What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? I've participated in several contests since I became an Amateur. When I talk about contesting, I often hear the same response, "Contesting is not for me". In talking to some of those people, it's clear to me that often Contesting as an activity is not really understood. I'm not going to talk to you about how much fun it is, and it is, or how much you learn, because you do, or winning, because you can, I'm going to talk about the mechanics of contesting. At it's heart, contesting is nothing more and nothing less than making a contact between two stations and exchanging some information and getting points for the effort. How that precisely works depends entirely on the contest itself. On a typical contest, the exchange is the readability and signal strength, which in most contests is 59, followed by a serial number. So, the information exchanged might be 59001 for your first contact, 59002 for the second and so-on. The other station will supply their information as it relat