{"id":423,"date":"2010-07-03T22:32:45","date_gmt":"2010-07-04T03:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=423"},"modified":"2010-07-04T08:21:18","modified_gmt":"2010-07-04T13:21:18","slug":"ham-radio-satisfaction-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=423","title":{"rendered":"Ham Radio: Satisfaction at Last"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>), I could hear people chatting on all sorts of long wavelengths. Amazing!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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<\/em> specific set of rituals, jargon, and history. Some initial observations I’ve made:<\/p>\n