Ham, Not Bacon
Friday, June 11th, 2021 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydIn April, Burning Man announced that Black Rock City would not be built in 2021. I'd been holding out hope that the COVID recovery would be looking promising enough to make the event possible, and I'd been mentally preparing to spend a couple weeks wearing fashionable dust masks and experimenting with post-pandemic community creation.
My first world problem then turned to "What can I spend my big pile of accumulated vacation hours on now?" Early last year Google extended the unused vacation cap from 240 hours to 300 hours, since encouraging people to take a vacation when everyone was supposed to stay at home would've been irresponsible. I took a couple long weekends last summer, but between an "Avoid interacting with too many people" pandemic and "The western U.S. is blanketed in smoke, so visiting the mountains is no fun" there wasn't much worth spending vacation time on. As winter approached, I realized I was going to hit the cap before the weather was nice enough to run around outside, so I focused on long weekends of "Do stuff around the house." Between holidays and well-placed vacation days, I didn't have a five-day work week between mid-December and late February, which was fairly pleasant.
But now that summer has arrived, I decided it's time to have a big ol' vacation. I'd much rather have a two-week adventure than have ten 3-day weekends in a row. Fortunately, there's an opportunity to scratch my Black Rock City itch as well. There's a long annual tradition of people visiting the Black Rock Desert at the beginning of July, popularly dubbed the 4th of Juplaya. This is the same location as Burning Man, but rather than creating a temporary city of 70,000 people in a few square miles, small groups of friends set up camps around the fast desert space with no central coordination. I've never been to Juplaya before, since the two-day trip each way always seemed like a big challenge to visit a place I was just going to return to seven weeks later. But with Burning Man off the table, 2021 seems like a great opportunity to explore the unique features "outside the trash fence." Plus, I can throw in a road trip to visit friends and family on the west coast.
As I started planning this trip, I quickly realized that I ought to get an amateur radio (ham) license. Radios are key to Burning Man operations, and with nine years rangering I've come to think of radio chatter as part of the playa experience. But while the org runs a commercial radio system in BRC, the rest of the year requires a ham license to spread your message across the desert.
The U.S. amateur radio system provides three levels of license—technician, general, and amateur extra—each with successively larger parts of the electromagnetic spectrum they're allowed to transmit on. Licenses are gained by passing a multi-choice written exam, with the question pool published in advance. From an academic perspective this seems like an unreliable way to assess someone's full understanding of the subject matter, but on the other hand you don't actually need to know things like how to read a circuit diagram in order to use a push-to-talk radio.
With my road trip starting in mid-June and another short vacation I had planned in early June, I had a pretty limited period of time to learn the material. While waiting for my Technician license manual to arrive, I read through the free PDF The No-Nonsense Technician-Class License Study Guide. After two nights I was able to obtain a passing grade on hamstudy.org, but I sure felt like I didn't understand half of the material. There's a significant focus on the physics of electromagnetism and circuits. I've long felt that my grasp of electromagnetism from Physics II was much worse than my understanding of Newtonian mechanics from Physics I, and probably worse than my understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics from Physics III. I have no problem explaining the dual particle/wave nature of photons and could probably work through probabalistic quantum tunneling, but have been kind of confused for over two decades about what exactly an ampere is.
Once I got the ARRL manual I zipped through the 200 or so pages in four evenings and felt like I had a much better understanding of what the heck was going on. After a few more rounds of hamstudy.org practice exams, I drove to southeast Denver (the license test that best met my time concerns) and managed to get a perfect 35/35 score. That felt like a pretty good accomplishment given that my first exposure to any of the material was only a week earlier. Just for kicks I decided to take the general exam, having studied absolutely none of its questions but having all the radio basics bouncing around my head. I managed a 23/35 on that one, which is three questions shy of a passing grade. I guess the test isn't a completely bogus assessment, then.
By the time I got home an hour and change later, the next callsign on the FCC's stack, KF0FTJ had been assigned to yours truly. I am now legally allowed to transmit on the VHF and UHF bands as well as portions of the HF bands. (The names for portions of the radio spectrum are kind of silly. It feels like someone started with "Low Frequency", "Medium Frequency", and "High Frequency" and then people kept saying "But wait, why not turn it up a notch?" so there's now Very, Ultra, Super, and Extreme High Frequency for [VUSE]HF.)
In general, the lower the frequency the further it can travel, but also the less information can be packed into the signal. Also, the lower the frequency the longer a good antenna needs to be. My main amateur radio interest is in emergency communications and disaster response, for which battery-powered and easily-mobile radios are ideal, so VHF seems to be the primary band. The HF bands allow amateur operators to talk with people hundreds or thousands of miles away, and hams like to geek out on things like bouncing radio waves off the moon and the solar cycle's effect on long-distance communications thanks to the ionosphere. I find that mildly interesting, but I still don't entirely see the attraction in having a complicated radio setup to talk to people on the other side of the continent now that the Internet has made it cheap and easy to talk to any of two or three billion people around the world. I imagine the ham experience was pretty amazing in the '50s through the '80s. Amateur radio experimentation led to many of the Internet protocols that have come to supplant the service.
I think "I have a license, now who will I actually talk to?" is a common issue for hams. Fortunately, the ham community seems to be pretty friendly (they're people who's hobby involves elaborate setups to talk to people, after all). I've been participating in a weekly Boulder Amateur Radio Club discussion net, and yesterday I received a "radiogram" originating in Pasadena congratulating me on getting a new license that was relayed through "Traffic Nets" until someone on the Colorado traffic net picked it up and gave me a phone call to make the delivery. This is way less efficient than email, but I'm glad that folks are keeping in practice with a communication system that can serve as a backup in the face of a widespread Internet outage. Because if there's one thing I've learned working at a major Internet company for a decade it's that having a well-tested plan for component failure is crucial.
My first world problem then turned to "What can I spend my big pile of accumulated vacation hours on now?" Early last year Google extended the unused vacation cap from 240 hours to 300 hours, since encouraging people to take a vacation when everyone was supposed to stay at home would've been irresponsible. I took a couple long weekends last summer, but between an "Avoid interacting with too many people" pandemic and "The western U.S. is blanketed in smoke, so visiting the mountains is no fun" there wasn't much worth spending vacation time on. As winter approached, I realized I was going to hit the cap before the weather was nice enough to run around outside, so I focused on long weekends of "Do stuff around the house." Between holidays and well-placed vacation days, I didn't have a five-day work week between mid-December and late February, which was fairly pleasant.
But now that summer has arrived, I decided it's time to have a big ol' vacation. I'd much rather have a two-week adventure than have ten 3-day weekends in a row. Fortunately, there's an opportunity to scratch my Black Rock City itch as well. There's a long annual tradition of people visiting the Black Rock Desert at the beginning of July, popularly dubbed the 4th of Juplaya. This is the same location as Burning Man, but rather than creating a temporary city of 70,000 people in a few square miles, small groups of friends set up camps around the fast desert space with no central coordination. I've never been to Juplaya before, since the two-day trip each way always seemed like a big challenge to visit a place I was just going to return to seven weeks later. But with Burning Man off the table, 2021 seems like a great opportunity to explore the unique features "outside the trash fence." Plus, I can throw in a road trip to visit friends and family on the west coast.
As I started planning this trip, I quickly realized that I ought to get an amateur radio (ham) license. Radios are key to Burning Man operations, and with nine years rangering I've come to think of radio chatter as part of the playa experience. But while the org runs a commercial radio system in BRC, the rest of the year requires a ham license to spread your message across the desert.
The U.S. amateur radio system provides three levels of license—technician, general, and amateur extra—each with successively larger parts of the electromagnetic spectrum they're allowed to transmit on. Licenses are gained by passing a multi-choice written exam, with the question pool published in advance. From an academic perspective this seems like an unreliable way to assess someone's full understanding of the subject matter, but on the other hand you don't actually need to know things like how to read a circuit diagram in order to use a push-to-talk radio.
With my road trip starting in mid-June and another short vacation I had planned in early June, I had a pretty limited period of time to learn the material. While waiting for my Technician license manual to arrive, I read through the free PDF The No-Nonsense Technician-Class License Study Guide. After two nights I was able to obtain a passing grade on hamstudy.org, but I sure felt like I didn't understand half of the material. There's a significant focus on the physics of electromagnetism and circuits. I've long felt that my grasp of electromagnetism from Physics II was much worse than my understanding of Newtonian mechanics from Physics I, and probably worse than my understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics from Physics III. I have no problem explaining the dual particle/wave nature of photons and could probably work through probabalistic quantum tunneling, but have been kind of confused for over two decades about what exactly an ampere is.
Once I got the ARRL manual I zipped through the 200 or so pages in four evenings and felt like I had a much better understanding of what the heck was going on. After a few more rounds of hamstudy.org practice exams, I drove to southeast Denver (the license test that best met my time concerns) and managed to get a perfect 35/35 score. That felt like a pretty good accomplishment given that my first exposure to any of the material was only a week earlier. Just for kicks I decided to take the general exam, having studied absolutely none of its questions but having all the radio basics bouncing around my head. I managed a 23/35 on that one, which is three questions shy of a passing grade. I guess the test isn't a completely bogus assessment, then.
By the time I got home an hour and change later, the next callsign on the FCC's stack, KF0FTJ had been assigned to yours truly. I am now legally allowed to transmit on the VHF and UHF bands as well as portions of the HF bands. (The names for portions of the radio spectrum are kind of silly. It feels like someone started with "Low Frequency", "Medium Frequency", and "High Frequency" and then people kept saying "But wait, why not turn it up a notch?" so there's now Very, Ultra, Super, and Extreme High Frequency for [VUSE]HF.)
In general, the lower the frequency the further it can travel, but also the less information can be packed into the signal. Also, the lower the frequency the longer a good antenna needs to be. My main amateur radio interest is in emergency communications and disaster response, for which battery-powered and easily-mobile radios are ideal, so VHF seems to be the primary band. The HF bands allow amateur operators to talk with people hundreds or thousands of miles away, and hams like to geek out on things like bouncing radio waves off the moon and the solar cycle's effect on long-distance communications thanks to the ionosphere. I find that mildly interesting, but I still don't entirely see the attraction in having a complicated radio setup to talk to people on the other side of the continent now that the Internet has made it cheap and easy to talk to any of two or three billion people around the world. I imagine the ham experience was pretty amazing in the '50s through the '80s. Amateur radio experimentation led to many of the Internet protocols that have come to supplant the service.
I think "I have a license, now who will I actually talk to?" is a common issue for hams. Fortunately, the ham community seems to be pretty friendly (they're people who's hobby involves elaborate setups to talk to people, after all). I've been participating in a weekly Boulder Amateur Radio Club discussion net, and yesterday I received a "radiogram" originating in Pasadena congratulating me on getting a new license that was relayed through "Traffic Nets" until someone on the Colorado traffic net picked it up and gave me a phone call to make the delivery. This is way less efficient than email, but I'm glad that folks are keeping in practice with a communication system that can serve as a backup in the face of a widespread Internet outage. Because if there's one thing I've learned working at a major Internet company for a decade it's that having a well-tested plan for component failure is crucial.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 02:53 pm (UTC)I think it is important to keep this type of fallback network functional. When the internet goes down and/or the power goes out, it takes almost no infrastructure to establish communication via amateur radio (as long as there are experienced people with the proper equipment).
So, have you bought a rig yet?
no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 09:39 pm (UTC)If you're interested in making radio calls through satellites that did launch, check out the OSCAR system. I've heard that amateur radio contacts with the ISS are also popular, and at some point I hope to tune in when it's overhead and see if anyone's chatting. The Boulder Amateur Radio Club will be set up at Betasso Park on the last weekend of June for ARRL Field Day if you'd like to try getting on the air.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-13 03:26 pm (UTC)While I appreciate and support the continuing role of hams in our society, I’ve never had any interest in taking up the hobby. At this point, I’m mostly curious to see how many decades I go with an active license, never so much as touching a radio. ;)
no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 10:02 pm (UTC)