Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country? I am VE3HWO. I hold a basic with honours and advanced qualifications in Canada. Hoping to connect with other hams on HN. 73 |
Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country? I am VE3HWO. I hold a basic with honours and advanced qualifications in Canada. Hoping to connect with other hams on HN. 73 |
https://www.k0tfu.org/repeater-systems/intermountain-interti...
We now have 3 classes, I hold the "highest" class, A, but I'd still suck on the air, mostly because I'm almost never on the air.
—73
It's taken nearly 30 years, from buying the study guide in high school to finally sitting the test in my 40s. But glad I finally got it done.
I got into it recently mainly to play with digital modes on HF for emergency comms and also because it’s an interesting and unexplored field for me.
Poll would be better for that :p
Jump between intermediate and full is more challenging, but IMO intermediate is well worth it (with minimal effort).
Go for it.
Please explain. Surely one simply opts out of having ones address published in your countries call book?
https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/searchLicense.jsp
Not going to dox myself here putting my callsign in a post.
I don't know if there are others like me.
EDIT: Glad to see that there are others around. Happy to meet you. Async acks are great. So is the joy of engaging with something intellectually challenging.
edit: I know there are ragchews all the time, but it's still mostly about equipment.
That's one reason I love New York so much.
However my pace is much slower. I take my time.
On the technical side, the added attraction is to do some homebrewed amateur radio astronomy.
I like building kits, QRP, CW, and building my own antennas. I only make contact with other people to be able to improve my skills and validate my gear.
My father has been licensed for nearly 50 years, he loves the technical side of the hobby, I've made more contacts over the last 2 years than he has in 15 years. There are others like you.
Oliver, M7OCL
(Also, HF antennas - just didn’t anticipate how difficult they were to set up properly)
Not only am I pursuing this because I want long-range emergency comms in case cell networks go down (like what happened with Verizon recently), but also because I see a very notable contraction on what communication is allowed to be done on the internet, especially in the last year. Censorial regimes around the world seem to be accelerating and I don't want to be cut off from communications because I am not of an "accepted" identity.
And yes, I'm aware that states police the amateur airwaves too. But I see it more like how getting a driver's license doesn't mean I can't flee a country with my car... Learning to drive, or operate a radio, is still a valuable skill to learn and practice.
Stupid question, do search and rescue services even have equipment that can tune into HAM frequencies, are they even listening on those frequencies, and do they regularly train on communicating with the HAM community?
I'm sure there are more established ways of radioing for help in the maritime world(Aviation has the guard frequency)
EPIRB and other emergency beacons still use HF radio frequencies (not HAM of course) and countries like the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and others I'm sure are monitoring those signals. But even then, they will first and foremost look to the seafaring community to actually render assistance, and that kind of call to action does often make its way through HAM radio nets, though I'm not sure exactly how, e.g., the U.S. Coast Guard makes that first outreach as the rescue coordinator.
I did it online thru the New York Radio Club (?).
I did Novice then General in about 30 minutes. I studied for maybe 6 hours immediately prior.
I grew up from age 5 in my Dads ham shack in NZ - every single thing he had made, transmitters, receivers, antennas, the feed wire, oscilloscope, signal gens, grid dip oscillator etc with many parts salvaged. In NZ in those days that is how most people did it, at least partially.
I also have an Electrical Engineering degree.
So sort of had a bit of background working knowledge, which meant I wasn't starting from scratch.
KK7RBX
There was a short burst of activity shortly after introduction, probably a decade ago by now. Would be interesting to plot how many per week^W year make it to the front page or get more than a dozen votes
Experience of Canadian ham scene though is it's almost all just buying/selling equipment, to the point some channels were occupied by automated announcements of what people were buying and selling. APRS is fairly well used though, and by far the best way to find what is in the local area.
For better or worse the more dynamic and technically interesting stuff now seems to be with SDR and Meshtastic/Meshcore. Even the people with envy inspiring antenna arrays are mainly on the mesh stuff.
I have mostly worked HF phone, but in latter years I've (finally!) become reasonably proficient in CW, too.
I enjoy the technical aspects of the hobby, being a radio frequency engineer - but also enjoy chatting to others, particularly to improve my language skills - Portuguese and Brazilian hams are an absolute delight and quite patient as I try to make myself understood in Portuguese!
Oh, and chasing the occasional award - but I am not very good at sending in the paperwork, so I guess I had better do that soon and get some paperwork for my shack. I have a particular soft spot for the RSGB IOTA program, as I live on one - EU-079 - myself.
I hope to be QRV from home again before long, though - I live on a farm, have lots of room, and I have a small mast and an almost finished wire beam in the barn, so with any luck I'll be able to put it all together and have a working station again sometime this spring!
For people who don't use radio for communication (chat), what do you do? I guess it's useful as an emergency measure, but I could simply purchase an ordianry radio or use my car's, not a ham radio.
https://www.dx-world.net/the-ham-radio-operation-that-made-h...
I had two atypical goals with it:
- If I could present a certificate that says "the Government admits that I know something about how RF operates" maybe my irritating brother would acknowledge me when I tried to explain that Wi-Fi multipath concerns no longer apply when we plugged his machine into a hard-wired Ethernet socket.
- Being able to brandish "the FCC allows me to build a 200-metre antenna tower in the backyard" as a counterargument when the local HOA hassles me about the weeds that apparently have evolved beyond vulnerability to the stuff they sell at the local home centre.
It feels very "bifurcated" as a hobby -- you either do 2m/70cm stuff with little $100 handhelds, or you start doing outright construction projects to deal with antenna sizes, and spending four figures to explore HF.
The LMR license is more useful to me than my amateur license - I can just hand my friends my pile of cache radios and get yapping at an event. As a plus, we can run encryption and other fun things on the LMR license (within the bounds of our emissions) like APCO P25 (Project25) data transmissions.
Getting my general and maybe extra are goals for the year. Want to get on HF before the sun cycle starts winding down
73!
Sold Yaesu portable unit at the height of COVID after some fun with it. Still mess with the HTs sometimes but looking for an opportunity (time wise) to get back into it.
I'm part of a code club at the local school, and would love to show them radio too, spark that curiosity and imagination. I think it'll be out of scope for this year though.
5 and 5, 73.
My callsign is a 2x1 call.
It really is baffling they are so stuck on having full address available to the world. City/state, zip code, Maidenhead locator squares, or a number of other options would be more than enough to place one into a local area without an exact address listed publicly. Until that happens, I definitely will continue to refrain from mentioning it on any online accounts to help keep all the data miners a little more at bay.
I know American data protection law is pretty poor, but that really is shocking; such data should not be made public without the users explicit opt-in consent.
In fact, several of the questions on the ham test involve the fact that you can look up operator info online.
The ham registration is the same. Before you can take the test to get licensed, you have to go to the FCC website and enter your information into their public database. It’s clear what you’re doing, you have to actively choose to do it, and it’s the direct outcome of the action you take.