literally – the touch of a button.

Which, to wrap it all up, explains the reason for this map:-