This is Ham Radio

 

What was a special moment in your amateur radio career?

 Question posted at QRZ that I felt inspired to respond to.  I'll post in here; it may interest you and anyway, I don't want it getting lost to time.

Question was:

What was a special moment in your amateur radio career?

An excellent question with, I'm quite sure, a load of personal stories attached to it.

In my own case, my special moment came some 50 years before I was licensed for the Ham Bands.

I was out one summer afternoon, at about age 12, aimlessly riding my bike around my town. I happened to stop on top of a local hill, hoping for a cool breeze off the nearby lake.
When I got there, there was a car sitting in the parking lot of then local firehouse.Kind of battered, it had several antennas on it. He was chatting away on a mobile rig, which I now recognize as a Motorola low band unit with a modified control head.. I pulled up next to him and sat and listened intently to the conversation, since it didn't appear to be anything official. He looked over and smiled, and continued his chatting away.

After about 5 minutes or so, he asked me if I'd be interested in saying hello to his buddy on the other end. Being the curious lad I was, I lept at the chance. We chatted for a few minutes and concluded the (Apparently Simplex) contact.

It was Ham radio, of course. I've no idea who it was, what their respective call signs were, what their names were etc. Remember, this was 50 years ago.

But, as fate would have it, that memory stuck with me; I was hooked. And the truth is, I've always been on the air in some form or fashion for the 50 some odd years between then and now. I went through years of CB/SWLing, helped to build and operate a local FM broadcast station owned by the local school district, and because of that, went on to get my commercial ticket(s) Then I worked at several commercial broadcast stations both as air talent and as tech talent as well, eventually got my ham ticket a few years ago now. There was magic in the air for me in those days..... and you know what? There still is.

The lesson here is that you never know who you'll impress, whose life you will benefit. Even if the lives you come in contact with don't suddenly change direction, those impressions stay, and affect people in ways you might never realize. The intersection of lives is more than worthwhile. In my case, it made a life.

Real world rules for Ham Radio

 This will be a living document. As more rules occur to me, or are passed along, they will be added here.

 K2ENF Rules for Ham radio

1: Everything you do with your station affects everything else, both inside and outside your station.

2: After a few months of being a Ham you will realize that a drug addiction would probably have been cheaper.

3: CB operators will always be loathed by older hams, even though well over half of the hams of the last 20 years came from CB.

4: A non-conversational mode (say, FT8) will always be dumped on by operators whose radio conversations seem to revolve around their recent bout with (Insert a list of health issues you really don’t want to know about, here)


5:Tech of any sort appears totally unnecessary to those who don’t understand it.


6: Technology invariably moves many times faster than government (The FCC, the commerce Dept, your local zoning board...) is capable of.

7: Your list of friends will be centered around those similarly afflicted with the radio virus.

8:”That’s not Ham Radio” will forever be the battle cry of those resisting tech changes in Ham Radio.

9. Forget the amp. Concentrate on the sound. If you sound large, you are large.

10. RF is going to come out somewhere; and not always where you intend it to!

Yeah, it's like that....

 

What will the result of the elimination of the symbol rate be? Don't hold your breath.

 

Over at QRZ, K0IDT said: ↑

Well, US amateur radio got "bolstered", now what are hams going to do with it? I eagerly await the unique and innovative uses beyond the ones currently available
to amateurs on the HF spectrum or their smartphones. Maybe some software modem advances but usage will still be stuck where it is today, faster possibly but
not much else. Amateur SMS, texting and email is not an advancement of the radio art.

I've been chewing on this one for a while now, and I'm afraid that my response to the question will not please some.

I dare to suggest to you and the group that for several reasons, advancements in Ham radio tend to be rather slow. The hobby, in my observation, tends to be slow to adopt change. An extra step in that process is when there's been a regulatory roadblock.

Consider, as an example, that SSB came on the scene in 1933, but the ARRL didn't get into it (beyond the usual committees study of the mode) until 1947 when Byron Goodman started his QST column, “On the Air with Single Sideband”. And the first WAC/WAS awards in SSB went out in 1956. But we're still only talking about a few hundred stations with the ability. Despite this, the (rather heated) back and forth between the SSB crowd and the AM boys continued until well into the 1960's. In the end, the only thing that stopped those arguments was the then new argument over the value of "incentive licensing". ... which I note the old timers of today arguing FOR, while a goodly number of them were dead set against THAT change in the day.

So in the end, SSB took over 30 years to become really accepted.

Resistance to change. The pattern of this is well-established.
Other examples.... No code tickets. DIgi modes. I could give more, but you get the picture, I'm sure.

We're about to see it again, with this new regulation and the standards that will eventually come from it. What will those modes be? I suggest the ones who make that happen... the ones that will make that decision, will be the early adoptors and creators of modes that can be used in the new bandwidth.... with around half the ham radio population dragging their heels as they usually have historically.

So what will you and I get out of the new regs? I fear we won't live long enough to see what becomes of them.

Engaging with young folks, teaching Ham Radio

It's true, that are some  who will tell us that we really have no idea who Younger hams are and how to connect with them, and on that rather weak excuse, refuse to try.
 

Actually, however, I think we do know who we're dealing with.

We're talking about a group of folks who are technically adept to the point where they're the ones who get called to (As an example) solve computer issues that vex their grandparents repeatedly. A group of people who are used to the idea of carrying around more computing horsepower in their pockets than they had aboard the Lunar lander and know how to use it effectively. In the end we're talking about a group of people who scare the living poop out of their elders in terms of their tech ability, at least from a user standpoint.... and frankly, I can't help thinking this is the reason the Hams of today are reluctant to engage with the IPhone crowd.... or even more, the Android crowd. (Given the android is somewhat more accessible in it's internals.)

The trick is to get their curiosity peaked into finding out what's under the hood of radio, and learning about THAT.

Obligatory Warning: Once you get to that point, mixing the old and new technologies will be a natural thing for that crowd...That kind of melding of skillsets is going to be a natural for these folks. I speak from personal experience here, being someone who was a computer hobby type back in the 70's and once I left the broadcast industry, brought the skills of both fields to my Ham pursuits.

I wonder if that, too, isn't the cause of some reluctance on the part of today's hams to engage with tomorrow's. Look at the resistance to digi modes, etc. This new kind of Ham will bring changes with it that some are going to be unwilling to accept. But as Vince Gill sang:

"Just teach 'em what you know
and pass it on down...
Even though you built it
It's a young man's town."

Advantages of automatic logging?

 At the moment, my logs contain, 5793 QSO's of which, 4417 are confirmed. That comes out a hair over a 76% confirmation rate.  How is that confirmation figure so high after only a couple of years on the air?  Simple enough; Automation.

The vast majority of my contacts are either SSB or FT*.  Allowing for the slop in the numbers created by the smattering of other modes in my log,  that makes it that there are about 4900 contacts logged in either FT8 or FT4, or about 870 SSB loggings. 

I could dive into these numbers further, but it's clear to me there's a decided advantage in the digital modes in terms of logging new countries. Which in turn, suggests that the tendency is to log/ and confirm SSB QSO's less.

I'll dive into this more as times allow.

Tornado!!!

Technology and the personal connection

 My wife's gotten into playing the guitar lately, in a big way. She loves playing the thing. It does my heart good to see her dive into this thing with both feet.
But watching her go through this process, has got me to thinking about the physical relationship between music and those listening to it, and playing it.

There is an addicting quality I think, to playing music. And frankly years ago there was a similar quality to listening to music. There was a physical relationship in both cases.

Things have changed, however.
Consider the idea that with vinyl records and to a somewhat lesser extent with tape, there was a physical action going on and there was an interaction between the listener and the material being listened to. There's a record going around.

There's a tape in that machine that you can see being played. You had to put something there, you actually have possession and control of something that makes that sound. The equipment requires at least basic upkeep and a basic understanding to make those sounds. The maintenance and operations of such beasts is as much an art form as it is a science. There is a personal interaction at that level between you and the music.

With some more recent formats, say, CDs, and certainly with MP3s and streaming, there's nothing of the sort going on. There is no physical connection between the music being played and the listener. And it got me to thinking that maybe that's part of the reason why music hasn't been selling all that well lately. There's no holding it in your hand, no watching it being played. No technical expertise required to make all that happen on the listener end.

(Say what you will about the quality of MP3s, I will likely agree.... but frankly that's a discussion for another time.)

In the days of vinyl and whatnot there was a lot of listener input to the Hobby, if you will. That's no longer true.
I can't help but wonder if that isn't a major reason why sales of music has been dropping off, and why high-end stereo stores aren't doing well except for those engaging in sales of retro material and equipment..... The Resurgence of tape and vinyl.

Granted, the music isn't what it used to be either. For the most part it's been absolute crap for the last 20 years. But I'm starting to think that that's only half the issue. And the Resurgence of tape and of vinyl records for home use speaks loudly to me on that that point.

But but you know, about that as well, so much of today's music is being played on equipment and instruments that are as plug and play as the MP3 player.

Example:
It's certainly a lot more costly, less dependable, and certainly more fragile to carry a Hammond B3 /Leslie 147 combination around on the road with you everywhere you go. So, most people simply carry the synthesized equivalent. And it simply does not sound the same. Sorry, it just doesn't.

Another example would be Auto-Tune. Does anybody record vocals without it anymore? In listening to the radio these days, one has to wonder.

For that matter radio is another example of what I'm talking about here. Years ago every music station that you listened to had very little if any automation, or at the very least it was quite primitive and required a lot of user input. (An exception might be Drake Cherault, and their beautiful music systems.)
Back when top 40 radio was King, you had one or two folks on at all times who knew very very well how to run a manual live control board. Not only was there an art form to running the equipment but there was also an art form to making the sound. Every mix on the air was done live, you used Records & Tapes. There was "no holds barred" talent involved, there was a direct connection between the people on the air and the listener. I suggest that's one reason that Top40 music of the period remains popular to this day; there was a connection between the music and the listener that was aided by the relationship between the radio talent, and the listener.

Not so, anymore.

These days radio stations can run 24 hours a day without any human input at all. Every single element is pre-recorded, voice tracked, the mixdowns on-air between each element, are sloppy at best, the connection between the broadcaster and The listener is completely gone. And radio, is, as an industry, alas, is struggling, and wondering where their listeners went. Radio has become bland, impersonal, mechanized. And all of this before we come to AI running the show, which I assure you is coming and in a few cases is already here.

So again we come to the question... Have we succeeded in separating ourselves from our music by means of Technology?

(---

So runs the bit I wrote for general consumption a few years back and to the question I'll raise, here:

How does this trend i mention above, (possibly) affect Ham radio? Some of you will see where I'm going with this already, but let's spell it out:

I must wonder if the objections to the digi modes, the FT*'s etc, is not rooted in the same trends I note in the above piece. I must admit that it's possible, but if so, there's a lot of Ham ops mislabeling their objections, to the detriment of their own arguments.

If the comparison is true, (Obviously, I think it is) then the objection driving the complaints about digi modes, is the lack of human connection. And so anything that reduces that connection is labeled as "Not Ham Radio".

Yet, we are without question a technical hobby, a tech minded group of folks. Ham radio is placed in a rather unique position.... we're supposed to be on the cutting edge, at least if you take our charter seriously, which seems to suggest that the goals of maintaining that connection and being of the techie cutting edge, (At least at the current levels of technology) are mutually exclusive.
Is there a solution to this disconnect?

EmCon rears it's head again

 With the comment period 9n the fcc's new rules proposal for 60 m the arrl has responded with a call to amateurs to comment on the proposal with specific emphasis on the use of the band for public service and the experiences of individual hanlms in that context.

This response from the league goes directly to what I have been saying all along about the league using emergency communications as the wedge to drive governmental policy as regards ham radio. Not only operating privileges but a whole host of issues such as regulations on antennas global installations and so on.

Like it or not, Newington obviously feels that emergency communication is the best argument they have for defending any and all of amateur radio operation.

Iirc, one of the purposes of granting amateurs access to the 60-m band was the desire for interoperability between amateur stations and the United States military. I can't think of anything, personally, that would negatively affect that interoperability than lowering licensed power levels to the relative equipment of citizens Bank. Indeed in looking over this new proposal from the commission I can't imagine what got into their heads, and what the purpose of this new rulemaking is. Perhaps some of you have some insight on that point.

All of that said, I will repeat what I said a couple of months ago: The constant drumbeat from some amateurs that amateur radio is not an emergency service may technically be correct but in my view of the league in their efforts to protect what operating privileges we have.

Now, anyone who's read any of my stuff goes that I'm no fan of the league, but in this at least they are correct. If there is in fact a stronger argument to be placed before the FCC then the standard SHTF scenario, I've yet to hear it.