Reserve for the "foreign" commuter
FlyA380
I fly Long Haul for BA and live on the continent so I have a little experience of the "commuting" problem vs Reserve.
Your 28 days of reserve start with 7 fixed days off, after that you are in the hands of the Company for 21 days. You are now "contactable" by telephone for a couple of hours every evening ( I don't have the rules to hand but 1800 UK time to 2000 UK time rings a bell - pun intended) and you can be assigned a duty the next morning - early, either a trip or Home standby ( the "2 hours to report" sketch).....
Practical problems for the long distance commuter should be obvious - if you are assigned a duty early in the AM ( perhaps being told at 8pm you have an 8 AM report), can you get to LHR in time? Home standbys can run from 6AM - can you be in position to report in 2 hours by that time?
On the subject of the 2 hours to Report sceanario - you can and will get called on the dot of two hours, it's happened to me on several occasions and a lot of the BA guys who commute decent distances by road even have been known to sit in their car, at a motorway services, mobile phone in hand so that they are "legal"...
SO.......somebody asked "please tell me I don't have to sit out reserve duties at LHR" well, if your commuting airline doesn't have any late night flights the answer I'm afraid is, in extremis, "yes".
When I do reserve I usually talk to our ops people and ask to be worked to death, ask to do trips if possible rather than standby, volunteer to do "back to back" trips, so you spend just one night at LHR between trips. I aim to work flat out, as far as legally possible, so that I discharge my obligation to do 80 hours of credit in the 21 days ASAP......