Ham radio

[bae]

Of course, you still need some juice for the radio...

You can get by with a pretty minimal amount of juice, and a pretty minimal setup.

I can now set up my station in < 10 minutes, and power it for quite some time with just a couple of batteries, which can be topped off with solar. From the NW corner of Washington, on the 40m ham band, with only this portable antenna, I can reliably contact from California to Alaska without issue, as well as Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona with only a teeny bit of additional work. I can also hit the state Emergency Operations Center from here.

And I'm not in a particularly good spot, if I relocated to the top of the mountain I'm on, which would take another 20 minutes, I'd do much better. If I moved the station down to the beach, and reconfigured the antenna to take advantage of the ocean, I'd be able to pull off some fun things too.

There seem to be regular regional traffic nets at several times of the day, you'd only need power for a few minutes a day to check in and pass traffic in an emergency.

[redfox]

My Grandfather was a ham! He lived in rural Alaska from 1946-71, and was the linkage between AK & the continental US during the '64 earthquake, and between the Antarctic explorers in the 60's and their families. We grew up getting their calls from Auke Bay, AK, patched through to a local ham so they could call us at no charge, crackly lines & all.

He built his equipment out of Heath kits. When I was visiting my grandparents at their retirement Airstream place in Sequim in 1981, I mentioned that I would love to inherit his ham radio set-up. He growled at me that I was a girl, and that was the end of that. My Mom has his AK license plate with his call letters framed in her house. I have no idea what happened to his equipment.

[bae]

My Grandfather was a ham! He lived in rural Alaska from 1946-71, and was the linkage between AK & the continental US during the '64 earthquake, and between the Antarctic explorers in the 60's and their families.

Apparently there are still a reasonable number of people on the air practicing their operating skills, their network control skills, and traffic passing. Seems like enough to still rely on to get information through in an emergency situation, especially if the emergency is only regional.

I tried an experiment today with two of the noon 40m nets, and managed to be read quite clearly by a fair number of folks when I was running only *5 watts of output power*. That's a game-changer, power-budget-wise.

Realize, you don't have to be able to talk to *everybody* on these traffic-passing nets, if you can talk to "some* people, they can relay your traffic.

It also means I can get to surrounding states with a radio that fits into the palm of my hand, which makes hiking to the top of the mountain 10x easier :-)

[rosarugosa]

My dad was in the Merchant Marines, and I don't recall the exact details, but he would sometimes call us from sea with a ham radio operator as an intermediary. It was always a big treat since Dad was gone 6 - 9 months at a time.

[Yossarian]

Some of the guys on another forum I hang around on devote some time to ARES. You could have worse hobbies.

http://www.arrl.org/ares

[SteveinMN]

bae, around the time I let my ticket lapse, 2-meter was an up-and-coming thing. Given what can be done with cell phones (different technology, I know) and FRSs, I'm a little surprised that radios aren't smaller than handheld. Is it the size of the radio transmitter that keeps them from getting smaller?

[Yossarian]

Ah, reminds me of the good ole 70s


Big Ben, this here's the Rubber Duck, we just ain't a-gonna pay no toll. So we crashed the gate doing ninety-eight, I says let them truckers roll, 10-4.

Sorry, I know your stuff is more serious. Two cross country trips in a Chevy Malibu Station Wagon will do bad things to you.

[flowerseverywhere]

living in the hurricane path ham radio is huge around us. Something I intend to get involved in as well. They use little hand helds and many people have antenaae in flagpoles. Clever.

[Selah]

I didn't know anything about ham radio, but I was interested and wanted to learn. I attended a three-hour cram session and passed the first exam the first time. I bought a little rig in the hopes that I, too, would be able to pick up interesting stuff from hither and yon. Unfortunately, all I was able to do, with my tiny antenna emerging out of my "shack" (which was a corner of my bedroom in Pahrump, Nevada) was to connect with the local group of "old guys with ear hair" crowd.

Typical examples of the fascinating stuff I could hear:
A: It looks like there is some rain and there is a big puddle on the corner of Bell [sic] Vista and 372.
B: Yeah, I had to put my horses into the barn so their hooves wouldn't get muddy.

Therein ended my fascination with ham radio! I'm glad you're picking up cool stuff, though, BAE. One of my first EFL students, when I taught in Finland in 1990, was a dairy executive who had collected a zillion ham radio cards from all over the world. It took twenty years + for me to get my license, but that's what inspired me. Too bad it didn't work out, and here in Israel, ham radio is kind of a no-no, so I got rid of my rig when we moved to Florida.

[bae]

bae, around the time I let my ticket lapse, 2-meter was an up-and-coming thing. Given what can be done with cell phones (different technology, I know) and FRSs, I'm a little surprised that radios aren't smaller than handheld. Is it the size of the radio transmitter that keeps them from getting smaller?

The 2m/220/440 bands are quite suitable for very small handheld radios. I have a tri-band that covers those and all the emergency/fire/police frequencies that is miniscule. However, it puts out 5 watts max.

To transmit on the HF long-range ham bands, you end up needing batteries, power supplies, and heat sinks that make the radio pretty big. That small one I pictured above is about the smallest practical radio there is if you want to transmit voice, and it only puts out 5 watts, which is problematic. If you want to put out 100 watts, which is about the "norm", you need something like the other radio I pictured, which is backpack-portable, and needs a 5-20 pound battery to run it. Remember the Serious Hams put out 1500 watts...

And have silly big antennas.

I had some success today using the research of Tesla to create an antenna that used my mountain as part of the system and making contacts with super low power, but that is Serious Voodoo :-)