available through local clubs (see the section “Clubs and online groups,” later in this chapter).
WHERE THE HAMS ARE
The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU; www.iaru.org) counts about 160 countries with a national radio society. Counting all the hams in all those countries is difficult, because in some countries, amateur stations and operators have separate licenses. The United States alone had more than 760,000 hams as of 2020 — the most ever. You may not be surprised to hear that China has the fastest-growing amateur population; Thailand and India aren’t far behind.
Because radio signals know no boundaries, hams have always been in touch across political borders. Even during the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet hams made regular contact, fostering long personal friendships and international goodwill. Although the Internet makes global communications easy, chatting over the airwaves with someone in another country or participating in a planet-wide competition is exciting and creates a unique personal connection.
www.arrl.org/international-regulatory.
Tuning into Ham Radio
Your interest in ham radio may be technical, you may want to use ham radio for public service or personal communications, or you may just want to join the fun. These are all perfectly valid reasons for getting a ham radio license.
THE RADIO IN YOUR POCKET
You already use a radio to transmit all the time, although you probably don’t think of it that way. Your mobile phone is actually a very sophisticated, low-power portable radio! You don’t have to have a license to use it, of course; the phone company takes care of that. Nevertheless, your phone is really a radio, transmitting and receiving radio waves that are very similar to some of the radio waves that hams use. As you find out more about ham radio, you’ll also find out more about radio waves in general, and you’ll begin to look at your mobile phone in a whole new light.
Using electronics and technology
Ham radio lets you work closely with electronics and technology (see Chapter 2). Transmitting and receiving radio signals can be as much of an electronics-intensive endeavor as you like. By digging into the technology of ham radio, you’re gaining experience with everything from basic electronics to cutting-edge wireless techniques. Everything from analog electronics to the latest in digital signal processing and computing technology is applied in ham radio. Whatever part of electronic and computing technology you enjoy most, it’s all used in ham radio somewhere … and sometimes, all at the same time!
In this section, I give you a quick look at what you can do with technology.
Design and build
Just as an audiophile might, you can design and build your own equipment or assemble a station from factory-built components. All the components you need are widely available. Some of the original do-it-yourself (DIY) makers, hams delight in homebrewing, helping one another build and maintain stations. In software-defined radio (SDR) equipment, computer code is the new component, and I encourage you to experiment as much as you wish.
Experiment with radio waves
Besides being students of equipment and computers, hams are students of propagation, which is the means by which radio signals bounce around from place to place. Hams take an interest in solar cycles and sunspots and in the ways they affect the Earth’s ionosphere, that uppermost region of the atmosphere that reflects shortwave radio signals back to Earth. For hams, weather takes on new importance, too — microwave radio signals can travel long distances along storm fronts or reflect from rain or snow.
Create your own antennas
Antenna experimentation and computer modeling is a hotbed of activity in ham radio. New designs are created every day, and hams have contributed many advances and refinements to the antenna designer’s art. Antenna systems range from small patches of printed circuit-board material to multiple towers festooned with large rotating arrays. All you need to start growing your own antenna farm are some wire or tubing, a feed line, and some basic tools. I give you the full picture in Chapter 12.
Invent networks and signals
You can write software to create brand-new types of signals. Hams also develop systems that are novel hybrids of radio and the Internet. Hams developed packet radio, for example, by adapting data communication protocols used in computer networks to operate over amateur radio links. Packet radio is now part of many commercial applications, including your mobile phone.
The combination of GPS technology with the web and amateur mobile radios resulted in the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), which is now used around the world. For more information about these neat systems, see Parts 3 and 4 of this book.
Code yourself a radio
Modern radios are based on software-defined radio (SDR) technology, which allows the radio to adapt to new conditions or perform new functions, as I discuss in Part 4. Hams using design tools like GNU Radio (www.gnuradio.org) can experiment with all sorts of techniques to improve and customize their equipment. Digital signal processing (DSP) is a big part of ham radio and has created some very innovative designs, such as the FlexRadio Systems Maestro operating console shown in Figure 1-1.
FIGURE 1-1: The FlexRadio Systems Maestro combines traditional operating controls with the latest in software defined radio (SDR) design and display techniques.
Digitize
