iBanjo

OK, I got my level 2 (General) license. I’ve got the 50′ wire going across the backyard, from top of my house to a tree, and I’ve chatted with folks from my ham shack^H^H^H basement now — several eastern seaboard states, and last night even someone in SF. But hey, the ionosphere is kinda random. Lots of noise and static. And yet somehow, those morse code conversations I’m hearing seem to cut right through the static.

So even though it’s no longer a requirement, I’ve started learning morse code for fun. Yes, for fun. My mentors tell me it will allow me to make longer-distance contacts through even the worst environmental conditions. And even cooler: you can build pocket-sized tranceiver kits that send and receive morse. Just throw a wire out your hotel window, plug it into your altoids tin, and soon you’re chatting with folks in Australia. Okay, you may still be chatting in binary, but it’s still chatting. 🙂 So I’m busy listening to some tapes that teach me one letter at a time, slowly building up my vocabulary. It’s slow going, but amusing and satisfying in the same way learning to arpeggiate a banjo once was.

What’s also fascinating is all the ergonomic research that has gone into devices for sending morse. It’s like the whole qwerty/dvorak/maltron insanity all over again! While most people are told to start out with simple telegraph keys, it seems that what’s ubiquitous are these things called ‘paddles’. It’s two little levers that you push toward each other — one with your thumb, one with your index finger — and it’s hooked up to an electronic tone generator. One paddle makes a continuous series of ‘dits’ when you push it, and the other makes a continuous series of ‘dahs’. So you get the sounds by wiggling your two fingers back and forth, sometimes holding levers longer, sometimes not. You can adjust the speed of the auto-repeat as well, depending on how fast you want to go. Here’s a video that shows an expert in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMiTKeTook

So it turns out I couldn’t hear anything on my backyard horizontal-wire antenna because I had it hooked up to a handheld walkie-talkie tranceiver. In brief: those things can’t decode the sidebands used on the low frequencies, and have horrible sensitivity and selectivity. As soon as I hooked up a “real” HF tranceiver (my new ICOM IC-7200), I could hear people chatting on all sorts of long wavelengths. Amazing!

At this point, I took a business trip to Atlanta with my handie-talkie in my bag. From the 20th floor of my midtown hotel I finally was able to make my very first contact to a local area ham over 2 meter FM. He welcomed me to the hobby and we blabbed for a while. The next night I participated in an Atlanta area multi-way chat session over a repeater. My enthusiasm only increased after this.

Back at home in Chicago, I finally made my first couple of contacts over the 20 meter band: first to St. Louis, then to central Ohio. And tonight, I’ve made contacts with New York, Maryland, and Massachusetts as part of a special 4th of July weekend “event” — a game in which you try to contact specially planted operators in each of the 13 colonies. If you reach all 13, you get a special certificate. I thought this was silly at first, but after reaching three, I started getting eager to hunt down the fourth! Maybe these contests are more addictive than I expected…

I finally made contact with some local hams as well, using a Chicago-area repeater on top of the Standard Oil building downtown. They were quite welcoming, asking me to meet them at their monthly meeting or every-Saturday brunch at a local diner. I think it’ll be great to get some direct support from people nearby, rather than pestering my mentor over email all the time!

I wonder if anyone has ever actually written an ethnography of amateur radio culture. (Clare, do you know?) It’s been a fascinating jump into the deep-end of a very specific set of rituals, jargon, and history. Some initial observations I’ve made:

• 90% of those participating are retired men. Much like my love of banjo and barbershop quartets, I seem to have yet again confirmed that I am an old guy at heart.
• The country seems populated with tons of amateurs like me with “small” transmission power (between 5 and 25 watts), and a few diehards with “big” transmission power (anywhere from 500 to 1200 watts). When scanning the bands, the typical scenario shows up over and over: some big-gun is asking for contacts, and dozens of small fish are screaming all at once to be recognized, hoping they’re heard in the crowd. The big gun chooses a lucky minnow, they exchange callsigns and say hello, log each other, and then the crowd starts screaming again. It’s like the big gun is the pretty girl at the party — everyone gathers around and wants to chat with her. Perhaps this is why hams quest to build ever more powerful antennas in their backyards; more transmission power creates more popularity!
• Because the communication mode is simplex (you can’t transmit and receive at the same time, like you can on a telephone), people have a very special set of rituals for “passing the microphone” back and forth. For two people chatting, it’s the usual junk you hear truckers say on CB radio: they end their statements with “over” or “back to you”. But in 3 or 5 way chat, people pass control around in a very polite circle. When people get the floor, they tend to ramble and pontificate for at least 2 minutes before passing it on. The conversation ends up sounding more like a set of parliamentary speeches, rather than guys sitting around at a bar.

That’s the news from the field for now. More to come.