new thread
So, I am going to ask a question that shows how big of a nerd I really am.
Are there any Ham Radio operators on this board besides me? I don't often talk on anything besides 2meter because there is a huge collection of us Hams here in Louisiana and we talk constantly.......almost like this board does. We know everything about each other and feel as though we are one big family.
Reason I ask is because when I travel I always carry my rigs and try to make as many contacts as possible en route. And it would be nice to listen for people on this board when I'm in your area, or when i flip on the bigger rigs here at the house.
Peace
Clayton "kd5ozi"
Yup!
73,
Bill, K9AT
tech as of mid-December, working on General.
2-meters in NOLA seems awfully quiet...
-m
Am a Ham too...Mike, KD4ZMG. Got my license about 13 years ago. Technician Plus. Have always had trouble with code. Congratulations on your license...and your hair.
73,
Mike
I actually have had my license for almost 10 years, but thanks anyways!!!!!
73 clayton kd5ozi
Ham Radio?
I take it, Rome, from your question, that you don't know what it is. [grin]
When I was a teen, there was no Internet. If you wanted to get involved in electronic communication, all there was, was ham radio. You'd get a government license to transmit, a shortwave radio, and a large antenna, and you could talk to people all over the world. People today take the Internet for granted, but back then only the hams could do what we all do now - have friends all over the place. They did not have cell phones either - if you wanted to talk to people in your car you used ham radio.
I got my first computer in 1977. It came as bags of parts and it had to be put together. No one but hams had personal computers because they had several thousand solder connections in them, and only hams knew how to solder, or build something that complex. The first computer hobby club I joined had a blank along with your name, address, and phone, to put your ham radio callsign. All of us with personal computers were hams back then.
I wrote my own software for my computer. You had to. There was none available. This included an operating system. You couldn't go running to Microsoft. It didn't exist yet.
By the mid-1980s we had connected our computers to our radios and built a network, all connected by radio. Soon we were sending e-mails worldwide, at a time most people did not know what e-mails even were. We had what was San Francisco's first ISP in the room here where I now sit. We had it on battery backup, and right after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake it handled over 2300 e-mails while the city's regular communications were a shambles. All this happened over radio.
When the Internet came along for the masses in the mid-1990s, hams, who had owned computers for a long time and who had been doing e-mailing for a decade, moved onto the Internet in droves. I was among them. I hardly ever get on the ham radio anymore, and that is the case for a lot of hams. We often just see the Internet as a new ham band, one with huge bandwidth and that is "open" 24/7. (Radio bands are only "open" certain hours due to solar effects, and you have to plan your use to coincide with that.)
Hams such as myself bring a lot of the ham culture with us when we come to the Internet. For one thing, we are apt to see the Internet as a hobby, not as a utility like people see the cable TV company. Ham radio has deep traditions of helping newcomers, giving back to the hobby and community, and treating others with respect. Because hams' transmissions are receivable by anyone and they must be identified with a government-issued callsign, hams also tend to not be anonymous. Many hams regard the use of "handles" instead of their names to be "what Citizens' Banders do" and look down on the practice. (Citizens' Band is a very low powered service for talking to people nearby and gets you very little of what you can get with a ham license.)
When I got onto the Internet I soon ran into the Hyperboard, and when trolls were trying to drive it off the air, I did some ham things - I offered to Victor to dig into the software and to help. If hams are not happy with the way something works, they will dig inside of it and change it. I learned the language it was programmed in. We then made the Hyperboard be what we, OUR COMMUNITY, needed.
Hams are not perfect. Just as the Internet has "trolls", hams have had the same thing, but they call them "jammers". Having run that server in San Francisco for so long, and repeater systems for long before that, I had twenty years of experience already, providing electronic communications services for users, when the Internet came along. I knew two things - first, that the users own your system, not you, because without any users you might as well shut it off, and second, that jammers will take over and destroy any system that is wide open. Though they are few, a few rotten apples can ruin any barrel....
Today the MLHH is very much run like a ham club. The volunteers who run it are drawn from among its users. It is run as a non-commercial hobby. Those who run it are not anonymous. The philosophies behind its operation are ones that have worked for a hundred years. They come from ham radio.
Ham radio is part of our heritage. You will spot hams around the Internet sometimes by their mention of their callsigns, which usually are a bunch of letters but with one number. Many of them are no longer on the air, but they tend to take electronic communications very seriously, and they are driven to make their present home, the Internet, a better place.
Bill, K9AT
When the hurricanes struck Louisiana and New Orleans got wet, about a thousand of us hams got together and headed for N.O. Since everything was down, we were put to work. I rode around in a police cars for days relaying messages back to base where other hams received them, then switched over to another frequency to send the message to the appropriate recipient.
It was fun, exciting, scary, and most of all rewarding and emotional to be apart of what was a massive display of community. Strangers coming together armed only with hand-help radios, working together, efficiently, is and was a beautiful thing.
peace
clayton kd5ozi
KA7OIZ here...
--Rick
I am not a ham but was interested in it. However I dont know how to get licensed in Taiwan, if one is available. Back in the day I heard they banned short wave radio to prevent people from listening to broadcasts from mainland China.
I beleive Taiwan callsigns begin with the BV prefix. Even the mainland Chinese have ham radio, with calls beginning with BY, or BZ if it is a club. Surely it is possible now for you to get a shortwave radio to listen to them?
Hi Clayton!Its been awhile since I have heard Ham Radio or Amature Radio as its also been called mentioned.I never became one but it was big in my family as my brother,father,grandfather,and uncle were all hams!I remember all those big old rigs they used to have with the vacuum tubes and all!LOL. Also the elaborate antenna systems they set up at home for the base station.And all those funky brand names like Yeasu,Swan,Hallacrafters,etc.The morse code used to bug me out!LOL.Anyway most of my elders passed on and I actually have some of the remnants of their stations up in the attic.My brother though is the last remaining ham but he hasn't been too active with it lately.So thanks for bringing back some memories Clayton and NO you are not a nerd!!!!!LOL.Mark
I've always wanted to get my ham radio liscense.
But i'm allergic to morse code. Never could get the
hang of it.
Morse code is no longer required in the U.S. This is also likely the case elsewhere. If you've always wanted to go for it, now is the time!
Bill
The morse code test was abolished internationally in July 2003. Some countries implemented that within weeks - the US took until February 2007! Some snails move faster than that.
yer not a nerd. or maybe you are but so what. lots of longhairs are geeks. what about the luxurious long flowing hair club for scientists (see link below and scroll down)? Anyway, I'm not active above 15 meters but it's a great hobby so don't give up on it.
I already replied to a couple of the replies, but now I will introduce myself properly. I am currently licenced as a ham both in the UK, where I originally come from, as G8VUK, and in the US where I now live, as N3KIP. My UK licence is 'Full' and my US licence is 'Extra', which are the highest grades of licence in each country respectively.
I also have a degree in EE, so passing the theory tests was never much of a problem. The problem I had was with the Morse code, but as mentionned in other posts, that's no longer required.
Morse testing was introduced by the ITU (the International Telecommunications Union, at least that's it's modern name) in 1927 and abolished by them in 2003, although they relaxed this rule to allow UHF without a Morse test in 1947, and gradually relaxed it further over the years so that by 1979 it was only shortwave that you needed a Morse test for.
The USA, on the other hand, required Morse testing at least as long ago as 1916, i.e. at least nine years before it became an international requirement, and didn't kill it until this February, nearly four years after they could have. Not only that, but they didn't introduce a 'no-code' licence, allowing use of the higher frequencies without Morse testing, until 1992, whereas the first country to do so was Australia, back in 1952, a whopping 40 years earlier!
The FCC (the US regulating body) had originally proposed a no-code licence in 1971, but that was successfully blocked by the ARRL (the US ham organisation), and yes, I do have that the right way around, it was existing hams that blocked it, not the government.
As you can see, to say that the USA was a stick-in-the-mud on this issue is a massive understatement. OTOH, the US did have quite possibly the easiest Morse tests in the world, allowing for quite some time a multi-choice comprehension test. It's all water under the bridge now, though.
My own country, the UK, reacted back in 1927 to the, then new, Morse test requirement by creating two paths to a licence, one requiring a Morse test, and the other requiring six months practice transmitting into a 'dummy load' instead of an aerial! The dummy load wasn't supposed to radiate, but some of these people made contacts using them anyway!!! Sadly, this laughable alternative route didn't survive WW2, but a 'no-code' licence without shortwave privileges appeared in 1963, and the Morse test (as such) dissapeared within three months after the ITU rule change in 2003.
However, all new hams in the UK now have to pass a 'Morse code appreciation' where a single letter is sent at a time and they can look each one up on a chart provided before going on to the next letter. This is reportedly impossible to actually fail (?).
I am finding that local ham activity on VHF and UHF is drying up. It's almost necessary now to go onto shortwave (or HF as hams call it) to find anyone to talk to. There's no doubt that the Internet and cellphones have reduced the appeal of the hobby to many people. Mind you, people who used it instead of a cell phone were not usually really into it as a hobby.
73 de Alun, G8VUK, N3KIP, aka Elektros
(In ham jargon 73 means Best Wishes, and de means from, just as it does in many actual languages)
Code, those were the days. Im saying this and im only 21!!! My grandfather started working on code with me when I was 4 and to this day I haven't stopped. It got to the point where I began to hear whole words instead of individual letters. But as you said, the waves are drying up, but there are still a few of us around.
As far as cell phones go, I don't use mine. I still call up the "patch" on my 2 meter to call home when stuck in traffic!!!
peace
clayton
So, only three of us so far:-
Clayton KD5OZI
Bill K9AT
Elektros (Alun) N3KIP (also G8VUK)
Some of my local ham friends, including Rick, KK4GV, and Gary, N3SJL, have long hair, but they don't hang out on the board.
Add Rob, and Rick KA7OIZ, who have posted to this thread. I also know that "Sugarcane" in the users' directory has a ham ticket. I've seen him at ham clubs off and on for twenty years.
Bill
And now add Mr. Coffee KE5LRQ and Mike KD4ZMG. That makes eight of us. Before long we're going to have an MLHH amateur radio club!
Bill
Or an MLHH net, perhaps!
Anyone care to suggest a time and frequency?
N3KIP
We have four Extras and four Techs. Nothing else. To all chat it's going to be slow Morse code.
The MLHH chat room perhaps???? [g]
Bill
Hi
This Ham Radio is it simaliar to C B Radio on Sideband is that what we called it I not on about AM & FM bands either
Axel
CB stands for
"Citizen Band" and requires no license. To be a "HAM" one must complete a series of tests to earn the right to use certain frequencies.
peace
clayton
And there are a lot more frequencies. CB is one band around 27 MHz, whereas hams have several shortwave (HF) bands ranging between 1.8 and 28 MHz, plus various VHF, UHF and microwave bands. If we want to catch the skip we can switch between the different HF bands to one where there is skip at that time to where we want to go, instead of sitting in one place waiting for it to come to us, and if we want to talk to locals we can move up to VHF or UHF for a quiet chat without background noise.
And we can use different types of transmission. Sideband for skip, FM for local stations, plus Morse code, AM, digital and even television if we have a mind to.
We also have repeaters to extend range for local FM use, and even satellites orbiting the earth that can relay our sideband and Morse signals around the world.
We can also use a burner to increase our power, _legally_. CB power limits vary from 0.5 to 4 W for AM (and FM where its allowed) and usually 12 W for sideband in countries that allow it, and burners (amplifiers) are specifically banned in several countries. Ham power limits, for the highest class of licence, are (giving some examples in descending order) 2,250 W in Canada, 1,500 W in the US, 800 W in Spain, 500 W in France, 400 W in the UK, several hundreds of watts in most places, and at least 100 W everywhere that I know of, with no amplifier bans anywhere (although in some places there are restrictions on amplifiers for 28 MHz, because it is close to CB frequencies).
CBers in the US can't _legally_ talk to anyone more than 150 miles away (though that doesn't seem to stop anyone, LOL!), and in some other countries CBers have limits on what type of antenna they can use, but these restrictions don't apply to hams. We can talk as far away as we can get, and the only limits on our antennas are building restrictions, not part of the radio rules.
Any questions?