Why Ham Radio is the greatest hobby

Anyone that's known me for any length of time has been subjected to the Ham Radio sales pitch, or seen pictures of my station, or towers. To learn about Amateur Radio, or Ham Radio on the Web I suggest you start with http://www.arrl.org/.

What can you do with this hobby? First you need an FCC license. To get a license, you take a test administered by dedicated volunteers. The cost is $15. The license is good for ten years, and as long as you renew it, is good for life. There are three levels, or classes of license; the tests are progressively more difficult.

With the entry level, or Technician license, and investment of a couple of hundred dollars you can do quite a few things.

Talk to your local ham friends in a fifty to hundred mile or so radius in an old fashioned, party line style conversation without wires or an Internet connection. Depending on how rural your neighborhood is, you may be able to do this with a hand held radio. You can only talk to people who also took the tests and got their licenses, and you can't engage in commercial activities.

You can help the national weather service during severe weather events by acting as a trained spotter, sending reports to your county emergency operations center. For a lot of people, the Skywarn program is the only reason they have a Ham Radio license. If you've ever watched the storm chaser television shows, they all have Ham Radios tuned to the local Skywarn repeater.

You can participate in the APRS network, allowing others to see your location in real time on the Internet. Before GPS enabled cell phones, this was the only way this could be done.

Join your local Radio Club. They do quite a few fun things, and have various yearly events.

If you're into the space program, and are willing to spend a few thousand dollars, you can:

Talk to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Yes, they have a Ham radio station up there, and quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts are Hams.

Using that same setup you can talk to other amateurs through dedicated ham radio satellites. Who you can talk to is a function of how high the orbit of the satellite is, and where it is relative to you. You can work the satellites from a parking lot using a hand held radio and a small antenna working on a camera tripod for less money, but having done it both ways myself you'll stick with it a lot longer with good sized antennas that rotate in both the horizontal and azimuth plane.

For a few hundred dollars you can setup a station on the six meter band. The six meter band is called the "magic band" by Hams, because at certain times under the right conditions low power and poor antennas will let you talk halfway across the world.

You can experiment with microwaves, building your own microwave station. With microwaves, you can bounce your signal off of raindrops and do all kinds of crazy things.

You can bounce your signal off meteor trails. Sounds impossible, but plenty of Hams do this every day and night.

Earth Moon Earth Ham Radio Setup

For a significant investment in time and resources, you can build a station that lets you bounce your signal off the moon, communicating with half of the earth at once. Google EME for some really incredible systems people have built. You won't be able to do this from an apartment or your car, of course, but I've been told that hearing your signal coming back from a moon bounce is one of the most incredible experiences you can have as a Ham.


And much, much more. That's one of the things that non Hams don't get; this is a hobby with an extremely large number of sub-Hobbies built in.

The next license level requires you to take another test. With this license the world of HF, or shortwave operating is open to you.

On the HF frequencies, your ability to communicate with fellow hams is dependent on the solar weather, the eleven year sunspot cycle, and how much you want to invest in radios and antennas in that order.

With an investment of under five hundred dollars, a wire strung between two trees, and a little experience under your belt you can talk to pretty much anyone in the continental US, depending on the time of day. If you take the time to learn Morse code, you can get through with this setup at any time of the day or night unless there is a strong thunderstorm nearby.

When conditions are right, you can talk to people in most parts of the world depending on where you live and where we are in the sunspot cycle. Hams call this "working DX"; for many (me included) this is one of the great joys of the hobby.

With a modest antenna setup, consisting of a forty or fifty foot tower, or a rooftop tripod, and a small Yagi or Beam antenna, you can work DX most of the time. How much you spend on all this is a function of your ability to scrounge, horse trade, and build your own stuff. If you buy it all brand new top of the line and pay someone to erect the tower you can easily spend twenty thousand dollars; if you acquire the parts over time, and do a little scrounging you can do it for a thousand.

The beauty of the hobby is that once that station is built, it costs only electricity to run it. Unlike golf, where you have to pay to play, or other hobbies where constant reinvestment is required, Ham Radio can be done year after year for very low cost. It is also a hobby that combines well with other hobbies; I have Ham radios on my boat and in my car.

You can send pictures, talk keyboard to keyboard, using voice, or Morse code. Morse code and digital modes through the computer are very popular because it doesn't take much radiated power to communicate over great distance. You can easily communicate over a thousand miles using less power than it takes to illuminate a single Christmas tree bulb, and many Hams do this every day.

Quite a few of us take great pleasure in collecting, restoring, and operating old, or vintage, radio equipment. Tube gear has a very unique sound, and requires more skill to operate than modern plug and play equipment.

If you've made it this far you already know that the ultimate class of license "Extra" gives you more exclusive frequencies and a distinctive call sign.

Why the Government Allows This
In the early days, the government needed to insure a supply of trained radio operators in the event of war.

Hams are the communications first responders in every natural disaster that interrupts normal communications. In every recent natural disaster such as Katrina, the first reports to come out of the affected area were provided by Hams. We're generally a resilient, self sufficient bunch who can be up and running on batteries, solar, wind, or generator power very quickly.


Your local ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) has close ties with your county Emergency Operations Center teams; if something happens in your neighborhood the first responders following fire and police are the Red Cross and the Amateur Radio volunteers.



Many Hams are very passionate and skilled electronics engineers, building their own equipment and advancing the state of the radio art. Ham Radio operators invented an astounding array of modern communications and radio technologies that we use in everyday life.

73 de W8VCK
This is ham speak for Best Regards from me. See you on the bands.