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A Month of Ham Radio
Saturday, February 5th, 2022 08:03 pmAt the start of December I stopped by the local Ham Radio Outlet store when I was in Denver for a COVID shot. I picked up the ARRL study guide for the Amateur Extra exam, but told myself I wouldn't read it until after the holidays because I'd be spending unhealthy amounts of time on a coding challenge. We started the new year at Valley View, since a couple days soaking in a spring without access to a computer sounded very appealing. I brought the exam guide along for those moments that I was relaxing out of the water, and got as far as the start of chapter 4, when the electronics material really picks up.
My throat started feeling scratchy on my last day at Valley View, and it turned into an unpleasant week that felt like a rough cold. A fancy home COVID test a couple days in and another one at the end of the week both turned up negative, so maybe my immune system is just incapable of fighting off a cold after two years holed up in my living room. (Fun fact: coronaviruses are often causes of the common cold.) Since I didn't want to go out and infect anyone, and it was cold and snowy outside anyway, I spent most of my free time the next week and a half buried in the book. While the electronics part of the Technician and General exam felt like I was relearning things I forgot almost 25 years ago in Physics II, the Extra exam was full of electrical circuit material I'm pretty sure I'd never encountered before. Electricity and magnetism was my weakest subject in physics class; I did better with relativity and quantum mechanics than E&M, for some reason.
When I started studying, I didn't have a test date in mind; I figured I'd test once I finished and felt like I knew what was going on. But there was a tempting testing opportunity coupled with a hamfest in Loveland in the middle of the month, so I stayed up to 1am on Friday night to finish the exam guide and didn't have a chance to review the electrical topics that I was still hazy on. Come Saturday I got up early and made it to the Larimer County Fairgrounds by 9:30, which was quite a feat given the "crack of 11" mornings I'd been having during the week. I missed 9 of 50 questions, which is still a passing grade, though a little disappointing. On one of the missed questions I should've trusted my logical brain rather than thinking I'd seen the question in a practice test and picking the surprising answer. I think the other eight were all electronics related, ranging from misidentifying a diode from a circuit diagram to getting the phase pattern wrong across a capacitor and inductor in series. I should probably get an electronics textbook or find a good YouTube series.
Amusingly, I didn't use my General class privileges in the half a year I had that license before upgrading to Extra. A General license lets a ham transmit on portions the HF bands, which can cover the whole country and, in good conditions, the whole world. At HF, antennas get pretty big, so the convenient handheld VHF/UHF radio with a short antenna is no longer an easy way to get in. Additionally, every antenna involves tradeoffs, and many good antennæ work on a limited set of bands. I got stuck in a bit of analysis paralasys where I didn't know what bands I was interested in because I didn't have an HF radio, and I didn't have an HF radio because I didn't have an antenna, and I didn't have an antenna because I didn't know what bands I wanted to get on. Also, quality HF radios are pretty pricey: I got a top-end handheld VHF/UHF radio for about $400 last year, which is only about a third the price of the flagship HF radios from the "big three" Japanese manufacturers. That's a big chunk of change to drop without know if I'll be able to set up an antenna with good propagation in my backyard.
Now that my Extra studies were done, I turned my attention to figuring out a plan for a low-cost rig setup. My goal is to start with a portable station so that I can (a) use it as an excuse to get out of the house while still maintaining146 Mhz 2 meters distance and (b) experiment with different antenna configurations before committing to something like attaching posts to my roof and hanging a dipole. Since software is a comfortable place for me, I started poking around the software-defined radio (SDR) space. I figure a card or USB device that can receive and transmit radio signals, plus a Raspberry Pi hosting a web UI that I can control with a smartphone would be a good platform for experimenting with radio from the software side. As luck has it, a ham in India has been working on an open source, open hardware, inexpensive kit called sBITX with HF radio circuitry, a Raspberry Pi, and a small touchscreen. It's still in development, but this might be an ideal entry point for me.
Rounding out a snowy month of amateur radio, the last weekend of January is Winter Field Day, inspired by the June ARRL Field Day but with the principle that emergency communication might be needed any time, so it's good to practice when it's cold outside. The Longmont Amateur Radio Club organized a Winter Field Day station in a building at the Boulder County Fairgrounds with two radios, one for 40 meters and one for 20. I showed up early and helped get the 40m antenna up, which involved tossing a small PVC pipe with a string over an evergreen tree, pulling stuck string out of tree branches, and holding on to the feedpoint to make sure the guy tightening the string to a distant tree didn't pull the antenna too far up the evergreen before we attached the coax cable. Ham radio involves some Physics I problems, not just Physics II :-)
Winter Field Day was actually my first chance to operate on HF bands, and I even got a chance to take advantage of the additional bandwidth provided to Extra class operators. The 40 meter band was challenging; I only managed to contact three other stations over the course of an hour, all in neighboring states, despite hearing clear calls from folks as far away as Kentucky. I think our antenna was a little too low, and coupled with the conductive snow-covered ground meant that we were getting takeoff angles close to vertical, so we could only get a couple hundred miles out. I later got to spend a little time with the 20 meter rig and racked up 7 contacts in about 20 minutes and helped log some more while another ham operated, reaching as far as Alberta and North Carolina. This was also a good opportunity to start learning what interface elements help be a smooth radio operator.
My throat started feeling scratchy on my last day at Valley View, and it turned into an unpleasant week that felt like a rough cold. A fancy home COVID test a couple days in and another one at the end of the week both turned up negative, so maybe my immune system is just incapable of fighting off a cold after two years holed up in my living room. (Fun fact: coronaviruses are often causes of the common cold.) Since I didn't want to go out and infect anyone, and it was cold and snowy outside anyway, I spent most of my free time the next week and a half buried in the book. While the electronics part of the Technician and General exam felt like I was relearning things I forgot almost 25 years ago in Physics II, the Extra exam was full of electrical circuit material I'm pretty sure I'd never encountered before. Electricity and magnetism was my weakest subject in physics class; I did better with relativity and quantum mechanics than E&M, for some reason.
When I started studying, I didn't have a test date in mind; I figured I'd test once I finished and felt like I knew what was going on. But there was a tempting testing opportunity coupled with a hamfest in Loveland in the middle of the month, so I stayed up to 1am on Friday night to finish the exam guide and didn't have a chance to review the electrical topics that I was still hazy on. Come Saturday I got up early and made it to the Larimer County Fairgrounds by 9:30, which was quite a feat given the "crack of 11" mornings I'd been having during the week. I missed 9 of 50 questions, which is still a passing grade, though a little disappointing. On one of the missed questions I should've trusted my logical brain rather than thinking I'd seen the question in a practice test and picking the surprising answer. I think the other eight were all electronics related, ranging from misidentifying a diode from a circuit diagram to getting the phase pattern wrong across a capacitor and inductor in series. I should probably get an electronics textbook or find a good YouTube series.
Amusingly, I didn't use my General class privileges in the half a year I had that license before upgrading to Extra. A General license lets a ham transmit on portions the HF bands, which can cover the whole country and, in good conditions, the whole world. At HF, antennas get pretty big, so the convenient handheld VHF/UHF radio with a short antenna is no longer an easy way to get in. Additionally, every antenna involves tradeoffs, and many good antennæ work on a limited set of bands. I got stuck in a bit of analysis paralasys where I didn't know what bands I was interested in because I didn't have an HF radio, and I didn't have an HF radio because I didn't have an antenna, and I didn't have an antenna because I didn't know what bands I wanted to get on. Also, quality HF radios are pretty pricey: I got a top-end handheld VHF/UHF radio for about $400 last year, which is only about a third the price of the flagship HF radios from the "big three" Japanese manufacturers. That's a big chunk of change to drop without know if I'll be able to set up an antenna with good propagation in my backyard.
Now that my Extra studies were done, I turned my attention to figuring out a plan for a low-cost rig setup. My goal is to start with a portable station so that I can (a) use it as an excuse to get out of the house while still maintaining
Rounding out a snowy month of amateur radio, the last weekend of January is Winter Field Day, inspired by the June ARRL Field Day but with the principle that emergency communication might be needed any time, so it's good to practice when it's cold outside. The Longmont Amateur Radio Club organized a Winter Field Day station in a building at the Boulder County Fairgrounds with two radios, one for 40 meters and one for 20. I showed up early and helped get the 40m antenna up, which involved tossing a small PVC pipe with a string over an evergreen tree, pulling stuck string out of tree branches, and holding on to the feedpoint to make sure the guy tightening the string to a distant tree didn't pull the antenna too far up the evergreen before we attached the coax cable. Ham radio involves some Physics I problems, not just Physics II :-)
Winter Field Day was actually my first chance to operate on HF bands, and I even got a chance to take advantage of the additional bandwidth provided to Extra class operators. The 40 meter band was challenging; I only managed to contact three other stations over the course of an hour, all in neighboring states, despite hearing clear calls from folks as far away as Kentucky. I think our antenna was a little too low, and coupled with the conductive snow-covered ground meant that we were getting takeoff angles close to vertical, so we could only get a couple hundred miles out. I later got to spend a little time with the 20 meter rig and racked up 7 contacts in about 20 minutes and helped log some more while another ham operated, reaching as far as Alberta and North Carolina. This was also a good opportunity to start learning what interface elements help be a smooth radio operator.
