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Got my novice in 1971. General 2 months later. Extra 15 years after that. Fifty years a ham.

Worked a ton of DX in the mid 70's. Currently inactive but might get back into it since conditions are improving.

WB9HPF

I am a lurker. Receive only. No transmitting equipment and no desire to become a ham. Yet. Kenwood 5000/Chameleon RXL.

Hi All,

Been a ham for 52 years and hold extra class. Licensed since 1969 and still loving it! Mostly HF bands these days, voice, digital and CW buff. Although back in the day I used to enjoy 45 WPM but more recently only about 25 to 30 wpm. Still great fun!

2nd Wind and his XYL on here are good friends of mine too.
Just in thought I would chime in and say Hello to all!

Dave - WB8YSQ

Is this trackable by the government? Don't have any knowledge or experience with this sort of thing. Just curious.

Good to see you back.

I would have to say yes.

Man, they catch EVERY electronic transmission, worldwide, every day, if you believe what they say. Yeah, they can hear it. And your phone calls., your credit card transactions, your posts here, and whatever you say with your phone in your pocket. They don’t NEED to snoop on your ham talk, but they can. There is no privacy, short of ditching anything electronic and disassociating from those who use it. If you aren’t crazy enough to do that, just live your life and don’t worry about it.

Old, lifelong family friend of wife's dad was big into early ham radio and among the early ham visual broadcast experimenters.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/indystar/name/don-miller-obituary?id=10854029

http://www.arrl.org/news/amateur-radio-television-pioneer-don-miller-w9ntp-sk


He was quite an interesting man for many other reasons, as well.


https://news.artnet.com/art-world/don-miller-real-life-indiana-jones-dead-282806

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ctor-dies-fbi-seized-artifacts/70475324/

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-seeks-owners-of-recovered-cultural-artifacts-022719

Been a general class for 42 years. I work the satellites now, voice and aprs along with some D Star.

W7DB here. First licensed as KN7OWJ in 1960.

We call that "eleven meters."

Something I don't understand: my HF radios (and I imagine most modern HF radios) have built-in frequency and power limitations for their transmitters: for example, I can't transmit on 60m if I tune it in myself, but only if I select one of the built-in 60m memory presets; and if the RF power is set higher than 100W, it gets reduced to 100W when I select the preset. I can transmit with 200W on USB, LSB, and FM, but when I switch to AM, RF power is automatically limited to 25W.

Okay, fine. I don't really like that, because the whole point of ham radio is experimentation and hacking, and the whole point of requiring licenses is to encourage responsible behavior, and I don't like to be confined in a box by my radio. But I understand it.

But none of my HF radios will transmit on 11m at all, period. Key the mic, and the radio just grins at you. Why don't they give me transmit access to 11m and just restrict the power to 5W? If they're worried about me transmitting between channels, they could preset memories to the 40 CB channels the way they do to the 5 channels on the 60m band. It'd be easy to box me into legal operations with hardware restrictions.

An HF radio that could do that would be pretty attractive to me. I'm pretty sure I have an old mobile CB whip in the basement that would fit nicely into my "antenna farm," and I have at least one slot open on my antenna patch bay, but I don't really have space for a CB-only transceiver.

My father was an operator when he was a kid, but college, grad school, and family got in the way, so when I was a kid all I heard were stories.

But during the height of the pandemic, I decided that I was finally going to get that license, and I poked him into renewing his as well. We went to the exam together; he got upgraded from Advanced to Extra, and I went from zero to Extra in an hour.

Incidentally, that is not something I recommend, since having experienced it. I would heartily recommend going from zero to General, partly because it isn't really all that hard if you're technically-minded, partly because it gives you access to world-spanning HF, and partly because it gives you a five-character call sign, rather than the six-character one that marks you as a Technician noob. (Hams will swear up and down that they're not four- and five-character chauvinists...but they lie.)

But wait for Extra until you've actually got some experience behind the mic and/or the key, and you know what the world is actually like, and you've accumulated a little maturity. Wait for Extra until you've operated long enough that you just absolutely can't stand not having access to those slivers of Extra spectrum anymore. Then the test preparation will mean much more to you, and you'll actually learn something, rather than just memorizing.

I agree. 80m might be a little long, although I do prefer the noise floor there; I imagine there are a lot of folks who don't have space for an 80m antenna. 20m might be a little short to provide the reach we'd need, although 20m antennas are more manageable than 40m antennas.

Dunno.

Maybe I'll post a thread about that: 20m v 40m.

Welcome!

You have a Kenwood NX-5000 and no ham license!? What are you, a Communist?

Wait--you probably mean a Kenwood R-5000, which is a receiver rather than a transceiver. Okay. Okay. I'm calming down now...

Might not be worth the cost and process of them to channelize frequencies and regulate power for one band when one can buy a cobra 29 for $115.

It's trackable by anybody. The rules say that you can't transmit any encrypted traffic without special case-by-case FCC permission, with one or two special cases that can't really be stretched to encompass person-to-person comms. And of course anybody with a receiver, government or not, can hear you. And anybody with a DF rig can find you geographically, if you transmit long or predictably enough. And unless you go through a lot of hassle to prevent it, anybody who knows your call sign can find out who you are.

So: while ham radio is a lot of fun, there's a big set of stuff it's not wise to say on the bands.

Thanks!