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Episode: 3473
Title: HPR3473: My journey into Amateur Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3473/hpr3473.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:05:06
---
This is Haka Public Radio episode 3473 for Wednesday the 24th of November 2021.
Today's show is entitled, My German Intermediate Radio and is part of the series HAM Radio.
It is hosted by the Loveburg and is about 10 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Dave explains this journey into Hama to Radio, initial setup and successes.
Hello, my name is Dave and welcome to another exciting episode of Haka Public Radio.
It's been a couple of years since my last episode and I know that HPR is running low on shows at the moment.
And as I've had this one in planning for some time now, I thought this was the right time to get it finished.
At the time of recording this, I have been an amateur radio licence holder for six months.
I took the notion of studying and applying for my foundation licence, which is the first of three stages to a full licence.
When I read a blog post by John Spriggs, John the Nice Guy, G7 VRI, back in March entitled, Might amateur radio be a hobby for you.
I saw a presentation by John at Ogcamp in 2018 in Sheffield, where he gave a whistle stop tour of what amateur radio actually is and how easy it is to get involved in it.
By way of background, I was quite involved in the CB radio scene back in the late 80s and early 90s.
I was introduced to CB by my dad, whose handle was screwball in the 1970s.
He had a CB in his car since as far back as I can ever remember.
I picked up the hobby from him by actually liberating him of his CB when he stopped using it.
Unfortunately, it got stolen from my car, say la vie.
Yes, my handle Mac then was the love bug.
In fact, it was whilst looking for an alternative to cool cat as a handle that I first used the moniker the love bug, probably back in the 1980s.
And it just stuck and it's been my online and now radio moniker ever since.
So after reading John's blog post and doing some research into amateur radio myself, a whole bunch of things happened at the same time.
I bought my first radio, a bofing UV5RTP from Amazon, and it cost about 40 quid.
I joined the Radio Society of Great Britain, not a requirement, but I would very much recommend it.
And I signed up for Essexham's Foundation Training course again, not a requirement, but it is recommended because it's geared around the foundation exam.
And is free.
The training took three weeks, all in my own time, and I applied for my exam as soon as the training was complete.
The exam was an hour long, under as close to exam conditions as an online exam would allow.
And I was told by the online system that I'd passed as soon as I submitted my answers.
It then took a few days to get confirmation of passing and a certificate, yay, in the post, which then allowed me to apply to Offcom, the authority for the radio spectrum here in the UK.
For my license and course sign.
I was able to choose the suffix of my course sign, and as BUG for bug was taken, I opted for TLB.
For the love bug, and thus my course sign is currently M7TLB, Mike 7 Tangerley Mbravo.
Now I say currently, I'm not actually allowed to change my course sign, however, the course sign is specific not only to me, but also to my license class.
So as a foundation license holder, M7 indicates the time foundation.
I think M3 and M6 are also prefixes that identify a UK license holder as foundation.
But then when I go for my intermediate and then full license, I will then get a new course sign for each one of those which will supersede the previous.
And as I understand it, your previous course signs don't get reused, so I will still have the M7TLB course sign even once I move into the higher license classes, although technically I don't think I can use it.
Anywho, once I got my foundation license, I went out that Sunday to lock some contacts or QSOs as they're called.
So I parked up at a high point, Nisa here, put a small area on the roof of the car so that I didn't warm up my head while I was transmitting, and started calling CQ.
So essentially a way of saying, I want to talk to somebody, CQ if you like.
As part of the license conditions, you're only permitted to make contact with other identifiable and identified amateur radio operators.
General broadcast to whoever might be listening at the time are actually prohibited.
And the only exception to that rule is if you're calling CQ to initiate that contact in the first place.
So I couldn't call out and say, hi, M7TLB, whether it's great where I am, how's it with you?
Unless I was actually talking to another person, another amateur radio operator that I had previously made contact with as part of that conversation.
So I'd call out something along the lines of CQ, CQ, this station, M7TLB, M7TLB, portable calling CQ.
The portable indicates that I'm not at my home station location, but it's also a good indication that my transmission may be variable due to the portable nature of the station.
I was transmitting using eight watts of power, two fewer than my license allows me, but significantly lower than the 400 watts I could be using as a full license holder.
So I'll be honest, my hopes weren't high.
My first contact was with the chap just outside Caster in Lincolnshire about 38 miles as the crow flies from where I was based.
He was also using a portable station, but with a directional B-man tenor.
So he was able to concentrate both transmission and reception in a particular direction.
So I was pretty impressed for 38 miles, I was expecting like two.
My second contact was also from a portable station, located by the woodhead pass in a tank or penistan about 18 miles from where I was.
And that contact was the gift that kept on giving as there were two other portable stations at the same location, so I got three contacts in the log for that one.
Unfortunately, things went quiet after that happened, so after a further five calls, I figured that was it. That was my lot for the day.
But still, I was very happy with the four QSAs that I had logged on my first day on radio.
Now, later that same day, I went out for my daily constitutional, so I figured I'd take the radio with me, with the standard short rubber duck antenna that it comes with, and an earpiece.
At least that way I wouldn't look too silly, or to be fair, a target.
My intention was just to bounce around the frequencies and listen to conversations rather than put out any CQs myself.
I was in a residential area, so I didn't really want to draw attention to myself.
And whilst I was listening, I heard someone calling CQ and inviting respondents to move to a different frequency, so I followed along and listened.
Now, there were already a couple of contacts there that I couldn't hear, so I waited for the initial person that made contact to finish working their first QSO.
Then he put a call out for whomever had originally responded, so I quickly jumped in with my call sign thinking that there was no way that he would hear me.
I was walking around town in a relatively built up area, with probably the worst antenna I could have chosen for distance, and he wasn't exactly coming through strong.
But he responded to me directly, asking me to stand by whilst he worked the other station that had responded.
While I was shocked to hear him say to the other contact that he was in East Yorkshire, about 33 miles from here.
Now, as with my first QSO, he was using a directional beam antenna, which was pointing due west.
I was south west of his location, so if you consider the things that I'd mentioned that he was not pointing this antenna directly at me,
and I was in a residential built up area and he was 33 miles away, I was amazed that I was able to hold a relatively decent quality conversation with somebody who was based that far away, so I was well pleased.
Now, cost-wise, I should warn that amateur radio can, I emphasise can, be an expensive hobby, but it does not have to be.
The bare minimum to get me on the air was the bow thing that I mentioned earlier, which was 43 pounds.
The cost of my foundation examination was 2750, so a little over 70 pounds overall.
I bought a number of accessories for the radio and I joined the Radio Society of Great Britain, but these are no way required.
The standard radio on its own is more than sufficient to gain some decent contacts, as I hope I've proven with a success from that for Sunday.
Now, since then, I have bought a high-frequency radio from India, it's a low-power model, low-power or QRP, as it's known, which is unlikely to get me very far, but there are some transmission modes that I can use that are specifically intended for low-power operation.
The next big thing is to get an antenna up in the back garden along with a decent tuner so that I can actually use that radio.
I did do some experimentation with it using a dipole that I bought, but it was only about three feet off the ground, so whilst I was picking up signals from all over the world, nobody could hear me, because the low-power and the position of the aerial, just meant that I was being blocked.
By the time this episode goes out, I would have started an intensive course with the Online Amateur Radio Community ORC, which is a UK-based club, and a more fantastic bunch of people you are not likely to find.
So, at some point soon, I will be able to change my course sign to one beginning with the prefix 2e0 or 2e1, which are what the intermediate licence holders are able to use, and be able to use up to 50 watts to transmit.
Although at this point in time, I don't have any equipment capable of transmitting 50 watts. Yet.
I point you to the excellent Ham Radio QSK series on HPR, where a number of correspondence have recorded shows about amateur radio that you may find interesting, and I will be putting this episode into the same series.
Are you an amateur radio operator? Please do let me know.
Drop me an email to HPR at thelovebug.org, I'm on Facebook and Twitter at the Lovebug, or you can leave a comment on this episode, or record your own episode in response.
At the time of recording this, HPR is getting low on shows. If you do have any shows in progress or something burning in your mind, get it recorded. Find out more information on how you can do that over at hackerpublicradio.org.
So that's it for today. Thank you very much for listening, wherever you are in the world, please stay safe.
Come back again tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio 7-3.
It's kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our sync.net.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareLike, Lead us all lessons.