Amateur Radio - Parts 1 thru 8

[pLEXX]

cool thing :]

[N1TZU]

Hello Folks, Tony has a very good wright up going here on amateur radio, I've enjoyed the hobby for many years now, and have only scratched the surface of all the types of communications that can be used.....Bob...

[Mudderoy]

By the time I was 15 I had been studying the electronic theory and felt I would have my license fairly soon. I thought it would be fun to have a real HAM radio, but they were so expensive. One of the other catalogs (Radio Shack being the primary) I enjoyed was the one from Heathkit. In fact my parents had bought me a AM radio kit a couple of years later. We knew nothing about electronic construction so I used my Mom's "Weller" 300 watt soldering iron and some solder she had left over from making stain glass windows.

I read the instructions and put it all together. It worked, sort of.

I saw a Heathkit HW-101 Amateur radio transceiver. 80 meters through 10 meters. CW, and SSB. Here is a good number of things to explain.

80 meters is the length needed for a full sized antenna for a specific frequency. The HW-101 was capable of tuning five bands. 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters. This meant to be able to transmit on all five bands I would need 5 different antennas!

CW is the two letter designator for Morse Code. Those beeps that you may associate with old World War II movies, and most recently in "Independence Day". It is basically just turning the transmitter on or off. SSB is a form of AM audio processing, or modulation. SSB takes 1/2 of the power that a AM signal would use. Again, a popular movie that used this type of audio modulation was "Star Wars". They used it to simulate communications between the Rebel fighters and base during the Death Star attack sequence. Since the audio processing is very narrow it often distorts the voice of the person transmitting. You can still understand them the just sounds funny.

After saving up 1/2 of the money for the HW-101 kit, we drove into Houston to the Heathkit store and picked it up. I had made friends with a guy that was going to college studying electronics. I took the kit to his house and I spent the next four months building this radio. He was able to answer questions and check my work.



By the time I finished the kit I had my learners permit and I was driving my Mom's Gremlin the short distance to his house. He did some basic checks of my work so we powered up the radio, and it came on, nothing caught fire, but it didn't work either.

I didn't some checking, but I was so SICK of working on it by now my parents were nice enough to send it to Heathkit and let them figure it out. Turned out it was a few minor mistakes, the the final power output section required more work. That was the last part of the construct, and my patients were wearing thin.

I receive the radio back from Heathkit in a fully operational state.

Now I had a radio but no license. I really didn't have anyway of getting a license since at that time to obtain your first HAM license, Novice class, you needed to find a HAM with a General class license or above to administer a multiple choice test, and a Morse code test of 5 words per minute.



By now I had my own car, 1973 Pontiac Ventura, and had been talking on the CB for years. I knew enough about radio and HAM radio to be able to spot a CB antenna installation, and a HAM antenna installation.

I drove around the neighborhood, and then the nearby neighborhoods searching. Finally I saw one. Lots of wire antenna, and a tower with a antenna that you could rotate to point it at the person you were talking to.

I got the name from the mailbox, and looked it up in the phone book. I called the number and explained what I was doing. The HAM was more than happy to assist me in obtaining my first license.

I had studied from a Radio Shack book and a Radio Shack audio tape for the Morse code. So at age 16 I went to this guys house met him for the first time, and he administered the test. It was all over in under an hour, I pasted! It was very simple. He signed the proper forms and told me he would send it off (mail) to the FCC.

What seemed like another lifetime my Novice Class license finally arrived in the mail. It was something like three to four months of waiting. I was assigned the call of WN5ZDD. N for Novice.

Now as a Novice classed Amateur radio operator I was only allowed to transmit CW, or Morse Code. So for the next year, or so, all my conversations on the HAM radio were in Morse Code. It was fun building antennas, trying them out and seeing how far I could communicate. I also found it very interesting how each band "acted". They all behaved differently. Daytime, nighttime, Winter, Summer, Fall, even the Sun effected how the bands would act.

I had noticed some of this when I was talking on the CB. Skip, or signals coming from long distances, happened more during the day and almost always faded away by 9pm to Midnight.

More to come...

[Mudderoy]

As you can imagine at 16 I was more interested in girls that anything else, including school. I was very shy so I pretty well kept to myself. I enjoyed looking at the girls, but talking was really out.

I also focused a fair amount of my attention on my car. I had to start working on it to keep it going, plus adding L60s and custom wheels (American Racing aluminum slot mags!) I even outlined a "Starsky and Hutch" stripe on the side of my Ventura out of white pin stripe. My intention was to pain it in, someday. I know, it was pretty lame, but I liked it at the time.

During all this (including high school) I found time to study for my Technician Class license. It didn't require any additional More code tests, just a written exam. With this license I could actually TALK on the radio. I would be limited to talking on VHF and UHF.

I mention 80 through 10 meters earlier. This grouping of bands is called HF, or HIGH FREQUENCY. VHF is for VERY HIGH FREQUENCY, and UHF ULTRA HIGH FREQUENCY. HF was the first band that radio used. Marconi for example, although I think he used a SPARK GAP transmitter initially which is basically a lightning machine!

As the frequency goes up the antenna gets shorter! At 2 meters, VHF a mobile antenna is only about 1.75 feet long. Contrast that to a 80 meter mobile antenna would have to be 62 feet long! More on this later.

2 meter is very interesting. You are limited to 1000 watts, but most people had radios that transmitted about 10 to 20 watts. The distance you could talk with someone was a little better than CB, but this was largely due to the band being so quiet. There is no "skip" like there is on the CB band, in fact when you transmit on 2 meters the signal leaves the Earth completely! 2 meters is one of the bands that HAM radio operators use to transmit signals to satellites and bounce signals off the Moon and Venus (as mention earlier).

The really cool thing about 2 meters was that HAM radio operators have set up something called "repeaters". A repeater, listens on one frequency for a signal, and when it hears one, it transmits what it hears on a different frequency. If you have a radio that can have different send and receive frequencies, you can use a repeater to boost your send and receive!

How? Well say you are driving around in your Jeep and you tune your 2 meter radio "rig" to a repeater. You set your receive frequency for say 146.66 MHz and you set your transmit frequency to 146.06 MHz. Now when you send you transmit 600 KHz lower than the receive frequency. The repeater is set up just the opposite, it receives on 146.06 MHz and transmits on 146.66 MHz. The repeater's antenna is over 300 feet in the air. This means it can receive, clearly, weak signals from mobiles transmitting only 10 or 20 watts from miles away. The repeater's transmitter has a 100 watt output, so not only does it transmit much farther than a mobile station, it is also stronger by a factor of 5 to 10 times!

The effect of this is that your mobile can now communicate with someone not 5 or 10 miles away, but between 30 and 50 miles away! And since the communications mode is FM there is little noise, if any and the voice of the person you are listening to is reproduced in beautiful "mono" FM sound!

I was blown away with this mode of communications. It was very fun being able to talk to local HAMs. In the Houston area there were 20+ repeaters to choose from, and that was back in the late 70's.

You may be somewhat familiar with this type of "repeater" communications. They use the same basic approach with cell phones! The cell site "repeater" and the cell phone you have is a miracle of communications electronics. Not only can the cell phone automatically switch transmit and receive frequencies it can also switch from one cell site to another while you are traveling at 80 miles per hour down a highway. All the cell sites "talk" to each other, and your cell phone. Commands are sent to your phone telling it what to do next.

Police, Fire and Rescue services have used repeaters for years as well.

Some satellites have repeaters built into them that HAMs can use, only instead of being able to talk to someone 30 to 50 miles away you can talk to them thousands of miles away.

Truly amazing and really simple when you understand how it is done.

I went back to Heathkit and purchased a mobile 2 meter radio. I build it (older and wiser now) took my time, checked everything. It didn't work!

Off to Heathkit it went. It was a really simple fix and I had it back quickly. I'll say this, 2 meters is probably the most fun I have ever had on HAM radio. No static, no noise. Just just turn up the squelch and listen to the good time radio until someone starts talking on 2 meters. Turn down the music and have a conversation.



In fact because of the repeater installations it made a very old wish of mine come true. A walky talky that you could actually talk to people further away that shouting distance! I purchased a ICOM 2AT "handy talky" and with 1.5 watts I was able to talk to people through the local repeater from work, from my home, or from my car.



I neglected to mention that a Novice class license expires after 1 (maybe 2) years. So I had to upgrade or lose my HAM license. I was a Novice class HAM for maybe 6 to 9 months, then I decided I needed to upgrade. After I had studied for the Technician class enough, maybe 2 weeks, I made the drive into the FCC field office to take my test. I passed the multiple guess test. My call became WB5ZDD.

Since I could now TALK on the HAM radio I had to deal with the use of phonetics. It is sometimes difficult for people to make out the letters and number in your call sign. Some HAMs would come up with clever words to make it easy, and funny, for other HAMs to remember their call.

I would say my call sign is Willy Baker number FIVE Zulu Delta Delta, or W-B-5 Zebras Don't Doit!

When I upgraded to my next class license and requested a new call sign, I have an even better series of words that I use now!

More to come...