HAMs

[Tyler]

Anyone here a HAM?
I'm taking my technicians license exam this month and I was wondering if there were any chiffers into it as well.
As in radio, not honey baked pig!

[missy]

as we've talked before, I'm the daughter of a ham. I know many dulcimer players that are, too.

Good luck on your test!

[s1m0n]

Just the other day I was wondering whether the internet had killed off much of the interest in HAMs.

[Alan]

I procrastinated a long while before getting my ham ticket in 1979.

Unfortunately I have not been active lately due to antenna limitations at my present residence.

Good luck with the exam!

[Doug_Tipple]

When I was in high school in the late 50's, I passed the Novice test and became a ham radio operator in my bedroom, which I shared with two other brothers. I built a Heathkit DX-20 transmitter, and I started out at 50 watts CW (code). I only had a few crystals that controlled my frequency, so I didn't move around much on the 80 meter band. My home spot was 3710 hertz. With a long wire dipole antenna, I was able to get out pretty good to a two or three state radius. In my junior year of high school I passed the general class ham test, but because of my living situation, I still operated only code at the same frequency. My call letters were K9TAE. When I attended college, I became interested in other things, and I never went back to wanting to continue as a amateur radio operator. I do have some good memories though. We had a civil defense tower in my little town in Indiana. We were seriously looking for Russian military aircraft, but I never did see one. We had little transceivers called Gooney Boxes, which operated on 8 meters. They didn't get out very far, but they were a lot of fun.

[brianc]

My neighbor is a big-time HAMmer.

After our baby was born, it was pretty freaky hearing his radio calls and conversations on the baby monitor. (we hadn't realized anyone nearby us was into the HAM radios, until that day). For weeks after that first time we heard the call letters going out, we'd still jump out of our chairs upon hearing, "whiskey seven lima zero, C Q , C Q, CQ....OVER."



Good luck with your test. Just remember anyone near to you that has a baby may well be listening.

[Doug_Tipple]

My father enjoyed talking on his citizen band radio for many years. He had a large beam antenna and a ground wave atop a high tower, so when the skip was right, he could talk all over the country and sometimes internationally. He had a very nice ham Kenwood transceiver that he was using for citizen band (off-band usually) with much more than the usual citizen band power. I think that my father's biggest complaint was that it was difficult to find someone interesting to talk to. My dad wanted to talk about things that he had been reading in his science magazines, and most people were not able or didn't want to talk about things that interested him. That is one of the things that I appreciate about the internet; you are able to be selective. If you want to discuss flutes, you can go to the flute forum. On amateur radio if you put out a general CQ (I want to talk), you are opening yourself to anyone who happens to be able to hear you. They might want to talk about baseball. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't want to hear it.

[fearfaoin]

Just the other day I was wondering whether the internet had killed off much of the interest in HAMs.

I dunno, I know guys who got their liscense just to play with Packet
Radio (precursor to 802.11 Wireless internet). My college, NCSU,
still has a HAM club in the Elec. Engineering building.

[rebl_rn]

I'm not a HAM myself, but I have a great appreciation for them. In our emergency preparedness training, HAM operators are a very important element for communications when things like phone lines, internet, wireless lines, etc go down. There are a couple of volunteer orgs of HAM operators that are for helping out in such emergencies. We're supposed to be getting the equipment installed at work so we have HAM communications when all else fails (just bring in an operator). I hope we never have to use them, but it's nice to know the HAMs are out there!

[Darwin]

I got my novice license back in '82 or so, but never did get around to getting a radio setup. About the only result was that I programmed my computer to convert text into Morse code.

I decided that I just wasn't that interested in talking to a bunch of strangers--and here I am on C&F, conversing with some of the strangest strangers on Earth!

[Mitch]

Oh Nooooo!! I can just see this thread deteriorating into dahdahdah dahdahdah ditdahdahdit ditditdit - dah dahdahdah dahdahdah
ditdahditdit ditdah dah dit !!!

[Tony]

Anyone here a HAM?
I'm taking my technicians license exam this month and I was wondering if there were any chiffers into it as well.
As in radio, not honey baked pig!

Yeah. Years ago.
I used to fly radio controlled model helicopters and many times when flying at a public (club) site the normal general (no license) frequencies were tied up, so a few friends and I decided to get a technician class license to operate private frequencies on 6 meters. I'm also coordinated (assigned my own frequency pair) to operate a UHF repeater in my area. It has an auto (phone) patch and was my 'personal cell phone' for 3 or 4 years before I finally decided getting a cellular.

Internet seemed to kill off a good portion of ham activity... possibly just re-directing it to other technologies. There is talk they may relax the restrictions and allow tech's and tech+ to operate frequencies used only by general class just to keep the activity and not lose those band assignments.

[Chiffed]

I'm not a HAM myself, but I have a great appreciation for them. In our emergency preparedness training, HAM operators are a very important element for communications when things like phone lines, internet, wireless lines, etc go down. There are a couple of volunteer orgs of HAM operators that are for helping out in such emergencies. We're supposed to be getting the equipment installed at work so we have HAM communications when all else fails (just bring in an operator). I hope we never have to use them, but it's nice to know the HAMs are out there!

True 'nuff. In our Provincial Emergency Plan (see my avatar) we know that the phone and cell nets go down simply from overuse in emergencies. HAMs have the discipline and skill to work comms when things get hairy. Ex-military HAMs are especially nice to have in search operations, because many of them can fix their own gear in the field and they tend to have an intuition for operational priorities.

We had one planner who was convinced that HAMs could be replaced with Iridium sat phones, but recent disasters have proven that the sat network can be overloaded, too.

Best of luck on the test!

[Tommy]

I have the radio (yasu 101) and the book but no licence. I used it to shoot skip back in the CB radio days. CQ CQ DX 28W1629 standing by.

[Tyler]

My neighbor is a big-time HAMmer.

After our baby was born, it was pretty freaky hearing his radio calls and conversations on the baby monitor. (we hadn't realized anyone nearby us was into the HAM radios, until that day). For weeks after that first time we heard the call letters going out, we'd still jump out of our chairs upon hearing, "whiskey seven lima zero, C Q , C Q, CQ....OVER."



Good luck with your test. Just remember anyone near to you that has a baby may well be listening.

That's odd! From what I've been studying, most baby monitors opperate in the low AM bands or, more modernly, above 900mHz (the one we bought is a 1gHz model).

If there were more interest in amateur radio here, we could meet somewhere on the 2m band and have ourselves an unnofficial C&F frequency!