What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? If you're into contesting, you're likely to have heard of a thing called the Super Check Partial list and if you haven't then you should. It's a simple thing, maintained by Stu, K6TU, it contains a rolling list of the callsigns of all the stations that appeared in a minimum of 6 contest logs as a worked station over the past two years. This means several things. First of all, it means that you need to make contacts. Then each of your contacts needs to submit their log and it has to happen on a regular basis. If all that works, you end up with a text file that has some 43000 callsigns in it. This is a useful tool if you have logging software that can use the list to do partial matches on callsigns. If your callsign is only partially heard, lets say the other station only hears the LAB out of the whole call, VK6FLAB, it might return two or three hits and that might be enough to narrow down your whole callsign. So, instead of the backwards and forwards of exchanging letters, the oth