My Experience Getting Licensed in Ham Radio (2020)
beckystern.com
beckystern.com
Then to upgrade my license I had to have my dad drive me down to the FCC office in Detroit where I had an appointment. I still remember the glass lined room where I took the code test had a bit of an echo which made copying the code a little difficult but I passed the first time. My Dad treated me to a corned beef sandwich at the legendary Lefkowski's at Eastern market. Then I upgraded both my radio and launched a tower and a yagi. Did it all before I had a drivers license.
Started a ham club at my high school which a half century later I am proud to report is still going strong.
Edit: Just realized it may have been a Jewish deli which would clearly have precluded that option!
Eastern Market was amazing in those days, you heard fifty different languages being spoken, the aisles were so crowded and it was Detroit at its peak of prosperity.
In the early 2000's my dad drove me a few hours up to St. Louis for my technician test. I had been listening to the hams on some tube receivers that my dad had and was studying the ARRL books. When I realized that I had grokked the content. I thought why not go for the test. We drove to the city. I took the technician exam and passed. After the test, I promptly went home to make a j-pole that we put on top of our tv antenna tower and connected to a handheld 2m radio my dad had. I was able to hit local repeaters and chat with local hams, but sadly never committed to Morse code and never got advanced licenses. So my communications stayed local.
My grandpa was really delighted that I got my license -- he was thrilled about having 3 generations of hams in the family. Unfortunately, at the time, he was pretty old and had taken down his station so we didn't get to talk over the waves.
These days I bring my baofeng out and my 7yo daughter and I will listen in on some conversations. She'll ask about where they're from and how we can hear them. I really delight in the questions.
I would always recommend a cheap, probably second hand, desktop HF radio to start with. You will be forced to learn how to make a simple antenna, how to cope with impedance matching, and in the process of using it you will learn about HF propagation, and the reward is that you get to communicate across the world, not just across your town. It's a much better, and much more educational place to start.
And then you buy a power supply for the HF rig for another five baofengs worth.
And realize that the technicians license only allows voice on 10m.
People get into ham radio for different reasons — not always for technical reasons. And then people's interest in a hobby can change over time as well — perhaps they begin to get long-distance curious.
At least, that's what it was for me. Then I got a used Yaesu FT-817 and used that as motivation to get my general.
I now have GMRS as well, which is one of those hidden gems I wish more people in the public at large knew about.
Given how many of the GMRS enthusiasts are just itching to turn it into the zoo that is CB, I kinda wish the public would continue not caring about it.
It's easy to be an anonymous a-hole on CB because there's a decent chance you're far away (like, perhaps even continents away) from the person you're talking to.
Unless you have a very high-up repeater and legal limit transceiver, you're unlikely to be able to talk to someone beyond your metro area in GMRS. More likely than not you'll see the person you're talking to at least once a month. This strikes "anonymity" from what I like to call the Greater RF F*kwad Theory, wherein Ordinary person + audience + anonymity = f*kwad.
Unsoldering a diode to make it work outside the ham bands does not make it legal. Lots of services are now 12.5 kHz deviation, so showing up with a “modded” 25kHz deviation radio is gonna cause grief.
My GMRS and Technician licenses issued on the same day not quite two months ago. I'm interested in immediate family communications, communicating with people in my area, and potentially calling for help from nearby strangers. I only decided to get the Amateur license because I realized the valley in western NC where we have a home does not have a GMRS repeater but there is an Amateur club running VHF/UHF, and figured I'd have better luck convincing them to add GMRS by joining their club than as an outsider.
A cheap Chinese UHF/VHF/GMRS HT with a knock-off NA-771 reaches as far as my family needs.
And FWIW, the top feed on Broadcastify the past few days is coming from a VHF repeater on Mount Mitchell (N2GE via W4HTP due to lack of Internet).
The way new hams enter and interact with the rest of the amateur radio world has changed dramatically over that time span. It saddens me a bit each time I read that someone received the "get off my lawn" impression from their first contacts in the hobby. Hopefully such instances are rare and the result of miscommunication/misunderstanding rather than ill intent from either party.
I can really recommend doing it. If you have some knowledge about electronics and some affinity for it, it's pretty easy. You'll need to study some of the regulations and stuff but it's very doable.
When I did mine in the 90s the exams were still pretty hard but even then I studied for a day and passed. Of course having all my existing knowledge of electronics and 5 years of CB experience did help a lot. But overall i just coasted through it. People worry about it too much I think.
Since I don't have any HF equipment I didn't deem it wise investing in some for this reason. I do have a receiver but the inbound signal is also really meh.
With 2m/70cm I have better luck because the repeater is nearby on a tall mountain and the wavelength is short enough to be able to bounce around and get out.
Studying for a weekend from one of the books was all I needed to get ... a step or two up even, since morse code wasn't needed.
I used to load the gutters around my apartment as an antenna, I once even loaded up the box spring in the bedroom, then I got a MFJ isoloop also back in my apartment days. There are ways to get on HF. They might not be ideal, but when you do make that contact it sure is sweet.
There are repeaters most places, though chatting on them didn't really interest me much. Check out echolink (available as a smartphone app) after getting your license if that does though - there is no special hardware needed and you can speak with people on repeaters all over the world if you want to.
OpenSpot[0] is a high-end version but there are cheaper ones, too. These products create a tiny digital network in your house and act as a router/repeater for global ham networks. The digital radio + hotspot solution gets around the short range of handheld radios and lets you talk or listen with a global audience.
If you're reducing the whole HAM part to nothing more than a fancy Bluetooth handset, why not just jump into a regular Discord / Teamspeak / Ventrilo / Mumble voice server? Why bother going through all the trouble of getting a license and learning about radio when you're not actually going to do any of the radio stuff?
I thought the hobby was all about building experimental radios and trying to communicate with people as far away as possible - with a bunch of emergency comms LARPing on the side.
The primary goal of folks learning radio tech (via ham) today cannot be just talking to folks far away because, as you said, that's a solved problem. When you do get on these digital channels you find most of the conversation is about how you did it -- or ensuring that it worked. In other words, folks are using these technologies for exactly what you said -- learning about the radio side of it.
Just FYI, the hotspots use digital radio to communicate with your digital radio and Wi-Fi to communicate with internet servers, so they are radio devices, too.
Getting into the hobby, I was looking to unlock exclusive frequencies that would give me more range than FRS and isolation from FRS traffic.
While it did that, I found that benefit largely went unused. My comms aren't private. What I wanted from the ham bands didn't benefit me in the ways I wanted them to. Heck my identity isn't even private. In addition, anyone I want to communicate with have to be hams as well.
Like you said, outside of an emergency, there are more reliable, private ways to communicate by using the Internet. The use case I was trying to solve for is better suited using VOIP on a phone.
What I found instead in ham radio is the a world of experimentation. I'm building antennas and radios. I'm hooking radios up to computers to communicate across the planet. I'm hooking up my phone to a walkie-talkie to send messages over APRS and Winlink without the Internet. Not because I need to, but because I can and it is fun to figure out how to do these things.
On top of all that, it is just enjoyable to turn on the radio with a cup of coffee and call out and see who can hear you. It is reminiscent of the early days of IRC and ICQ when you just turned it on and someone interested in the same thing as you was just waiting to connect. For the most part hams are just happy to have someone to geek out with and that's reason enough to connect.
The trick is to only learn the question and correct answer, do not look at the wrong options when memorizing.
The article mention you can use a calculator, you can but the math does not really require it most of the time. I don’t remember using it.
Anyway, fast forward to the pandemic and I found myself thinking about radios again. I decided to study for my General because I started learning about over-horizon radio and how you could use HF to bounce off the ionosphere. I had some extra time so I studied the pool with an app and in a few weeks took the test. Once I passed, I took to the internet and read about HF and what I needed to get started. Purchased an Icom IC-7300, an Alinco 330MVT power supply, and an hfkits EFHW build-your-own 80/40/20/(15)/10 wire antenna with 49:1 unun. I also eventually purchased an LDG Z-100A-DXE antenna tuner, a RigExpert AA-230-ZOOM, and a Moonraker AV-600 inline meter. Building my own unun and antenna made me feel like a Jedi building their own light-saber as part of the experience! lol
This is when I got hooked. Tuning into 40m at night and hearing from Boston all across the eastern seaboard, into Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin/South America was wild. Then I tuned into 20m and made SSB contacts in Europe. What an electric feeling to call out to someone and having them respond from thousands of miles away! Then I re-purposed a raspberry pi 4 and imaged DragonOS to a card and, omg, digital modes through my radio is where I spend 90% of my ham time now.
FT-8 is so much fun. I've made contacts all over. I've hit Japan, Nepal, Asiatic Russia, Brazil, Suriname, Ghana, basically every European country, basically every US state, Canada, the list goes on. I've started building new antennas basically monthly. Copper pipe J-pole was the most fun for 2m. Testing the new antennas with WSPR is a really easy way to see how it performs. There are listening stations in Antarctica and Australia and New Zealand that I can regularly hit at 1 Watt (wtf!?). So cool.
DragonOS also does ADS-B tracking and monitoring, which I'm just getting into having purchased a Tram 1410 and stuck it in my attic.
Anyway, the world of radio is just incredible. I highly recommend it for any technologist as the fun and crazy shit you can build now for cheap is remarkable. We are truly in the golden age of wireless tinkering!
73
On the other hand, the Icom7300 is totally fine used semi-portably out at a campsite. It runs on battery, and putting up a wire antenna is easy enough with a fiberglass pole. I even have a raspberry pi that hosts digital stuff (and an ipad running vnc to control it)