hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1092.txt

Episode: 1092
Title: HPR1092: Ham Radio: The Original Tech Geek Passion
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1092/hpr1092.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:50:18

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Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. It is lunch again. Mr. Gadget's coming to you
over Hacker Public Radio and left they should lose the ownership of the call in line.
Of course, I have to keep on calling in shows. It's like my deity, right? So, at least
lunch should come up fairly quickly, fairly quickly after my lesson with I have called
in the other first show of this year, which was Get Off This Rock. Hopefully you enjoyed
that one then. I do plan on talking about that kind of thing in the future. So, today,
I am going to talk a little bit about AM radio, amateur radio. I am an amateur radio operator
and has been since the very early 90s. And I have had a long term kind of love affair
with radio and I have always had this kind of desire to become an amateur radio operator.
And finally, saw that come to fruition there about 20 years ago. As I said, and I talked
about in some previous episodes here, I got interested in electronics when I was a teenager.
And primarily, a lot of those first electronic kinds of things were about radio. It was
building a crystal radio set that was one of the first things that I learned how to build.
And it was just a wonder to me. I know in today's modern world, with the modern conveniences
and communications that we have, it seems to be a little bit old fashioned. But it was
just a wonder to me that I could take just a few components, two or three things. Some
wire that I literally wound in a coil on an oatmeal canister, a cardboard canister that
oatmeal, at least in the US, would be delivered in. So, it was a very pretty large diameter
for inches or so. I don't know what that is, a millimeter, exactly. And I could wind
a coil there. Some of the wire would need to be there. And a little crystal diode, or
sometimes even a little piece of germanium and a cap's whisker, it was called. And I could
position that there, get a little bit of rectification from the diode. And it could then have enough
power, just to have the AM radio signals, long piece wire connected to one end, and connect
the right parts of the circuit. No batteries involved, no audio amplifiers or anything. A very
sensitive set of first I started with a crystal earphone, which was actually the crystal earphone
earpiece was a little bit bigger than today's ear pieces that had phones that you used to
use to use the player, but it would fit into your ear. And it was sensitive enough, there
was enough electricity just to be over the air AM radio signals. So, I have that then
be rectified into the variations of the radio signal, which is how amplitude modulation
works. It's varying the strength of the signal. And there was enough power to be generated
into the circuit with what it could receive over the air to move the little speaker and
that crystal earphone set, and I could hear the gain radio station. Now, in World War
II, soldiers would actually make their own cap's whisker radio receivers with rusty
razor blades. They could take a razor blade, the standard razor blade of the day, not the
new modern ones with the multiple blades and stuff like that, but the old double-sided
razor blade, they could take a pulled one from their shaving kit, and the rusty parts of
it would actually work kind of like the crystal for a crystal radio set, and they could come
up with cap's whisker, all you need was a little bit of wire, and a little earphone piece
and they could have a radio that they could listen to. And that just passed made to be.
And then I started building other kits as I kind of mentioned before. The ultimate kit,
I think, that I built for the radio shut corporation, which had various types of kits that
they sold at the time. It came in a plastic box, and then the plastic box itself was the
perforated board that you would use the plastic top had a bunch of holes in it, and that's
where you would build your circuit. And the most complex one of those was a shortwave radio
that I actually built from a kit. And there were lots of other kits, kinds of things,
heat kit being the most well known of those. And so a lot of things about radio, radio in that
time frame was the geek fashion. If you were a techie, if you were a geek, the way that you
expressed your technical geekiness was radio. And this is long before computers actually existed.
And then a form that any normal even being could actually get a forward one. So the radio
fascinated me as I said. And Uncle who was into this, and he had those children, so he would tend to
give presents out to the various, you know, cousins and things like that. He bought me a radio
that was orphan, I believe it was, that had AEM, FEM, and a couple of shortwave bands. And I
could listen to those. Back then, the aperture radio operators would also operate with amplitude
modulation, at least some of them, so I could still listen to those. But along came another method
of broadcasting the signal, which was called single-side band. AEM radio, as I said, is a variation
of the power of the signal. And so if you look at that on a device that will allow you to see
the signal, you would see both sides going and going up and getting smaller, going up and getting
smaller. It looks like ways. But it would be a mirrored wave at the top and the bottom. Well,
single-side band only used one side of those. Unfortunately, without the right kind of extra
equipment, my little shortwave receiver could no longer hear those properly. They found it kind
of like dust. That kind of reduced my pleasure out of that radio. But that could still
pick up shortwave radio stations from around the world. And at that point, it was very difficult
to get a radio amateur license. You had to go to an actual FCC office. There was one in Kansas,
and it would be in downtown Kansas City somewhere to take the test to the more advanced things. If you
happen to know someone who was already an amateur radio operator, they could give you what was the
novice test. In the United States, there's a novice test, which has limited frequency kind of
privileges. Various privileges up and down the radio spectrum. And then there was a technician class,
which would give you a little bit extra frequencies you could operate on, general, and then I believe
beyond that at that time, there was an extra class license. Right now, there is a general
and advanced and an extra class. There are side classes of license in the United States.
Another limit extractor back then was the equipment was all crystal controlled because of the
variances that would occur with the analog equipment. You know, frequencies would vary off
frequency, and so you would use a crystal to control the frequency of the operation. And novice
transmitters would always have to be controlled by the frequency. Also, the major limit extractor
back then was the Morse code requirement for any amateur radio license. So all the amateur radio
licenses required that you pass a Morse code test. And trying to teach myself Morse code just
never worked. I got books on it, and I attempted to memorize the bitnaw and dodge it from things
like that, but it just never really worked for me. It gives CD or C, during the CD radio craze
in the middle 70s. And ironically, I went to my first jam set in the middle 70s when the micro computer
revolution came along. It was not because I was an amateur radio operator and interested in the
radio, but that was the source of a lot of chips and other kinds of components that would use,
you would use in terms of building your own computer. And so I did attend the local largest amateur
radio festival, ham sets, used to be in downtown Kansas City at the old downtown airport.
And we built a new international airport up north of town, and there were still some terminal
buildings back then, and they would rent those out some various groups. And there was a group in
the spring that had a big amphibious. And I did attend that once or twice, looking for computer parts.
So I believe I did pick up a few things. Their amateur slot meets are always an interesting thing,
because you'll see radios from back in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, even tube radios, because they're
still very functional for amateur radio purposes. And in fact, there's a lot of people who really
prefer those tube radios. I mentioned that a lot of amateur radio operators went off because it
was more efficient for voice communication, but he has started using that single side band. And
there are in fact other kinds of modes of communications with voice that have come along since then.
A lot of them had gone back to the old AM radio signal, though, because it sounds so good.
So there are a few amateur radio operators that have acquired old AM radio transmitters from
back in the 50s and early 60s, sometimes all the way back to the 40s. Some of them even acquire
old AM radio transmitters that have been retired by radio stations, and rework the frequencies of
those chains the coils, and such so that they work on amateur radio frequencies can use those for
AM radio transmissions to one another. The code requirement that they said always kept me from
doing that, and never did end up getting an amateur radio license when I was a youth. Then
computers came along, and I started expressing my electronics interest in those, and that's the
whole story that I've already told in multiple episodes. A very interesting author who still writes a
blog that I read a lot of editorials and other kind of articles, was an amateur radio operator,
and he happened to mention in a column that he wrote that there was a leftening of the requirements
for the technician class license, and that it was no longer going to require more code.
So as soon as I heard that his name is Jeff Duncomon, a very interesting chapter was very
instrumental in some of those early programming days, and wrote a lot of articles on programming,
which I would follow every time there was a Jeff Duncomon article anywhere, even with
the editor of some magazines that I read on a regular basis, and that was in one of those editorials.
That he mentioned this, and so I jumped on it. Got a book, I believe I might have been required
that from RadioShack, and steadyed up on the test for the technician class license. Found
a local group that had changed. He didn't have to go to a FCC office now to take the test.
There were local amateur radio groups that would sponsor tests, and submit those tests if you
passed them. There were standardized tests that the FCC had, and there was even a way for you
to study those tests. I found that the Gordon West book, who still acted in amateur radio to
say, the Gordon West book was the most interesting one for me, because it had an easy way for you to
go ahead and see the question and the answers to the questions. In such a way that you weren't
seeing the answers and giving it away to you, but it was fairly easy for you to follow on with
the questions that were going to be, and there was a question, cool, right, for the technician class
license, and you could then take the test kind of for yourself, make sure that you have the
answers. There's various types of information that's included in these tests. There's information
about the radio regulations, so you understand the types of privileges that you have as a
broadcaster of radio signals, and how you're not supposed to interfere with television stations and
radio stations and other uses of the radio frequencies, as well as power requirements and things,
electronic theory, and good operating practice of your radio stations so that you are working
in harmony with other radio operators, and so there's various sections of the tests, and I
passed that, and acquired my no-code text license, it was called by everybody, that was the official name
of it, but there was a tendency, it kind of reminds me of what's happening now in the computing
world, especially in mobile devices, to a certain extent with Linux also, but especially with
mobile devices. There's a certain amount of technical expertise that is involved with
the radio craft and the Morris code, and don't get me wrong, I have the utmost
of respect for Morris code operators. There are, unfortunately, they're passing away,
quite a bit of them, but there are quite a few operators that were especially
shipment on maybe shifts during World War II, where it was extensively used, but also all the
military used Morris code for communications, for their military operations, the most efficient way.
It is still the most efficient way, simplest transmitter, simplest type of receiver,
and it can get through the static interference kinds of things more efficiently than in the
other mode of communication to this day. There are several, especially, I'd say, old maybe
chiefs from the war that can listen to Morris code at 50 words per minute, and type it on a
typewriter at 50 words per minute. They can actually probably do it as fast through them that,
and at 40 words per minute, they can actually listen to the Morris code, be typing it on the
typewriter and have a conversation with you in addition. The key to it is they didn't learn
Morris code with the Dixon DAW, the way I tried to in my youth teaching myself, they learned the
sound of the letters. When you start sending Morris code at faster speeds, especially at the speeds
of 40, 50 plus words per minute, and faster words per minute, like 20 words per minute,
each letter doesn't become DAW DAW DAW, anymore, or DAW DAW, which have to be a K, or DAW DAW DAW,
the long symbols you usually say DAW, the shorter symbols you usually say DIT, and DAW DAW DAW
is O, so DIT, DAW DAW DAW, DIT, DIT, is S, O, S, right? But by the time you start sending it very
fast, the entirety of the letter has a sound. And your real key is to learn the sound of the
letter, the pattern of the Dixon DAW, the way they sound all together at a faster pace,
and that's the way to learn the Morris code. By the time you get up to 40 and 50 words per
minute, the entire word has a sound to it, a pattern, which they start to recognize, the entire
word, when it's at that speed. And it's really amazing to this day. I'm not sure about the new
keyboard that are a full-cwardy keyboard, right? Allah, Blackberry, or a fly-dot keyboard,
or things like that. But the old P9 keyboards, right? You remember when you used the text and you
had to press the A multiple times to get to A, B, C. And if you had to press the two multiple
times, right, to get to C, or to get to D, you had to press the three-one, but get to F, you
had to press the three times, right? So the old P9 method of texting. And they would have
contrast between young people who were extremely fast at sending out these text messages, of course,
because they do it constantly. And 60, 70-year-old Dan sending Morris code at 50 words per minute.
And the old guys who use the Morris code always learn. They can always send more information
than the short-of-career to time. This is kind of like talking about bandwidth. I have to be
driving on UF 50 highlight here in Missouri. And if I had, let's start in the other direction,
Jan, a few hours, I'd be in St. Louis, Missouri. Okay, one of the fastest bandwidth to get several
terabytes of data from Kansas City to St. Louis, printed on hard drives. Well, assuming you have
hard drives that all the data is on, right? Okay, take the hard drives out of the machine,
move them into the back of a van, driving St. Louis. Right, that's the fastest bandwidth to get those
terabytes of data to that other position to this day. So it all depends on your point of view,
right? But you have to have very specialized skills in order to do this. Eventually, as a
amateur radio operator, of course, once I got my technician license, I started going to Amphus.
I used to get around with people some of the stuff that was older stuff that I saw and the
computer parts that I saw when I went to Amphus in the middle 70s, seeing the still be there,
including all the old computer stuff in the 90s when I started going to Amphus radio Amphus.
So there are several, we're lucky enough here in the Kansas City area to have several Amphus
that are spread out throughout the year. And you go to those, you see people that you go,
you're trying to get to talk to them in real life, and spend it just on the radio and things
like that. And amateur radio is always an important issue. It's got some reason why it exists for one
thing. If there was a national emergency, the frequencies that are allocated to amateur radio
operators within the available to the military if they need extra frequencies, right? So it keeps
any full-time commercial use to happen with those, and those frequencies would be available
for governmental use if they were necessary. We're also tasked with experimenting with these things
technologically, and stretching the technologies that are involved with communications,
as well as with emergency communications and providing those kinds of services. So those
are some of the things that the amateur radio service is providing an exchange for all this
valuable structure. I mean, if you know anything about mobile radios and cellular telephone
frequencies and things like that, radio spectrum is a very valuable thing, and millions of dollars
are paid for the usage of radio spectrum. So why are we allowing these people for minimal cost
of license to use that spectrum? Well, those are some of the reasons why. Now, last you should think
that getting on a radio and talking to somebody, which still I think is an amazing thing,
I can throw a piece of wire up into a tree, okay? And I can then using lower power radios that
I have, but using the proper frequencies that have the ability to broadcast in the short-wave
spectrum, which can go farther distances. I can talk to somebody with five watts of power,
okay? Now, I'm not sure exactly what the average telephone nowadays has, but let's say that
the average telephone to get to the cell tower that has one lot of power. And so that would be
five times the power that your cell phone has. But with a one wire that I throw up into a tree,
I can talk to somebody from Missouri that's easily on either coast of the United States
if the conditions are right. Now, if I have more power, of course, I can more reliably talk to
people in other places. But if I'm on the right frequencies, I might be talking to somebody in
Europe or down in the South America. And there are other modes that are even more efficient with
those low powers. I mean, that's really what I'm kind of interested in and some of the things that
I still pursue. But let's just think that this kind of technology is no longer affecting your
lives, okay? And eventually I did learn Morse code once again by learning the sounds of the letters,
not the dip-bop patterns, but the actual sounds of the letters. I managed to pass the test
for Morse code and got high frequency times privileges. Now, in the modern day, all of the
frequency privileges, or most of the westworld, at least I think, the international standards have been
revised. And it's no longer necessary for you to learn Morse code, even to use the longer
the longer distance frequencies, the short-wave radio frequencies, what's called high frequency
radio, HF radio. The high frequencies that we use for mobile sounds is related to walkie-talkies
or what the M2 radio operator would call handy-talkies now. And those are very high frequency, DHS.
To give you an idea, just above the AM radio band is really the start of some of the lower
frequencies that amateur radio operators are allowed to use. But the ones that they use at mostly
are have wave lengths, and they always talk about these wave lengths in the length of the radio
waves to make a complete cycle. How long it would move at the speed of life? So that's directly
related to how long your antenna needs to be. And so there's 116 meters. So it's 116 meters
for an entire start to zero, goes to a highest point, goes back to zero, goes to its lowest point,
and goes back to zero again. That's a complete cycle. 160 meters at the speed of life.
So you would need an antenna that was at least 80 meters long in order to broadcast effectively
on that. There are ways to get around it, but the laws of physics are bendable but not breakable.
So yes, you can less efficiently, and you'd have to put more power into it. Use them in camera
if that was less long than that. So there's a very long piece of wire that you need. But with the
right length of wire and a very long piece of wire at the right height above the ground, you can
use less and less power to talk very, very long distances. VHF is starting to get into some of the
areas that you're more familiar with, and VHF is the amateur frequencies for VHF wire in the 144
megahertz range, 144 cycles per second. That's a much shorter, but that's the two meter band. So it
only takes a two-foot length of wire, right, and you'd be bet from the middle in order to
make a standard antenna for that. And we also have 440, which is the 70-centimeter band.
So they're getting higher and higher in frequency, shorter and shorter in terms of
and timmelings that would be necessary. To give you an idea, the 800 megahertz band is what
initially some of the cordless zones were in. Some cordless zones are in the 2.4 gigahertz range.
And when we're talking about the types of equipment that you have for Wi-Fi wireless and things
like that, the 2.4 and the 5 gigahertz range, those are very close to some amateur radio bands that
are also in effect, but we have lower frequency bands, which are more efficient. But anything that
is in those very high frequency and above ranges are very short ranges for the duration. It's very
similar to FM radio. FM radio in the United States, and I thank you internationally also,
it's very close to this. Spacing a part of channels, maybe for the different regions of the
world, but the frequencies are very similar. FM radio goes from about 85 megahertz to 108 megahertz.
So that's just a little bit below the VHL kind of range that we're talking about for amateur radio
operators. And in that particular case, and I don't know if you've noticed about your FM radio station,
you can't hear your FM radio station very far out of the city that it would get resolved.
You can only hear that because it's a line of sight communication. If you remember
independent say, right, they're explaining line of sight communication and the president
understands those because he was an aircraft pilot, supposedly before the king resident,
and so he understood line of sight. So line of sight means that the frequencies essentially
travel like light at that particular point. There's nothing that's able to bend to them,
and therefore they just keep on going straight in whatever direction they were going when they
first came from the transmitter. And so because of the curvature of the earth, they would go straight
out into space, and you will only be able to see and hear those, and definitely hear those radio
frequencies, as if you could see the transmitter. Now, it's too far away for you to see the lights
on the transmitter, but the radio frequencies will travel straight, and once you go beyond the
horizon, because of the curvature of the earth, you would no longer be able to hear that radio station.
That's not the way AM radio works, especially at night, there's certain AM radio stations. Have
you ever noticed your local AM radio station probably reduces its power at night. So a radio station
you can hear perfectly well during the day, when some say it reduces its power, but there are
certain radio stations that boost their power, and you can hear radio stations from a long way
away at night. One reason they do this is because the propagation of the radio waves down in that
spectrum, that is used by AM radio, which is in the kilohertz range, not the Menderhertz range,
that's a much longer traveling signal, and at night, the conditions for that to travel farther,
there's various reasons why. It bounces off the ionosphere of the planet, and bounces back
down again, so it doesn't just go off in the space and keep on going. There's various reasons why it
bounces down again. Likewise, there are other kinds of atmospheric conditions and things like that
that can cause the radio waves to actually go up, bounce off conditions under the atmosphere
and come back down to Earth again, and sometimes I make multiple hots. That's the reason why I can
use very little power and talk to somebody who's hundreds or even thousands of miles away
with my piece of wire up in the tree, when I'm using those lower frequencies, the HF fans.
That's why the AM radio station in the United States here, there's always a high-flower
station that would take Louis Missouri, as you could look to at night, another one out of New Orleans,
or somewhere down there in Louisiana, out of Chicago, there's a few particular stations
across the AM radio dial that would boost their signals at night, and then you could listen to them,
but you only be able to give them a night. You wouldn't be able to give them during the day,
and the conditions at night are even more so towards getting that long distance kind of communication.
This kind of communication is still benefiting you right to this day. The amateur radio operators
are the ones who came up with a way to go beyond this line of sight problem with VHS.
Back in the early 70s, somebody came up with the idea of, hey, what if we put a receiving station
way high up on a tower, either on a mountain, if we have to have mountains,
they're up on the tallest building that we'll let us do it, and we'll have a little receiving
station, though, received at such a such a megahertz, and then we'll read ridecast it on another
transmitter that has another antenna, and it'll be just far enough away in megahertz that it
won't interfere, so we'll be able to use a little small individual like walkie-talkie kind of radio,
and as long as it's got enough power to be heard by that first antenna up on top of the building,
or up on top of the tower, or the mountain side, and then it'll read ridecast with a stronger signal
out, and since it's so high, we'll get better line of sight, and so now I'll be able to
talk even farther, because I'm effectively changing the rules about line of sight by putting
the receiving antenna, and the transcending antenna way up high, and so they started experimenting
with this, and figured out how to make it better and better and better, and eventually there is a
network of repeater towers across the entire US, and in fact in every major area of the world,
there are repeating towers, there are use for radio communications for commercial purposes,
this is the basis for all of the radio communications that are used by police and fire,
and essentially this is the very start, the little baby steps towards the cell songs that you have
in your pocket are scrapped to your belt right now. So essentially, amateur radio operators,
you talk about there's a lot of this whole talk in the technical world about patents,
and invalidating patents, because who did it first, and who copied who, and things like that?
So I'm not going to get into that right now, I may do that on a future show, but I'll tell you one
thing, you wouldn't have a cell phone, you know, the size that it is in your hand,
and you might even be listening to this very podcast on some kind of mobile device,
and that would not exist without the amateur radio operators who developed the first technologies
and proved that those technologies would work, and then they were commercialized in the
revolutionized radio communication around the world. In fact, I'll often joke, you know, back in
high school, if I had a handy talk to you on my belt, I would be the biggest nerd around,
but the one real clue to me that the nerds have won, right, is not just that it's the technical
people that are the richest people in the world now, not the football players who don't play
professional football, who don't happen to go on to professional sports and things like that,
it's not the high school quarter, right, who goes on LSEs, the salesman for a technical company,
it's the Bill Gates of the World, right, it's the Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs of the World,
it's the Gates, right, that I've taken over the world, the revenge of the nerds, if you will,
and the trigger range of the nerds in my mind is everybody essentially walks around with a
handy copy on their belt, if they've got a built clip, and some of them even have push-to-talk buttons,
right, remember the whole push-to-talk in cell phones? It's essentially just using the, now,
their digital communication, instead of just simple FM communication, like cell phones initially
work, but it was all based on that kind of technology. So the kind of things that the amateur radio
operators are doing still to this day are spreading communications, kinds of things,
expanding those kinds of things. Another thing that's happening in the up-terrated community,
light, as I'm thinking right now, is the weather conditions here, if you're outside the U.S.,
you probably love the weather, just, although it might have made some international broadcasts
also last year, at least here in the middle of the country, we had too much water. We have a lot of
rain, and in addition to that, we had a lot of snowfall over the winter, and that then knelt
it off and came down through the rivers, and we had flooding. It was a terrible time with flooding
of the Missouri River System and the upper Mississippi River System here in the United States,
which is a big part of the farming community, are all tied to that, and a lot of those fields
did not produce the grains that they normally would because of the flooding conditions.
And there were major highways that were closed, et cetera, et cetera. We have the exact
offices of that this year. We have drought conditions. They've had some drought conditions down
in Texas that have been going on for multiple years, but now the entirety of the great claims
is in drought conditions, as well as up in the mountains, because we did not have as much snow,
and there's a peculiar kind of thing that's a waste problem medical, and in fact,
Mizzoula, Montana, where my youngest daughter has pursued a master's degree up there
at the University of Montana there in Mizzoula, Gil Grizzly. Right near her house, right next to the
airports that I flowed in and out of to visit them, and some visit tips and things like that,
is the station where all of the people who are far jumpers actually train, and they fly out of that
to actually parachute out of airplanes, talking about, you know, one thing, it's one thing to
parachute out of a perfectly good airplane. It's quite another thing to parachute out of
a perfectly good airplane. When you know there's a fire down there, and you're going to be
fighting it, and basically they fight those hearts by containing them, and clearing out brush,
and making sure that be far to not jump from one tree to the net by moving dirt, and clearing
up brush, et cetera, et cetera. And there are several fires that have started, this is a
totally natural phenomenon. In fact, there are trees that actually exist, that will not,
their seeds will not germinate, and left a fire occurs. The actual seed pod will not break open,
right, unless there's a fire, and that's what causes the seed pod to break open, and thusly there's
a possibility of growing a new tree. So it's not like fires like this aren't natural occurrences,
then they are not by and large, caused by man, they are by and large caused by lightning strikes.
And there's a severe problem with some fires that are moving out of control in Colorado,
in the Rocky Mountains there, in the Dideraria Boulder, and things like that, and even north of that,
I believe, up into Fort Collins, and down in Colorado Springs area, and then all the way down
to Flagstaff in Northern Arizona. And there are several fires at various points there.
There are outdoor radio operators that are there working in conjunction with the firefighters.
Maybe we're not right on the front line with those guys that parachute down on the tree,
but have the forward command post. And they're there with amateur radio positioning systems,
a precursor to GPS, right? GPS based, the GPS system that you have in your car, amateur radio
operators started doing that with amateur frequencies, and they not only take the GPS signal,
but they also broadcast back their positions. We have amateur radio repeaters for high frequency
kinds of frequencies with digital notes, and they can be there with equipment that will then give
exact position of where the fire is being fought at any given time, and those positions can be fed
back to the control areas for the firefight, so that they have a more accurate picture of exactly
what the fires, shape, and physical severity of the fire is. In fact, I just heard a story about
amateur radio operators that were called in for a fire that was in Boulder. The amateur radio
operators came to the fire and not only set up the BPRS and other kinds of digital communications
into the system, they also set up amateur television, right, which would use some of the
higher frequencies, like 440 megahertz, 900 megahertz, instead of those. You bright-cast
television pictures of the fire, so they could get a live feed in the master control
that was in charge of that emergency situation, and they could have big-screen live views of what
was happening with the fire. The federal government came in because this was still at the state and
county level, and if the fire stays below a certain size, it will not then fall under the
purview of the National Forest Service, I suppose, or other kinds of emergency things that
happen at the federal level. They came in when that was still at the E2 size, that severity of the
fire was not sufficient to warrant them being involved, but they wanted to check the situation out.
They came into the control center, saw the live big-screen TV feet of the fire,
went out, and visited the sites where the amateur television stations were broadcasting this live
feed back to the control, and we're not aware that this kind of technology was even available,
that amateur radio operators could provide this type of service, and requested specifically,
if this got to an E1 status, and thanked the higher power, right?
Thank God, or whatever else you want. The universal consciousness, whatever, it did not.
It stayed at a smaller scale, and it's not going to be spreading to actually have an even wider
situation where the athletes fight this fire, but if it had gotten to that E1 classification,
and had spread, they specifically requested that the amateur radio operators remain available,
and provide them with the larger service. And I have mentioned that other fires now are going to
start having these live feed, and other emergencies are going to start having these live feed.
When things like tornadoes happen, floods happen, other things like that. Amateur radio operators
go into those areas and set up temporary cell towers so that things can provide communications
for that, temporary communications, and can provide information in and out of those disaster areas,
until such time as infrastructure can be restored, and normal communications can then present.
So if there is a flood, if there is a fire, there's emergency, Italy. So they have that recent
set of earthquakes there in Northern Italy, outside of Milan by 700 kilometers. They're in
Tuscany, I believe, that I may not be the right area, but somewhere there in Northern Italy,
and it was a relatively rural area. There was not a lot of communications in the first place,
and the occurrence of that earthquake had completely knocked out all communications to the area,
amateur radio operators from various places there in Northern Italy were requested to go in.
They went in and set up equipment so that emergency communications and health and welfare,
right, is my family okay? That kind of thing is digital, as well as waste communications could
be established to get to the nearest city of any size that still had communications, which was,
I think, something like 80 kilometers away, if I'm wrong or very incorrectly. So amateur radio
operators provide that kind of disaster communication, and they volunteer to do this.
Whatever county you live in, especially if you're in any major area, there is probably
an emergency communications group of amateur radio operators who are ready, willing,
and able to provide these kinds of communications to your community if a disaster takes place.
Now, some things that you might be of interest, that same radio that I talked about that I could
actually use to talk to someone with only five watts of power. Some of the things I used to do
with that radio when I was doing this, but I'm getting ready to get more radioactive like this,
again, is I could use a digital form that all you need to do with a computer and some software,
and this is available in all the different operating systems. You can even do this with
tablet PCs and things like that via ILS-based, you know, an iPad or a Android version of that.
There are digital nodes that essentially use the sound card of your PC and the display of your
PC, your laptop or your tablet, and you have a special cable that plug into the radio,
and you go on to these HF bands, so we're talking about longer range communications here,
but tiny amounts of power, right? Very small amounts of power, but a big, long piece of wire
up high into three, and I would sit on my deck at night, throw a piece of wire up into the tree,
and hook it up to my radio, hook my laptop up to that, and you'll literally see the frequency.
You can hear them over the speaker of the PC. You can hear the little warbling sounds.
Kind of reminds me of the old days with modems. If you remember,
what the modems sounded like, a little bit more musical and a little bit less jarring
than the old modem tones. But you can hear these tones of signals over the radio,
and you can literally see them. There'll be multiple signals that are little lines that are
going up the screen. It's kind of like the matrix only in reverse. They go from the bottom of
the screen to the top. And you move this little pointer over to one of those strong signals,
and all of a sudden, a little space there that's available on the user interface on your PC
didn't start showing you the text that the person on the other end of the conversation
is typing in on their computer with similar types of equipment. And I said,
in my backyard, or down at a vacation cabin that belongs to my father,
and on a pleasant summer evening with nothing but a piece of wire thrown into the air and a
minuscule amount of power on my laptop and type messages back and forth to people down in
the South America, across the entire United States and Canada, once or twice, even all the way over
into Europe. Over the air, we talk about Ethernet now. You know, in the early days of radio,
one theory about how radio work was, there was this thing that proposed that was the ether.
There was some kind of magical substance that was the reason why that these things transferred
from place to place. Ethernet kind of gives its name from that old hypothesized mythical ether,
right? That was the way that these things. But you're really communicating across ether. You're
communicating wirelessly to somebody in another state, another country, another continent.
If you don't think that's cool, you don't have to do it. You'll benefit from the various ways
that we will improve that as amateur radio operators and improve communications.
Last bit before I part with you here on this particular episode is there are organizations for
each country that license the amateur radio operator. There are probably different classifications
of licenses for your particular country. I do know, happen to know, that the radio society is great
written, that is the people who handled that kind of thing and would be the people you get in
contact with about getting a license if you're in the UK. Here in the US, the primary group that
regulates it, of course, is the federal communications commission. The radius site is great
written, it's not the regulatory group, but they're the primary group of amateur radio operator
at the organization that represents them. So they can tell you information about probably
have studying materials for the test that would be appropriate there for the UK. Whatever country
you're in, there would be an appropriate group probably that would provide you those kinds of
things. In America, that's called the American Radio Relay League, and actually that relay
in that happens to refer to the old days when there was very low power involved, and amateur
radio operators would actually receive a message to one person and then relay it onto the next person.
So they would actually pass messages along and relay those, that's where the relay leak
actually comes from. This is from a very, very, very, very low power days of amateur radio
operations. There's W-5-Y-I, provides some testing. If you have a radius extort near you,
I would highly recommend some of the studying materials that are there. Make sure in the US,
I'm sure it's the same for all of the countries involved, but I happen to know more about the US.
There's always a set of question pools, and eventually they change those questions. They
refine the test and change some of the questions. So make sure you're getting a book that is the
current book for whether we're licensed class. You probably want to start out with a technician's class,
license, and then move on from there. There's probably a group not too far away for you that could
offer to do the testing for you. They usually do testing like this at the hampsest, so there's
probably a hampsest that wouldn't be too far with drive away from you. I happen to drive to
a hampsest that was not too far about so 40 miles from my house in a little town called Warnsburg
Missouri. It's a small regional hampsest that's close enough to the area that a lot of people
can't sit and come out there. I might comment sometime in the future about amateur radio and
what it was like to go to that, but that was a little bit of a reminder to be about amateur radio.
It's something that I'm kind of rekindlingly interested in, and
thrusting off some radios, requiring a little bit of new equipment and
going to get more radio active right now. Right now is a good time to be an amateur radio operator
because the sunspot cycle is up, and when the sunspot cycle is up, it helps in some of those
propagation of those radio waves to be able to talk around the world for longer distances
with higher frequencies. And of course, the higher the frequency, the easier it is to build
in antenna because it's shorter, and so that makes it for a more beneficial situation if you have
limitations in what the size of your canvas can be. And that's a cycle that's like an 11-year cycle.
So eventually we'll get them to a trough, and then the 11-year for now will be close to the
top of the cycle again. So we happen to be close to the top of the cycle now, and it's kind of
an 11-year cycle that the sunspots work. So look forward to any comments about this. Are there any
other amateur radio operators out there? I'm going to have the public radio crowd. If you're
interested in some of the digital modes and things like that, be sure to leave some comments.
You can always leave comments to me, right, at Hacker Public Radio, or HPR, either one,
at Mr. Gadgets, that's m-r-g-a-d-g-e-t-s.com. And I welcome any chronic comments about
any of the episodes that I eat here, or you could go over even and go to Mr. Gadgets.com.
And that's basically just my blog spot blog, but you could Twitter me on Mr. Gadgets,
right, on Twitter. I'm also Mr. Gadgets, I believe we get to be on Google Plus, or I am Bruce Bar,
right? And so you can get to be there on Google Plus. See some comments, Jimmy, either on the comments
on the HPR blog, or for this episode, or get to me, get in touch with me, some of those other
glaze. Let me know what you think. If you're interested in amateur radio kinds of things, radio
transmitters, things like that, we can certainly talk about those more. But it's certainly an
interesting geeky hobby, and it kind of meshes with the communications capabilities. This is a
way for you to be able to communicate even when Twitter is down, and your high speed internet
is down. You can still communicate with people, and if an emergency takes place, you probably
aren't going to have high speed internet. And your self-tower is probably not going to work either.
But there are modes that you can actually use to communicate, and you can serve your community
in helping out if Lord for God paid disaster should take place. So for now, the way we would say
that in amateur radio parlance, I'll say 73, which in Morris Code is a mirror image of one
another. The DIT and DAW pattern for the seven, and the DIT and DAW pattern for the three,
are an exact mirror image, right? The DIT for DAWs and the DAWs are DITs. And so that is how you
would sign off a CW transmission. You would say 73, the E, which means from A, B, 0, Y, O,
which is my amateur radio call sign. And we often use it's hard sometimes to hear what the
letters are. So we use words, which is the first letter of the word, right, represents the letter.
So that would be alpha, bravo, zero, Yankee, Oscar. This goes all the way back to military.
And the military guys would have a coding system that would indicate what the letters of the
alphabet are, and they would spell them out by using the words. So 73, D, E, A, B, 0, Y, O,
and we hope to talk to you in the not-to-distant future. And maybe even on the air.
And until then, be careful out here on the table, lots of a frontier, whether it's using
radio waves or Ethernet tables or cell phones. Always remember, if you're talking to somebody else,
it just happens to be they're not in the room with you. Bye now.
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