What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Recently I was part of a discussion about emergency preparedness. The idea being that as radio amateurs we're ideally suited to being communication hubs and conduits to pass messages along. Of course as part of that we need to have skills and equipment to make those things possible. I've often said that doing contests are a great way to improve your radio skills. It's an adverse environment in which sending and receiving messages is related to your score and as a bonus, it's a great way to pick up some DX stations that are not yet in your log. There are other things that you can do as an amateur to improve your level of preparedness. I recently conducted an informal survey among a group of amateurs to see which repeaters they had programmed into their radios and which ones they'd actually used. Turns out, in our little group, two repeaters were being used, the rest, around 15 were sometimes programmed into radios, but hardly ever used. As part of improving our skills we want to mak