The Ham Radio thread

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m about midway through the study guide for my entry-level (“technician”) ham radio license. Numerous people have asked me, “why?” I’m 34 years old, I’ve lived my entire life in the digital age, and I did not grow up around any amateur radio guys so it’s not something that was passed down to me by an older generation. So how was the interest sparked?

Well, a few years ago I went with a friend on a sailing trip to the Outer Banks. My friend, an experienced sailor, had just bought a beautiful steel-hulled sailboat and was in the process of getting acquainted with it before taking it out on an ocean voyage. He pointed out to me the various things that the previous owner had installed in it, and among them was a ham radio transceiver. He said he didn’t really know how to use it, because it was outdated compared to the boat’s other navigational features which included a very advanced Raytheon radar system that scanned the surrounding waters for all nearby vessels and displayed all of them, including their information, on a computer screen. But he said every now and then he’d listen to the old radio and hear transmissions from other countries. This intrigued me, but there were a million other things to concentrate on during the sailing process and I never did get a chance to listen to it.

Nevertheless, I remained interested in the concept of shortwave radio, and in the next few years, spent quite a bit of time listening to the numerous publicly-available SDRs online. (Software defined radio - if you’re reading this thread, you probably already know what it is, and I won’t go into the details.) However convenient and intuitive these online SDRs are to use, I became more interested in acquiring a standalone shortwave radio, ideally a vintage one, to do my own “real” SWR listening.

So earlier this year I bought a beautiful Panasonic RF-2600 on eBay, and, following various DIY videos on YouTube, rigged up a long-wire antenna between two trees in my yard, which massively boosts the reception capability of the radio. This RF-2600 has sideband capability, meaning I can listen to the amateur bands, which are surprisingly active, especially the 80m band. I’ve heard quite a bit on the 40m band too, including CW (morse code) which I downloaded a phone app to decode. (It’s usually just guys talking about their rigs - which makes up roughly 80% of voice transmissions too!)

So now I’m down the rabbit hole at this point and the logical next step is to get set up for transmitting myself. And that, of course, requires a license to do legally. A friend of mine who’s been a ham for a long time has helped me through the process of studying for the license and given me some advice about what kind of equipment to use once I’m ready to set up a transciever, but I’m definitely interested in hearing what anyone else here (who might happen to be a ham) is using, and any applicable advice for a newbie like me?

I’m particularly interested in no-frills, analog equipment, like the numerous Kenwood and Yaesu units I’ve seen on eBay in the sub-$1000 range, and one of my concerns is the failure rate of the various components in these units. The studying for the ham license gave me a crash course in electronic circuits, something I knew next to nothing about because I never took a physics class in my life. Now when I see these transceivers all I can think about is the vast number of resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductors, and other little parts that could potentially be rendered inoperable over time. In your experience, how do these transceivers hold up over, say, 10 years of regular use? I have to assume there is more possibility of damage from user error, compared to a simple receiver.

Advice about antennas, power supplies, amplifiers, how to properly ground everything, etc, is also appreciated.

2

I don’t see why solid-state transceivers should be in any way problematic, but if you are going to
be transmitting power then impedance matching is your friend. You can get antenna tuners, SWR meter
s, baluns, etc.

These days computers are also fast enough for SDR if you want to experiment with modulation or just
see how radio transmission works.

3

Well, there are tons of Kenwood and Yaesu tranceivers on eBay “for parts only.” I can’t help but wonder just what it was that rendered them inoperable.

4

Do any of those ads say what’s broken? It is always possible for parts to fail (example) but if any brand/model were a known piece of junk, would that not transpire in reviews?

But the general principle, I guess you already know this, is to plug the transmitter into a 50-Ohm, reactance-free load. (If you look at the specification sheet, it will say.) That means if you want to use (e.g.) a random length of wire as a transmitting antenna, sure, you can do it, but you need to make some simple calculations and design an appropriate coupling circuit. With a proper match I would be less worried about assuming the transceiver happens to be smart enough to avoid self-destruction.

5

Things have probably changed in the last 40-50 years. In my day, even though I wasn’t a HAM I was hanging around with these guys because they were electronics experts. There were local clubs everywhere and I attended several club meetings/electronic swap meets in NJ and PA in the 70s. Back then finding replacement parts was mostly easy because of the amount of used equipment available, and it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew all about that component needing repair. Good luck with this, the HAMs I knew were all great guys willing to help their community.

6

I don’t know anything specifically about “ham” radio versus radio in general, but isn’t all radio a branch of electronics pretty much by definition? I suppose a true amateur is the type of person who would as likely as not build a transmitter or amplifier out of spare parts, but like I said you need to know something if only to construct an antenna.

7

Sure. But you can have all sorts of radios that you only need to know how to turn on. The thing with HAMs, at least back then, was the practical need to construct a lot of your own components, and understand the underlying analog electronics in general along with the specifics of radios.

8

Pretty much nobody is building ham radios from kits these days except as an exercise in anachronistic enthusiasm. Modern amateur radio is about largely about digital channels and software-driven comms, e.g. PSK31, and while the ham rig in my truck won’t keep the cab warm with its waste heat, it also doesn’t drain the battery with fifteen minutes of use or take up the entire passenger footwell.

Stranger

9

I have a Technician License. A year ago I put together a “poor man’s base station.” It consists of a dual band (2 meter / 440 MHz) mobile transceiver and dual band base station antenna.

I mounted the antenna to some scaffolding that I’ve had next to the house for many years. I have a meter for measuring RF power & VSWR to the antenna, and a cheap power meter for measuring voltage and current (from 12 V power supply) to the transceiver. There’s 50 feet of LMR400 coax between the output of the VSWR meter and antenna.

The setup works surprisingly well. I can simplex over 30 miles on 2 meter.

10

I don’t know anything about ham radio. But I have vague memories from the 1970’s of an acquaintance who had a ham rig in his basement. And the only thing I remember is that the rig… made noise. And I mean a LOT of noise

He would twist dials for a long time, and all I remember hearing was a horrible combination of static,squeaks,high-pitch wavering sounds like a theremin,mixed with growls worse than howler monkeys. It was painful to listen to. I think you could barely make out a few words sometimes, but not full sentences. It didn’t seem like much fun to me.

I suppose what I’m asking is : what is ham radio useful for? Because I couldn’t understand it all.
Was this guy’s radio typical? Or is my memory bad? Maybe after all the twiddling and adjusting of knobs , the noises faded and the content became more understandable?

11

That is mostly gone—or at least dramatically reduced—with computer-controlled radios and real time digital filters. Amateur (“ham”) radio is useful for long-range communication (there are even ham relay satellites) when you are in backcountry without cellular service and don’t have or want to rely upon satphone, and many modern digital ham rigs will even give you very low rate digital modem capabilities (you won’t be streaming Youtube.com but you can send plaintext pretty easily). It has been used in the past by private/volunteer search & rescue where they weren’t licensed to use government-reserved frequency bands, although it complicates communications because then you have to relay between ham and ‘official’ nets. (It is entirely possible to modify a ham set to pick up and transmit on official channels, but highly illegal and the FCC will come down on you for doing it if you are discovered.)

With the advent of commercial satellite telephony it isn’t really as practically necessary, but if you want to be autonomous or prepared for the downfall of society, or just like maintaining a somewhat anachronistic communications system, it’s a pretty each hobby to get into for a modest investment. No howler monkeys or theremins required.

Stranger

12

Packet internet, it’s called. My friend with the boat that I mentioned in the OP has a setup for this, but it’s unrelated to the old ham transciever.

13

My RF-2600 (not a ham radio, because it has no transmitting capability, but a very good shortwave-listening radio) makes these sounds also, as you are turning the knob to scan the various bands for activity. But I think there’s something fun about “catching” the signal once you’ve heard that high-pitched squeal (I think “heterodyne” is the technical term for it) and then fine-tuning the tuning knob and the BFO (beat frequency oscillator) knob until you’ve modulated that squeal into the sound of a human voice. It’s like catching something “wild” and “taming” it, for lack of a better analogy.

14

Packet radio (AX.25). Many modern digital rigs, even portable handsets, have the ability to do this built in.

Stranger

15

I have my Technician’s License (KD8BAM) but I’m not really active right now. TBH, there’s not much on the amateur radio scene now that personally interests that isn’t normally achieved better with internet or mobile. Contacting and talking to someone thousands of miles away hit different during the pre-internet age. It definitely has its place though, in areas with poor communication and during natural disasters. I’m planning on getting a boat for cruising soon however, and there’s still a use for SSB when cruising so I’ll probably get back into it a bit.

16

That looks like a good basic setup there, at least for 2m operation - it’s certainly much less baroque than some of the cluttered “shacks” I’ve seen pictures / videos of. What kind of antenna is it? Is it the type that is pre-tuned to a specific frequency?

17

Oh, I have no doubt about it. Sadly, I never got the chance to really live through the pre-internet age, so I’m forced to make do with simulating it.

(Which I’m now posting about on…the internet.) :confounded: :confounded:

18

I feel obligated to post in this thread. As I have said earlier, I’m not very active. I do participate in skywarn (severe weather spotting) from home. I did upgrade my HF rig to an Icom IC-7300 (SDR with a more conventional interface). For digital modes, hook it up with USB and my computer just thinks it is an external sound card.

Some day I will come up with new QSL cards and actually start communicating (been mostly on listen mode)

Brian
(extra class)

19

I looked that one up - it seems to be top of the line, but I’m looking to spend about half the cash on a transciever alone.

20

Now that I think of it though, are there package deals available from radio suppliers, where I could get a transciever, an antenna, the necessary power supply, meters, and other stuff to get started, all in one bundle?