Any hams around?
So, I am far from the most experienced, or the most knowledgeable, or the most active amateur radio operator out there, but it is something that has piqued my interest none the less. Before I got into the hobby, I always assumed that the FCC just game amateurs a small bucket of useless spectrum and that was it. Maybe you could fly an RC plane, but surely that is about as cool as it gets.
It turns out I was dead wrong. Amateurs are allocated bands all across the RF spectrum - more or less. Bands from way below the AM broadcast frequency to way above the microwave frequencies used by our cell phones and wireless routers. Also, you are allowed to legally transmit at up to 1.5 kilowatts of power! That's 3,000 times as much power as your average walkie talkie! :) Also, importantly, the license exam only costs $15.
At many of the lower frequencies, the signals bounce off the ionosphere and you can make contact with people all over the world (propagation gods permitting). At the higher frequencies, you lose that "skip propagation," but more bandwidth is available. There are analog voice repeater networks, digital packet networks, mesh networks running on modified commercial WiFi gear, and even a handful of old school packet BBSes. There are some LEO satellites which run voice repeaters which allow you make international contacts, and sometimes even the International Space Station will participate in events. Lots of cool stuff going on. This hobby is kind of a bottomless rabbit hole of possibilities.
I got my technician license about a year ago, and I have been most interested in the data networking end of the hobby. Despite being a pile of hacks, APRS is still very cool, and sometime soon I hope to set up an AREDN node of my own. Every once in a while I'll call into the local repeaters and shoot the breeze.
So there's my story. Are there any other hams out there?
I'm a total newbie and I am taking the exam this weekend! Very excited about it. Thanks for posting this, I learned a few things and now am even more excited than I was.
Good luck! If you are in the US and are going to your Technician class license test remember that you can take the General and Extra class license tests in a row for no extra charge (and no penalty if you fail!). You might surprise yourself and end up leaving with a higher license than you studied for!
Hey!
I have completed my ham certifiction about half a year ago, so I'm still quite fresh one. I only have one Kenwood and one Standard portable stations (5W both) and 75cm/2m dipole on my roof. I have the highest possible license, except the CW part. I still have to get on to that. I hope to get enough motivation soon.
Hope to meet you on the bands,
73
Yep! I have a US Technician class license although I'm still very inexperienced in it. Right now I just have a Baofeng UV-5R and haven't managed to make any contacts with it yet. At some point I need to study and get my Extra class and I might commit some more time and money towards it.
Part of my problem is I don't really know what to talk to people over the air about? I'm far from the typical demographic involved in amateur radio (millennial, female, leftist, and queer) and I've dealt with sexual harassment in the past from an amateur radio operator when I was first trying to get my license. So I'm a little nervous about talking to people.
I'd love to contact NA1SS and maybe tinker around with packet radio and such.
Being a millennial and a lefty, I'm half way towards sort of knowing where you're coming from - though the abuse kind of takes it to another level. I'm sorry about that. :| In my experience, most of the conversations I hear on the local repeaters are just small cliques of boomers that I have little interest in joining myself. I mean, I could either open the current events can of worms with a bunch of older strangers (oh god no), talk about the weather (sigh), or I could be one of those people who gets on the radio to talk about their radio. That said, I live relatively close to NYC, and we have dozens of repeaters around here.
There are a couple which stand out. One of them has a slightly younger regular crowd (I mean, I guess we're talking 40-50 year old dudes instead of 70 year old dudes) but they are a bunch of night owls, and a much more approachable group in general. Then there is another that has a weekly net where a bunch of retired aerospace engineers discuss the most absurd scenarios you could imagine - like, what the mode of failure would be for an astronaut re-entering the atmosphere in a space suit. I haven't joined that one yet, but I should butt my head in there one of these weeks. Either way, it is an absolute joy to listen to those guys rattle off back and forth.
But yeah. While I listen to the repeaters, I rarely participate. Most of the time I don't feel like I have much to contribute. I usually only chime in if someone begins talking about something that really interests me.
Most of the time I'm either snooping on the cops/fire department, or fooling around with my FT-857D and seeing what DX stations and shortwave broadcasts I can pull in on the HF bands. As a tech licensee, I can't talk to them yet, but seeing what distant stations I can pull in using a homebrew wire dipole in my attic has been an absolute joy. As soon as you think you've seen everything, you will be surprised. I have heard stations calling in from Germany and Italy that sounded clearer than local broadcasts. I even picked up a station from Australia once! I have picked up shortwave broadcasts from France, Albania, Brazil, Cuba, Russia, China, and a few others.
HF in general seems to be much more formalized. Quick contacts, optional short discussions about station setups and background. Most HF operators are more interested in growing their logbooks than commiserating about politics. It doesn't have the entrenched cliquey atmosphere and lax operating standards that a lot of local repeaters do - though I assure you there are still weirdos.
Just found this thread by searching. Man, I'm jealous of your repeater scene! I'm at college in central Illinois, and as you can probably imagine, despite it being a very large campus, the repeaters are 90% older gentlemen from the surrounding rural areas. I can see one of the antennas from my bedroom window as I type this, but it's almost totally dead. I've had one unplanned contact on it, and it's been in my scan list every evening for weeks.
I'm hoping I can convince my two ham friends on campus to form a miniature midnight net with me, and maybe we can find some other younger people to join us. That said, I've dipped my toes in a few conversations on the repeaters with the older folk around here.
I am very interested in this and hope to join the hobby when I have more free time. I'm extremely interested in the idea of creating alternative computer networks over ham frequencies. I was reading the /r/amauterradio and saw a reference to this:
So I plan to look into that some more :)
Packet radio is a thing! It's part of how I got interested in ham in the first place. Definitely excited about diving deeper into it.
Oh that's hot. I LIKE that!
I'm really excited about the work this guy is doing.
Phenomenal. Thank you!
I've been wanting to take the plunge, just haven't bothered to track down a place to test or any study materials. I wondered if I could pass without studying anything, I used radios in the military so I am not completely clueless about their operation, but I am not sure what to expect on the actual test and would hate to waste the money. In my little bit of research online I read that there are still many who use Morse, and that it will transmit/receive over a much greater distance than voice transmission. Might be worth learning just to have conversations, don't guess there would be much political discourse if you had to bang it out in Morse.
Found this thread by searching, so I know this is a bit old, but hamstudy.org! I swear by it. Used it to pass my Technician and General in one sitting, though many people have done all three.
My dad and I got our licenses back in, oh, 2002, I think. I let mine lapse because it wasn't really my thing, but my dad still has his.
General here. I got into things a few years ago, mostly on UHF/VHF with a Baofeng HT, but my interest has waned a fair bit. I much prefer using SDR stuff and decoding digital data signals to talking with the old folks on the local repeaters over voice.
I recently built a uBitX so I could try and work HF, but my antenna broke last fall and I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet now that things are warming up. My eventual goal is to figure out JT8 and see what I can hit with 5W and a dipole.
Yes! My first post on Tildes. I took the three US exams in 2013, and have been mostly wandering around the 10m band. I got my VE cert through ARRL, but don't really proctor exams any more. Now I'm more about D-STAR (IC-7100 and ID-51a). I got into it a bit more last year due to joining our local ACS. SSTV broadcasts from the ISS are a great way to get hooked on SSTV/data transmission via radio!
I really want to get a license here in NZ. But I lack motivation to study up on the requirements for the exam, and life...gets in the way.