I have an amateur radio license from the FCC, so I waste time playing with high voltage electricity, seeing how far my bleeps and blorps can travel. It’s a fun and highly educational hobby, and getting licensed is very easy since they removed the morse code requirement years ago. You’ll find lots of guides and lots of what I’ll post here is posted elsewhere, but there’s probably some utility in seeing it collected in one place.
Let’s get a few pitfalls and potholes out of the way:
- You do not need to pay for study materials. The test and its answers are posted on the internet, and there are countless hours of video tutorial sessions on various video sites. As long as they’re referencing the current question pool, they’re all good.
- Do NOT use your home address for your initial registration with the FCC! Sure, you can change it later, but the change is recorded on the public FCC site and the history of all of your addresses is publicly available.
- Do NOT recklessly give out your ham radio callsign. Anybody can spend thirty seconds to go to the FCC website– or any other website like QRZ– and look up any and every callsign that’s ever been issued; since your callsign is linked to your real name and your address, it’s incredibly unsafe. The FCC, like any other government agency, is living in the past. There are some motions to get them to improve their security, but that’s too far off in the future to help any of us.
- The benefit to learning the ins and outs of FCC regulations is that you learn loopholes. You MUST identify your station at the beginning and the end of every transmission (“Whiskey One Alfa Whiskey”), you CANNOT encrypt your transmissions except when used to control model craft, and you MUST use English in some parts of the transmission (“This is W1AW calling twenty meters CQ”) but there is no rule stating your conversation must be in English, only that it is unencrypted. This means you CANNOT transmit secret codes (“Wounds My Heart With Monotone Laughter”) but you CAN speak in any other language.
- Unless you are a habitual nuisance to large numbers of operators, the FCC does not typically have the time, resources or inclination to track down every rule-breaker on the air. Amateur radio is largely self-regulating, which means the operators themselves are primarily responsible for good conduct and proper operation. With that in mind, VHF and UHF signals are easily tracked to the point where informal competitions are held to find secretly placed rogue transmitters (“Foxhunting”). Tracking a HF frequency, on the other hand, will only give you a rough approximation of a station’s location.
- You do NOT need to spend a lot of money on the radio OR the antenna. In both cases, you can either build your own equipment out of junk laying around the house (a quarter wave ground plane antenna out of a wire coat hanger, or a Yagi out of a tape measure, for example), or buy used equipment. With the proper application of electrical knowledge and a soldering iron, it’s even possible to resurrect ancient “broken” radios from the 40s and 50s.
- You do NOT need to erect a huge tower with a massive antenna. If you have access to a tall tree and are able to loft a pilot line twenty or thirty feet in the air, you can hang a number of long wire antennas. Black colored wire is invisible among branches and foliage, and blue colored wire is invisible against the sky; these antennas are practically invisible.
- Despite everything above and the availability of a vast array of better options, militias and other Live Action Role Playing losers still love to use amateur radio for their infantile fantasies. Unencrypted, too! What’s more, they advertise their operational frequencies on the internet! You’re not in Red Dawn, you’re not a militia loser, don’t do this! Where amateur radio really shines is in the aftermath of natural disasters when you really can reach out across vast distances to get messages to loved ones when the power, cell and internet services are all down. With that in mind, you’re just somebody with a radio providing a useful service to your local mutual aid efforts; this doesn’t turn you into SuperEMT or UltraParamedic, so don’t act like a whacker.
- Just like the internet, not every amateur radio operator is a good person or has your best interests at heart.
I won’t be posting much in this category, but it’s nice to get things started.