What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? One of the innocuous questions you are asked during a contact is: "What is your QTH?" or: "Where are you?". Often this is followed by a whole story about a goat track and so many kilometres away from some large land-mark. If you're dealing with an experienced operator, they'll simplify that to something like: 10km North East of Tokyo. Often that's more than accurate enough, but how do you communicate a more accurate location? In this age of GPS, we've all come to know that you can express any location on earth with two numbers, a latitude and a longitude. For example, the main 2m repeater in Perth, VK6RAP is located at 32 degrees, 6 minutes and 4 seconds South, 116 degrees, 3 minutes East, or digitally, -32.100054,116.051551. That's a right royal mouthful. We could improve on that by using a different system of indicating a location. We could use something called a maidenhead locator. For VK6RAP, the locator grid square is OF87av. I'll say that again, OF87av. Th