Ham Radio stuff

[AJMD429]

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I keep thinking I need to get into this stuff. I actually have an amateur radio license but have never gotten on the air

https://hackaday.com/2022/11/15/getting ... a-baofeng/

Radio that doesn't have to go through controlled intermediaries is probably one of the few things that can help maintain freedom in the face of oppressive censorship.

[Grizz]

what license do you have? I've had two and they expired before i updated them. The government using its prerogative to cancel my ham radio time . . . .

however, in an emergency anyone can use any radio gear on any frequency if you are trying to get the government to rescue you . . .

1. those radios are so inexpensive i suggest you get a couple spares and put them in faraday cages in anticipation of the big bang.
2. learn morse code if you can find time. an audio tape is the best way. it's easy. it's fun. and it gets thru atmospherics better than voice, using less power.
3. get active soon. after the big bang when everything digital dies would be a poor time to learn.
4. think about building a vacuum tube transmitter and receiver. it's easy. it's fun. and it will survive an EMP event if you don't put anything silly into it. Running 5 watts into a tuned antenna on 80 or 40 or 20 meters can, depending on propagation, communicate with every continent.
5. look into hamfests where hams trade their stuff for someone else's stuff. perfect place to stumble onto a tube radio set that someone forgot they had.
6. nets are like forums. hams with common interests meet at scheduled times to check into the net and make themselves known. the repeaters are full of this stuff.
7. remember that until The EMP Event, religion and politics and encryption are illegal. of course one time pads among trusted individuals are unbreakable. last i heard.

I imagine active hams will respond. And remember, most ham rigs are easier to find than computer ip's . . .

[JimT]

Back during the 1980's the propagation was incredible. I had a Cobra Single Sideband CB with a VFO that I installed. I had a homebuilt 3 element beam antenna that I made from a 10 meter antenna and built it to work on 11 meters. I was running 5 watts. Our house set at almost 5000 feet elevation and I had the antenna 55 feet in the air. I have QSL from all over Eastern Europe, Canada, Alaska, South America. All just on a CB Single Sideband. I remember talking to one gentleman from Germany running a home built rig on 3 watts. It sounded like he was in the driveway.

At night when the air was still I talked on groundwave to people in Phoenix 150 miles away. Their signal would not even wiggle the meter but on SSB I could hear them very clearly. Those were fun days.

I had an old tube model Hallicrafter receiver that was made in the 1930's. I had a 90 foot long wire up and I used to listed to stations from all over the globe on that thing. The strongest signal came out of Quito, Ecuador .. Radio HCJB ... high in the Andes and eventually running I forget how many thousand watts. They had problems with melting the elements on their antenna for quite awhile.

Haven't done anything with radio in years. Doing some of the "outlaw" stuff we were always careful to stay clear of HAM frequencies. Weren't out to make anyone mad. Just having fun. In those days there were quite a large group of people on 11 meters .. not always in the CB frequencies.

[Grizz]

I remember HCJB. Forgot about them. In phx my folks gave me a receiver kit, and i built a cw 80M transmitter, xtl freq control, end-fed quarter wave on the ridge of the house, and worked western and midwest states in the middle of the night. what history test?

then on my fish boat i used a yaesu rig on 10M ssb fed into a trolling wire dipole, with a pacific ocean ground plane. had an hour long contact with a sheep rancher in new zealand. we got the atlas out and he told us his location. we home schooled the kids on the boat, and they got a world class geography lesson. unbelievable propagation quality.

I was listening to an east german ham, before the breakup, talking to someone somewhere. when he signed i tailended his freq with a cw call. his phone band was in my cw band and we had a cross mode contact. i used the mic key to send morse.

my maritime mobile station attracted a lot of attention with a few pileups to sort. the calls i enjoyed the most were the air-mobile calls, including some military crews and transpac commercial flights.

when 11M lit up I could hear mississippi river tugboats rag chewing in their dialect, booming in.

Doc got me searching and i got within one question of a pass on a tech practice test, so not too far off i can test again. will be my third license. then i'll wire up my commercial ssb radio and play with QRP HF CW again.

so many good memories. A 65 foot steel boat is an amazing broadcast platform . . .

[GunnyMack]

I still have a receiver that my Dad put together from Heathkit. I really need to get a wire up and do some listening.
I've had a CB in my truck since the 80's. When I was going to Canada fishing we all had radios in the trucks, even rigged a base and antenna for us to have coms. The radio I have now I bought after it was 'worked ' , supposedly it makes 9 or 10 watts.

[AJMD429]

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One of the things that kind of turned me off as soon as I got licensed (technician code-free) was that most of the commmunication I had opportunities to mess with was on repeaters and required knowing and entering all the access tones and stuff. I'm guessing that gets easy or can be automated once you know what you're doing, but the dependence on such 'infrastructure' just made it seem like it defeated the purpose of 'survival communications', because with a cellphone you can do the 'repeater' thing so conveniently in the before-the-EMP era anyway, and I doubt the repeater network would be up after that, OR if there were a totalitarian situation instituted.

I do think that if outdoor groups and church groups would get 'into' radio, especially repeater-less communication, it would help stabilize the nation a bit.