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.