H. Ward Silver - Ham Radio For Dummies

Hams provide assistance for more than just emergencies. Wherever you find a parade, festival, marathon, or other opportunity to provide communications services, you may find ham radio operators helping out. In fact, volunteering for community events is great training for emergencies!

On the last full weekend of June, hams across the United States engage in an annual emergency-operations exercise called Field Day, which allows hams to practice operating away from their regular stations. You can find Field Day setups in parks, at schools, near athletics venues, even in fields! An amateur emergency team or station probably operates in your town or county; go visit them! The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for amateur radio, provides a Field Day Station Locator web page ( www.arrl.org/field-day-locator ) that shows you how to find the team or station nearest you.

Just like playing a sport or exercising, hams like engaging in challenging activities to build their skills and station capabilities. Called radiosport, these encourage continuous improvement of both the operator and the station. Competition provides training and that pays off for public service or in emergencies! Here are a few of the most popular radiosport activities:

DX: In the world of ham radio, DX stands for distance, and the allure of making contacts ever more distant from one’s home station has always been part of ham radio. Hams compete on the shortwave bands to contact faraway stations and to log contacts with every country. They especially enjoy the thrill of contacting exotic locations, such as “DXpeditions” to uninhabited islands and remote territories. On higher frequencies, even the microwave bands, hams guide their signals along weather systems and ionospheric features, even bouncing signals off the moon, to make contacts far beyond the “radio horizon.” When conditions are right and the band is full of faraway stations, succumbing to the lure of DX is easy.

Contests: Contests are ham radio’s version of a contact sport. The point is to make as many contacts as possible during the contest period— sometimes thousands — by exchanging short messages. These exchanges are related to the purpose of the contest: to contact a specific area, use a certain band, find a special station, or just contact the most stations.

Awards: Thousands of awards are available for various operating accomplishments, such as contacting different countries or states. There are award programs for contacting islands, summits, parks and trails, counties — almost any type of station or location. Awards are great incentives for improving your station and your operating skills.

Special-event stations: These temporary stations are on the air for a short time to commemorate or celebrate an event or location, often with a special or collectible call sign. Each December, for example, the Marconi Cape Cod Radio Club sets up a special temporary station at the location of Marconi’s Wellfleet transatlantic operations. Find out more on the club’s Facebook page, KM1CC - Marconi Cape Cod Radio Club ( www.facebook.com/KM1CC ).

If you enjoy the thrill of the chase and the feel of a good workout, go to Chapter 11to find out more about all these activities.

If you were to tune a radio across the ham bands, what would you hear hams doing? They’re talking to other hams, of course. These chats, called contacts, consist of everything from simple conversations to on-the-air meetings to contesting (discussed later in this chapter). I discuss contacts in depth in Chapter 8.

Though you make contacts for different purposes, most contacts follow the same structure:

1 You make a call to someone or respond to someone else’s call by transmitting your call sign over the air.

2 You and the other operator exchange names, information about where you’re located, and the quality of your signals for an understanding of conditions between your stations.

3 If the purpose of the contact is to chat, proceed to chat.You might talk about how you constructed your station, what you do for a living, your family, and your job, for example.

A call sign, often shortened to just call, is a ham’s “radio name.” (The term call letters is only used by broadcast radio and TV stations.) Call signs have two parts; a prefix of letters and a number, such as KE7 or W5, and a suffix, which is all letters. The prefix tells you what country licensed the ham and the suffix tells you which ham it is. My call, NØAX, says “N” (so I’m American), “Ø” (so I was licensed in the tenth call district), and “AX” (that’s me!). Chapter 7covers call signs in detail.

Except for the fact that you and the other ham take turns transmitting, and except that this information is converted to radio waves that bounce off the ionosphere or are retransmitted by powerful relay stations, making a contact is just like talking to someone you meet at a party or convention. You can hold the conversation by voice, by keyboard (using a computer connected to the radios), or by Morse code. The average contact satisfies a desire to meet another ham and see where your radio signal can be heard.

A question that I’m frequently asked about ham radio is “How do you know where to tune for a certain station?” Usually, my answer is “You don’t!” Ham radio operators don’t have specific frequency assignments or channel numbers. This situation is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that ham radio gives you unparalleled flexibility to make and maintain communications under continually changing circumstances. The bad news is that making contact with one specific station requires you to know when and on what frequency to call. As you see in Chapter 11, hams have found many ways to solve this problem, however; the result is an extraordinarily powerful and adaptive communications service.

By far the most common type of activity for hams is casual conversation, called chewing the rag. Such contacts are ragchews. Ragchews take place via voice or keyboards or Morse code across continents or across town. You don’t have to know another ham to have a great ragchew; ham radio is a friendly hobby with little class snobbery or distinctions. Just make contact, and start talking! Find out more about ragchews in Chapters 8and 9.

The origins of the word ragchew are fairly clear. The phrase chewing the rag was well known even in the late Middle Ages. Chew was slang for talk, and rag, derived from fat, was a reference to the tongue. Thus, people began to use chewing the rag to describe conversations, frequently those that took place during meals. Later, telegraph operators picked up that use, and hams picked it up from telegraphers. Because most of ham radio is in fact conversation, ragchewing has been part of radio since its earliest days.