What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Recently I talked about making contacts on HF. Picking the band, the time of day, the right location on the band and looking for a nice loud station are part of the equation, but there are other considerations to be had. If you consider a station transmitting with 1.5 kilowatt on a 5 element Yagi and you're at home with your radio, you tune around and you find this station to be the loudest on the band, you're likely to try to talk to them. Sometimes this even works. However, many times, in fact, most of the time, this is pretty hard to do for a number of reasons. The first reason that this is hard is because their strength is a combination of lots of power and lots of antenna gain. If you transmit back, the only thing going for you is their antenna gain, but their power will likely distort your perception of how well they'll hear you. If you find a station that tells someone else that they're running high power, then make sure that their signal to you is banging the S-meter agains