What No One Told You About Amateur Radio

what haven't they told you about ham radio what are those secrets that you really only find out once you've kind of already stumbled down the rabbit hole and maybe bumped your head a few times on the way well today I'm going to talk about it here on the ham radio crash course let's get [Music] started the first thing the first misconception people often have about amateur radio is that it's a narrowish or actually just smaller hobby than it appears to be it's like the Tardis from Doctor Who once you actually get into it you realize it's way bigger than you expect and unfortunately at least here in the United States the way our licensing system works it gives the impression that there is kind of something smallish in the beginning but in actuality it's it's much much bigger and you only find out how big after you get your second license which is the general license and then fleshing that out a little bit this is a VHF UHF handheld radio when you get your technician license you get full access to VHF UHF 6 M portions of 10 m and a couple of other bands generally when people start out an amateur radio they spend a lot of time talking on repeaters using a mobile radio in their car or using a handheld just like this the downside is that that type of communication is line of site communication the RF the radio frequencies coming out of this antenna like to go as far as it can before it is either absorbed by something in our atmosphere or punches right through the atmosphere and keeps on going yes this can talk to the space station which is a really cool Niche portion of the Hobby in itself but is a little bit not expected which leads me to my second misconception this will not do 300 miles it won't do 200 miles it won't do 100 Mil you're likely only going to get 3 mil radio to radio out of this or with the help of a repeater which is a radio station maybe on a Mountaintop or in a municipal building with a tall tower something along those lines you get up to 20 30 40 maybe even 50 60 miles out of that those are radio devices though that have to work for this radio to talk to whomever it is you're trying to talk to one of the questions I get the most often on my channel is someone is new to radio and they come to me and say Josh I want to talk to my father and mother they're 350 Mi away from me or Josh my kid just went to college and he is 500 mil from me what is the most effective way for me to communicate with them over ham radio and unfortunately I have to be the bearer of bad news and probably tell you something that you were not told when you were getting started is that to have consistent communication between two parties the same parties day in and day out regardless of the time of day with radio is actually kind of difficult and I'll try to explain step one of course we have to admit that the world is not flat but because it's a ball and because this transmits line of sight eventually that RF is going to go out into space well we get around that by using lower frequency radios called high frequency those radios using the appropriate antennas which are much larger will refract their r F off of our atmosphere that gives you beyond line of sight communication that's what allows me and other hams that are General and extra some technicians to be able to make those cross country cross the world cross Continent Communications now an important note on that is well yes we are doing some very impressive contacts I'm not always talking to the same people when I go do an activation on a Tuesday in a park versus talk on my radio at home from here and the reason is is the atmosphere is a highly random thing that we have no control over when I shoot my RF Into The Ether even if I have an antenna that's designed to focus the RF as much as possible in a direction maybe the direction of the loved ones you're trying to talk to you have no guarantee that the atmosphere is going to work with you and give you that perfect little bounce to be able to drop the r right into their backyard into their home antenna to be able to try to achieve specific communication Windows of high success you will need to use atmospheric calculators which exists I'll post one in the description that you can go check out and you'll have to Avail yourself of radio frequencies and antennas that are designed to give you more of a close in footprint there is an antenna design called nvis that fires more of your RF vertically that hits the the atmosphere and comes back down yes it is designed to be closer in but a lot of people use that for this trying to get 3400 mil away type of thing for those that are trying to make those close in Communications you're actually going to have to size down into the lower frequency radio spaces which require larger antennas 40 m and 80 M that is the representation of the full wavelength for that antenna basically roughly so if you put up a dipole which is usually a half wavelength antenna that dipole is going to be 20 M long in wire just for 40 m not a small amount of space required for that however if you do this it is likely that you will be able to attain some kind of routine in which you would find a good communication window with whomever it is you're trying to hit Now spoiler alert this this can get expensive for you in a couple of instances the first is that you will likely need a decent 100 wat base station radio with a good receiver what we often call a front end as well as the appropriate feed line and the appropriate antennas to be able to work and those will need to be in both locations so a child going to college living in a dorm likely is not going to work out very well in this type of situation at least something that they can consistently just pick up and start talking to you back home misconception number three is that there are Sage likee Wizards we call them Elmer or traditionally they're called Elmer that know everything possible about radio and they are willing to stop everything they're doing to help you the reality is is that there are some people that do know an incredible amount of information on this wonderful Hobby and they do make themselves available to many people people but unfortunately those numbers are starting to go down I would say mainly due to the proliferation of the internet and some of our really really skilled hams just getting a little bit older we're starting to see a trend where more people are coming online and so they're not just sitting down with people at a club and taking the time to have this one-on-one tutelage because of that if you are one of those not so fortunate people to not live in an area with really good clubs you're generally going to have to gleam the information you can off of the internet which I'm not calling myself really an Elmer and I'm certainly not one of these super smart people that I search for and like to ask questions of but I do have a YouTube channel that I do try to help what I do want to recommend is that you join our community's Discord the ham radio crash course on that Community is that you will find hams that are skilled in one or two things that they are very good at and they can help you but you are not going to find the Gandalf who knows all the things things you're going to find a couple of people who do this really well and then a couple that do this really well the fourth misconception is that amateur radio is cheap or that there's some assumption that it's going to get cheaper let me get out of the way first that there are plenty of inexpensive options right there are inexpensive handheld radios and there are more inexpensive HF higher frequency right refraction refraction Bend Bend Bend Beyond line a site those radios though start to Trend a little bit to the more expensive side amateur radio is one of those hobbies that uh reward you for doing a lot of things on your own we call it home brew if you want to home brew your own antennas you will save a considerable amount of money if you're buying all the parts and all the things that go into that yourself there is a Vibrant Community of people that Homebrew their own radios and they have a ton of fun doing it I would say that most people though are likely not doing the home brew of their own radios particularly to start and that's something that they evolve or graduate themselves into as they learn more and more about Electronics radio fundamentals and our hobby misconception five this is a big generalization but be prepared for this one there are those in the community that are very active with emergency communication and personal radio preparedness and then there are those that aren't and they're actively not as in so far as that they want to distance the radio hobby from preparedness Preppers have gotten kind of a bad name in the community and it's through inexpensive radios like the bow Fang that brought them into the community again this isn't me this is me talking about what uh is going on with our community then because of that and because of those hams that well may not be the best operators uh also are really not being helped by some of the old guard who are not bringing those people up to speed or helping them again going back to my Elmer comment on what people should be doing in the hobby we do find ourselves in a place where there are those that want to do this preparedness stuff and then there are those who are just totally against it and they're not about it is it is it either 50/50 no not at all but they exist and if you are one or the other and you encounter the other just try to be nice or just know going in that you are going to bump into people that this is not their thing and that's okay to speaking of personal preparedness misconception number six encrypted radios are not lawful in amateur radio right if you didn't know this now you do you're not supposed to have encrypted radios there are spaces for that in fact this is a business radio this business radio being a Motorola if you are on business frequencies and you have a business license then you can use the encryption of assuming you have the right keying material to do that on this radio and that's legal this has nothing to do those frequencies have nothing to do with amateur radio frequencies so you don't do that on amateur radio and why not since we're talking about radio Services misconception number seven an amateur radio is not supposed to be able to intercommunicate with a land mobile radio a gmrs radio an F FRS radio or a CB radio those are sand boxes of frequencies that are alone for those Serv gmrs radios need to stay within gmrs frequencies amateur radios we stay within our bands what's the caveat to that well as an amateur radio operator I can take this business radio and I can reprogram it and I can use it on my handband so far as it performs as I expect it's not doing encryption or any other weird stuff it's it's working as a voice transmitter or something along those lines right so that's okay all those other radio Services though we're not supposed to to intermingle with them we're not supposed to use our Ham radios to talk on CB and vice versa now is anyone really coming to do something if you do that my experience my understanding is no and caveat this is not legal advice I'm just telling you what I've seen in this community in the time that I've been involved in it which brings me to misconception number eight the FCC used to go after people they used to send letters to H telling that them that they need to behave better on the bands and really the point should be struck about the FCC in that there are some of us who remember when the FCC was actually like an entity not to be reckoned with but was out there making the bands kind of more of a civil place or at least was a force that you could point to and say like yeah there's somebody out there on that Watchtower now not so much they do go after hardcore complaints we actually have seen an uptick in uh violators getting fined for gmrs and and CB so uh we have also seen that with amateur radio as well but these are usually like egregious offenders so it's still happens but it's incredibly rare and it's certainly not going to be like somebody using uh a ham radio on gmrs or a gmrs radio on ham radio like that's really just not really that going to be that big a deal so FYI misconception number nine and this one's actually a big one it comes up a lot it's it's a finely nuanced point but it shapes a lot of thoughts that people have understanding uh our wonderful Hobby and that is we're licensed I'm licensed ki6 nazz uh you have a license for gmrs but but that license makes you mandates that you use a gmrs license obviously CB radios they don't have a license they did Once Upon a Time but with the amateur radio license you're given a whole lot of responsibility in that uh you are the one that is going to deploy a radio so you are responsible whether that is a good working radio or a bad badly working radio so because you're the licensed operator it's basically up to you to make sure that your station is in good working order you can't just punt it off to COBRA or you know one of the various other manufacturers of other radio Services radio and say like no their radio is screwed up go after them number 10 and this one is a very big one that really hits a lot of new hams ham radio is not a smartphone there is nothing in amateur radio that basically works like a smartphone does there is no Apple Computers of amateur radio or Samsung or whatever Google right sure you can use your smartphone to interface your radios in a lot of cases but there's nobody out there that is integrating Hardware to software in user experience and all that stuff the way they do with phones the people who make amateur radio software and even some of the amateur radios are doing it because they're Advocates of certain portions of the hobby but not necessarily all of them when you go buy an iPhone or an Android phone you're expected a certain level of capabilities across the board for lots of different things that really doesn't apply with amateur radio if you want to do slow scan television you got to go download a slow scan television application again there is no unifying simplifier within amateur radio you are the sole driver behind the wheel of your amateur radio experience there's no one you can really pay to subcontract out all of the complexity sure we use things like ham radio Deluxe is a inclusive software package that does a lot of the heavy lifting for logging and some of the digital modes and just interfacing with your radio but you still have to know how to use it you still have to get trained up to do it so just because you go by a top-of-the-line radio and spend thousands of dollars it's not going to be a push button thing you're still expected to learn when you should be deploying filtering when you should put on the attenuator when you should be using RIT for you CW operators there's all kinds of explicitly important things that you have to learn if you're coming up in this hobby even important things for just running this simple handheld that we just can't obfuscate out and make the software smarter to keep you dumb that means to truly excel in this hobby you're going to have to get in there in the trenches in the mud the Techno mud it's fun mud I promise and learn how the stuff works get engaged with it it's stem so get involved you'll have a lot of fun believe me when I say that none of these misconceptions are insurmountable problems you just need to slightly twist your reality a little bit when you think about our cool Hobby and what you can do with it if this was helpful to you I'd like to hear about it post a comment below please consider subscribing click that Bell I go live every Saturday and I cover topics that might be new and interesting to you but also I do a Q&A session called hams helping hams if you hop on there either in the text chat in YouTube on Twitch or join our Discord ver is a voice chat we can answer your questions live and let me tell you we go for hours just answering amateur radio questions so I hope you consider joining me I'm Josh ki6naz thanks so much for watching and I'll talk to you later 73 this is how out of focus I can be when recording isn't that crazy it's like wildly out of focus you got itoo I just dropped a Motorola on my foot it's good thing I was wearing my Crocs

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 290,267

Keywords: ham radio, Ham radio crash course, how to get your technician license, what to do with ham radio, having fun with ham radio, how to run a ham radio net, hoshnasi, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, qrp antenna, hf radio antenna, calling cq on hf, ham radio review, amateur radio review, ham radio secrets, amateur radio misconceptions, ham radio misconceptions, ham radio for beginners

Id: naJ4V0L1GUM

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023