[wplug] OT: Ham Radio?

[Steve Kudlak]

It goes like this. Way back when radio broadcasting
was just getting started and there were lots of open
air waves there evolved a method of communication
wherein people built radio transmitters and receivers
and talked to each other via them.  To keep things in
order the FCC gave out licenses to do this. In order to
get a license one had to take a moderately daunting test
that involved not only the "rules of the road" but things
such as electronics and communication receiver and
transmitter design.  Originally almost all equipment was
home brew so this was probably useful,

After one got one's license one would try to talk to other
people. Since the frequencies used allowed "skip" or bounce
off the F layers of the Ionosphere one could with luck chat
with someone over quite some distance although not reliably.
A particular thing that was very much the thing to do was to
"DX" which meant to talk to someone over some distance.

 When all of this started up(read 1920s) much of the
communication was via morse code. Hence there evolved
various shorthand forms "DX=Distance" CQ = "Calling pretty
anyone..."  For example CQ DX is how one asked to try to
get any distant person to respond. Note also the FCC gave
one a license number and one could often tell by that license
alphanumeric  in what area someone was. One often had cards
printed up with one's name and some cute graphics etc. on
them and one sent them out to people who one talked to.
These were called QSL cards. I think things that had the letter
"Q" in them meant query.

When lots of communication went by voice, via what was called
"Radiophone" the "morse code shorthand" stuck. and is still used
today.  ¶? Note later there came a thing called "Citizen's Band"
which will set old hams off to no end. Originally it was supposed
to be limited to kind of like emergency road problem stuff and
the like but via truckers became an informal medium. In CB people
adopted informal nicknames called "Handles". Radio Amatuers which
are what hams are officially never used handles and had a pretty
strict code of conduct. No swearing, as to not compete with regular
radio stations one could not broadcast music via ham radio. Most hams
were pretty serious about this code of conduct. Hams were less related
to popular culture. For example CB boomed in the 1970s after the
Country Crossover song "Convoy".  This caused the FCC to up the
number of CB channels to 40.

Note Radio Amateurs or hams were like *nix, techies, or geeks
in that they tended to informally associate and were not afraid of
technical details. The "General Class License Exam" required one
to be able to do Morse Code at a pretty good clip, 10 wpm (words
per minute). understand a lot about radio receiver and transmitter
design. Like uh I won't bore you with exaplaining how a super
heterodyne (superhet) receiver works or why a super regen front
end is such a neat thing in remote Canada. Anyway...after that
digression, which is the reason I'll post this to bcrants...

>>The short synopsis which everyone hope I gave above is that
"ham radio" was sort of like a big polite highly self-regulated
chat space with lots of goodies for those who could communicate
over great distances via technical expertise.<<  For anyone who has
worked in any form of radio, and played with trying to hear
things through the pops and crackles and mucked with antenna
design and having realized there is a world in remote Manitoba
far north of Winterpeg...uh I mean Winnipeg and for those who
see Victoria, British Columbia as warm and inviting and for whom
the concept or radio singles bouncing off the remote Pacific to get
to you whether in BC or Aptos, California, or who got a lot of their
technical background in their early youth by reading "build your
own Theremin"  articles, well this is all a sort of romantic memory.


Have Fun,
Sends Steve

P.S. Hopefully no one's spam filter will complain that this
has too many recipients. After all aren't we talking about
a communication media that was the grand daddy of let
everyone talk to everyone else.



gonffen wrote:

> HAM isn't very new.  If it is the newest, then we haven't made many good
> communications advancements in about a century.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org] On Behalf Of
> billings at negate.org
> Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 11:20 AM
> To: wplug at wplug.org
> Subject: Re: [wplug] OT: Ham Radio?
>
> On Fri, 2003-04-18 at 11:04, Ryan Kaulakis wrote:
> >    This may sound kinda dumb, but what is ham radio?
> >
>
> I think it's the newest form of biodegradable open-source
> porcine-wave communications.  Tasty too.
>
> --
> Jonathan S Billings <billings at negate.org>
> TSFNKP
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