Amateur Radio

This hobby page is all about Amateur Radio! My radio callsign is AB1CT. I've been involved with Amateur Radio for over 14 years. I got my first ticket, a word we use for an FCC license, back in 1992.

History

Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is a hobby enjoyed by several hundred thousand people in the United States and by over a million people worldwide. Amateur radio operators call themselves "radio hams" or simply "hams." The word "HAM" as applied to 1908 was the station call of the first amateur wireless stations operated by some amateurs of the Harvard Radio Club. They were ALBERT S. HYMAN, BOB ALMY, and POOGIE MURRAY. At first they called their station"HYMAN-ALMY-MURRAY". Tapping out such a long name in code soon became tiresome and called for a revision.They changed it to "HYALMU", using the first two letters of each of their names. Early in 1910 some confusion resulted between signals from the amateur wireless station "HYALMU" and a Mexican ship named "HYALMO". They decided to use only the first letter of each name, and the station call became "HAM".

To become a radio ham, you must pass an examination. Wireless amateur communication is done on numerous bands (relatively narrow frequency segments) extending from 1.8 MHz (a wavelength of about 160 meters) upwards through several hundred gigahertz (wavelengths in the millimeter range). There are several license classes. The more privileges a class of license conveys, the more difficult is the examination that one must pass to obtain it.

Amateur radio operation is fun, and that is one of the main reasons hams do it. But ham radio can provide communication during states of emergency. Ham radio works when all other services fail. After Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the utility grid was destroyed over hundreds of square miles. All cellular towers and antennas were blown down. Only amateur radio, the Citizens Radio Service ("Citizens Band"), and a few isolated pay phones with underground lines provided communication between the outside world and the public in the affected area.

Amateur radio operators are known as technical innovators, and have been responsible for important discoveries. For example, in the early part of the 20th century, government officials believed that all the frequencies having wavelengths shorter than 200 meters (1.5 MHz) were useless for radio communications, so they restricted radio amateurs to these frequencies. It was not long before ham radio operators discovered the truth, and were communicating on a worldwide scale using low-power transmitters. Thus the shortwave radio era began.

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links

Here are cool Amateur Radio websites:

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