My path to hamming.

I'll let you know when i'm ready,, not sure my setup will talk across the street,, let alone all the way to alaska

 

50' of coax arriving today, can get my hf up and running finally. if internal tuner won't tune up well enough i may have to wait on the external i ordered. ready to try and reach some monkeys, always seems to take forever for stuff to arrive via post office. Have to stop buying stuff now, wife is going crazy, spent about $1800 on a scanner, 3 radios and accessories, lol, she said i could spend about half that, but you know how it goes..

 

Outstanding! Good deal and congratulations! I crack my Extra book several times a month because as you say, it's one you have to learn, not just study.

 

@ghrit - VE takes 20-30 minutes to read the manual and 10 minutes to take the test, which is open book.

It takes FAR longer to get them to respond to the application.

 

Don't pay any attention to anyone who derides "Appliance operators". That nonsense has been around as long as ham radio: I'd bet that the first guy who use a Ford spark coil instead of winding his own was labelled an "appliance operator".

You don't need the knowledge which was required in decades past because hams aren't doing the same job we did in decades past. It used to be that hams had to know Morse code because that was the mode used by ships at sea, by the military, and by the Coast Guard, and they all wanted recruits who were already trained.. Now, since geostationary satellites were invented, Morse isn't needed, so hams don't have to know it.

The knowledge needed today is how to deal with the problems of today: loss or overload of cellular coverage during large public gatherings or emergencies (such as after the Boston Marathon bombing), lack of data connections due to floods or earthquakes, and for small detached IP networks such as ampr.org.

Well, cutting a dipole is pretty simple, since the word "dipole" means a half-wave antenna. If you want to operate on 20 meters, your dipole will be 10 meters long; and sending on the 80 meter band would require a dipole 40 meters long, etc. As far as taking an antenna away from a home-based trial to a field deployment, that's what hams do every year at Field Day (which comes up in June), and practice often, but not always, diverges from theory. That, of course, is the whole point of Field Day: to learn what does, and doesn't work before the rain starts falling. There's no guarantee that someone will hear your call on any frequency, which is why it's best to get into an organized club and set up plans to contact others when you need their help or they need yours.

Morse Code was always the "gotta kill it" gremlin on the road to a ham license - back when the government and ships at sea and airliners all needed Morse operators to communicate for any long distance. Arthur C. Clarke popularized the idea of geostationary satellites back around 1948, (long before the technology that makes them work was available), but as soon as they were rocketed up to the Clarke belt, Morse became yesterday's news. There are a lot of hams who want to bring it back, but it's not an essential skill anymore unless you plan to work for the CIA, DIA, or one of the other TLA's that still keep track of Morse traffic in the third world.

The funny part is, Morse is still a viable and important mode for amateurs, for the same reasons it was the only thing used when spark radios were invented: sub-optimal antennas in tiny fields, battery power, and radio bands crowded with noise from computers all make Morse the mode of choice for top-of-the-line contesters, for insurgent armies in far-away places, and for youngsters who build a transmitters from a kit because it's all their allowance will allow. Penny for penny and dollar for dollar, Morse gets through when nothing else will.

FWIW. YMMV. Welcome to Mount Olympus!

William Warren