Ham radio conversations

Factual Questions
1

What do ham radio operators most frequently talk about with each other?

In theory, I’m sure the answer could be ‘anything and everything’, but something tells me the gender, age, and personality type of the individuals drawn to this hobby is probably going to narrow the scope of potential discussions. I’m guessing common topics would include local weather and probably Q&A’s about each others’ equipment setup.

Disclaimer: I am not involved and do not personally know anyone else involved in this hobby.

2

Well, my experience is limited, being something from my youth (a dim memory sadly) and some more recent observations.

Back in the day, unless you knew the other operator, it was all about collecting QSL cards*, and you simply exchanged the rudiments - call signs, locale, equipment, maybe a bit of chatter about technical stuff. Back then conversation topics were quite limited - politics, religion, anything bordering illegal was actually a citable offence that could lead to loss of operating license. And it was policed.

Nowadays, with the demographic being what it is, conversations seem to be more between old timers who do know one another, and the topics seem to the latest ailment, operation, hospital stay, and who has died recently.

  • Train-spotting without getting cold and wet.
3

LOL, 90% of ham radio conversations consist of:

<callsign1> you are 599. over
<callsign2> you are 599 as well. 73<callsign1> out.
<callsign1> 73 <callsign2> CQ, CQ, CQ.

With that advent of online callsign databases, relaying any info other than signal strength is redundant.

4

I haven’t been hanging with HAM boys for a long time, but a lot of conversations were about the equipment back in the day.

5

The qsl databases also contain info on your rig. You can even print out the QSL card right then and there to save on postage.

6

So, people would buy equipment in order to be able to ask other people what equipment they had?

7

Which sort of ruins it a bit for me, because receiving those cards through the mail from all over then posting them on the board or in an album is part of the fun. Who wants to collect and show off cards you print yourself?

8

My dad was a ham operator for decades. He did a variety of things. There was a morning “coffee club” type chat where several guys from around the South would check in every day with weather, sports, fishing talk. There was the random conversations with operators from all over the world with the typical talk about gear and tech stuff, but usually some local color too…

And at least once a year he participated in an emergency drill, where the local hams would meet at the high school football stadium with a field set up and monitor certain frequencies in morse code–which my dad excells at. He can accurately copy code at speeds over 50 words per minute.

9

Exactly. I have thousands of them carefully organized in special boxes. But I haven’t turned on my rig in years now. Maybe I should post in that other thread about hobbies you’ve given up on.

10

Most likely Field Day.

I was pretty proficient in morse code for a while there. Not 50 wpm proficient but I got along good enough to contest. I got my Extra Class just a year or two before they dropped the code requirement.

11

I’m relieved to hear that some mildly interesting conversations do occasionally occur, because I was beginning to seriously question why anyone would pursue this hobby if all discussion progressed along the lines described by UncleRojelio.

12

There were some interesting things Dad just stumbled into occasionally, too. He picked up a transmission from a guy on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, and was able to contact the Coast Guard to send help once or twice. Seems like he was also involved with some injured hiker that had some sort of portable radio, too.

13

My dad was a ham operator for many years before he died. I got my Novice license at 11 and my General license at 14. (Sadly, I let it lapse back in the mid-to-late 1990s.) My mom also got her license, but I believe she only reached the Technician level. Her dad was a ham operator, and had been involved in radio since the 1920s.

When I was young, we lived in Indonesia and we would regularly talk with my grandpa in California. My dad was part of a regular network (and, in fact, may have been one of the main leaders) that consisted of operators from Australia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, as well as parts of the USA. One of our fellow missionaries in Hong Kong was also a ham operator, and we talked with them a lot.

Back during the 1970s, phone calls between Indonesia and the USA were about $10 a minute, so phone conversations were only an option in extreme emergencies, such as letting my dad know his own father had passed away.

When I moved to San Diego for college, I kept a regular schedule with my parents using the 20-meter rig at my college.

In high school, I would get on the radio in the afternoon and talk to people all over Asia. At the time, I was going for my “Worked All Prefectures”, which consisted of talking to at least one operator in each of the prefectures in Japan. I don’t recall how many prefectures there were, but I had all but two of them. I also tried getting my “Worked All States”, and I got most of the US states, but not all of them. Getting the WAS is much cooler when you are halfway around the world than it is if you are in the USA.

I remember one conversation I had with some guys in Guam, Samoa, and Kwajalien Atoll. I remember specifically talking about the “Russian Woodpecker”, which was a really noisy hammering that flooded the 20-meter band all the time. The other guys said that the Woodpecker was an atmospheric/weather testing apparatus.

When talking to a complete stranger, we would start out by letting the other know the signal strength and clarity, I think it was, using a scale of 1 to 5. Someone who was coming in “5 by 5” meant that it was like talking to someone face-to-face. Typically, we would then share the hardware characteristics of the radio and/or the antenna, but that stuff bored me silly. Then we would move on to small talk about the weather, what do you do, etc. Because I was so young, I was a bit of a novelty; besides, I can talk the ear off a fence post and make friends easily.

Exchanging QSL cards was also a big deal, and cards from “Yellow Banana Land” (Indonesia) were fairly sought-after. (The call sign for Indonesia start with “YB”, with the number indicating the major area. Jakarta was “YB0…”.)

14

on the few occasions when I watched a ham radio geek I knew back in the 1970’s…there was so much static and noise that you couldn’t really have a real conversation. You could slowly and loudly state a few words, half of which got lost in the static, and then the listener would guess what you had said.
“Conversations” of two or three sentences were common. And then my friend would than turn to me and say “Wow!!! Did you hear that???This guy in Rhodesia has a new XYZ antenna modulator!!!”

And he had a wall full of calling cards that he was very,very proud of. He didn’t know anything about the people who sent them, but he tried to get one from every country on the globe

I suppose that, for its time, it was equivalent to the way that, nowadays, people collect a thousand anonymous “friends” on Facebook.

15

When he was back in the USA for furlough (every 4 years on the mission field, my parents came back to the USA for a year to raise funds), he had a radio in his car. (Remember, kids, this was before we had cell phones or the internet.) He used it sort of like a CB radio, but for longer distances.

One time, he was driving through Dallas and happened to be speaking to a truck driver who was also a ham operator. The trucker was somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin. My dad was talking to the guy and missed his exit in the middle of heavy traffic, and happened to say something on the air like, “Ah, nuts … I missed the exit on I-35.” The trucker asked him where he was and he said, “Dallas”. The trucker happened to live in Dallas, and gave my dad instructions on how to get off the freeway and get headed in the right direction. This was way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

My dad’s car had his call letters on the back. One day, he was driving through Arizona or New Mexico, and he had parked at a rest stop to run a mile. (My dad was an avid runner, and logged 3-5 miles a day, 5-6 days a week.) Sometimes he would drive 100 miles, then run a mile at the rest stop. Trust me, sports fans, the car reeked worse than a junior high locker room!

Anyway, he was heading back to the car and he saw a State Trooper with his foot on the bumper writing something. My dad thought he was being ticketed. He walked up to the cop and asked, “Is something wrong, Officer?”

The cop answered, “No. I’m a ham operator myself and saw your call sign so I was writing you a note to say, ‘Hi’!”

They exchanged small talk and my dad mentioned he was a missionary from Indonesia. The cop brightened up and said, “Hey, I used to talk to a bunch of guys in Southeast Asia. There was this one guy in Indonesia … what was his name … oh, yeah, he went by “Jakarta George” …”.

My dad laughed and held out his hand again. “That’s me!”

The cop was a little skeptical, and so my dad said, “Let me get my log book out of the trunk.”

Now, every ham operator has a log book, typically a little spiral-bound think with about 25 pages in it or so, kind of like a teachers attendance book. It was basically a spreadsheet for logging conversations. For most operators, a logbook might last 5 years or so. My dad would fill up a logbook in about 2-3 years. Therefore, he had a “LOGBOOK”, which was a huge ledger, similar to the guest registers you see in the movies about old hotels. I’m talking something that was like 14 inches tall, 11 inches wide, and an inch thick. This was, essentially, his database, organized by call sign prefixes.

The first third of the book was for the USA contacts, separated out by the Ks and the Ws (USA call signs are W---- and K----), and then all the regions (0 through 9).

He asked the cop for his call sign again, and then flipped through the logbook/database to the proper section. Running his finger down the page, he said, “Here you are!”

Sure enough, they had been airwave buddies for quite some time.

Being a ham operator made the world seem so much smaller, way before the internet was even heard of outside of DARPA.

16

What are the odds? :eek: Four billion people on earth at that time and your dad just happens to run into someone he’d talked to before on the other side of the planet that’s involved in a hobby shared by .000001% of the population!

17

Nowdays, logbooks are just databases on your station computer. As you initiate a contact, you type in the callsign and all of their info pops up. You can add some notes if you want to and then hit a button at the end of the contact to log it with all of the other info automatically filled in. You can log thousands of contacts a month, especially if you are contesting or doing digital modes.

18

@Cardigan: True. But, it was slightly different than two random people just walking up to each other. The conversation was initiated by the recognition of practitioner of the hobby of another practitioner.

The world is truly much smaller than you realize, even with the billions of people. Consider the “six degrees of separation” effect. In this situation, the two people recognized each other.

I’m sure it has happened across the world in many different ways, such as soldiers who were in Basic Training together meeting up randomly years later. I am sure there are probably people here on the SDMB who have discovered they know each other IRL.

I, myself, have had at least 6 such incidents where I ran into people from my past, and my wife has had 2. My wife’s encounters were so much weirder than mine because she was from an extremely small town, whereas several of mine took place in Hawaii, which is really a crossroads for people coming and going from Asia and Australia to the USA.

[slight_hijack]
When my wife was in high school, she lived in a very small town in Nevada, like with a population of less than 2,000 people when she lived there. About 2 years after graduation, she and I walked into a 7-11 in San Diego, and the guy working the counter was someone in her graduating class. They recognized each other and we talked for a bit. I asked if he was in the Navy or Marines, but, no, he had left the town a few months before and thought that living by the ocean would be nice for a while.

About 5 years later, we were in Los Angeles, and she recognized another classmate at a table in a Mongolian BBQ restaurant.
[/slight_hijack]

19

Many contacts are short signal reports, especially during contests where they try to make as many contacts as possible.

But there are plenty of “nets” that last several hours per day where people take turns doing monologues on whatever they are doing, which usually consists of gardening, grandchildren, equipment, things like that. There are also people that use it as a sort of long distance phone call, a friend of mine has a childhood friend from Michigan and they talk the same time every week on ham radio.

20

UncleRojelio, My dad passed away in 1994, and, although his office used computers and he was familiar with them, I don’t think he ever used one personally. He probably would have been skeptical about using them!