Friday, June 11, 2010

Ham Radio,It's Fantastic!

I really enjoy Ham radio. I like building my own equipment, looking for new contacts, and collecting the QSL cards that eventually come from those big, hard to find contacts. It is relaxing and relatively exciting all at the same time. Sort of like an electronic form of fishing. In fact at it's fundamentals, it is almost exactly like fishing. You throw your line (signal) into the water and see who bites. There are more adventurist sides of Amateur Radio as well. Ham Radio introduced me to storm chasing and satellite communication.  I talked to Bosnian Hams reporting war updates.  I talked to space shuttle astronauts.  And once almost was able to talk to the King of Jordan.
Unfortunately, I've strayed a bit from the hobby over the last few years. I made a few attempts to get going strong again but something always got in the way, usually work. I've decided to get going again despite all my other commitments and am going to use this blog as a tool to stick to it.
One of the things I've always had a problem with Ham radio is a lot of the Hams out there are not very good teachers. I got my license pretty much by memorizing the question pool posted by the FCC without any explanation. I can tell you what the answers are but I don't understand a lot about the "how". It's also intimidating as all get out to get out there and get transmitting without worrying about messing up. I am going to address that here and maybe fill in the gaps that I found when I first got started. I'm going to get back to the basics in my fresh start and do my best to figure it out. Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things and find that Zen once again.

5 comments:

  1. You said it, most hams aren't great techers but it is believable since most hams are on the air simply to chat a useful communication habit but an awful one to have when teaching your average joe whoos only radio expirince is with a a phone reciever on 87.5 to 108.3 MHz
    73 from Future Tech in region 3
    juan m

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  2. I studied hamstudy.org for my tech license and was using it for my General test. I just finished watching the videos and I understand this time what I'm answering and will take my test in a couple of weeks. Thank you so much for these videos I know I will pass and hope to make contact with you on one of the frequencies one day. Thanks KM4FPY

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  3. Woww, very amazing blog structure...! How long have you ever been running a blog for? you made blogging glance easy. The entire look of your website is wonderful, let alone the content material!

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