Ham Radio, explained by EA1HET

Just in case you’ve never heard about the term “Ham Radio” let me introduce you to the hobby of amateur radio communications.

My name is Jonathan Gonzalez, and my “call sign” is EA1HET. A call sign is a unique identifier for a transmitter station. I obtained mine by passing a government exam and obtaining a radio station license.

The particle “EA” represents my country (Spain) and my license class (”A”). The number (”1”) designates the region where I live in my country of residence. The last 1, 2 or 3 letters are simply a consecutive list that changes to identify different radio stations. Call signs with just 1 final letter are called “vanity calls” and are used mainly by DX stations, or stations that compete in radio championships. Keep reading for more details.

Ham Radio Operator 0.2%

But, what is really a ham radio operator?

Since the dawn of radio, amateur operators, “hams” in our own jargon, have transmitted on tenaciously guarded slices of radio spectrum. Electronic engineering has benefited tremendously from our activity, from the level of the individual engineer to the entire field. But the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with its ability to easily connect billions of people, somehow removed the attention for our discipline.

OK, How ham radio fits today in society?

Well, that’s a fantastic question. As N0SSC (Sterling Mann) argued in his blog article titled “Millennials are killing ham radio”, the “Hobbiest Computer” movement of the 1980s (all of you with a TRS-80) is now the hacker/maker movement, automating life with microcontrollers, tiny computers, and data centers… and, in regard to the amateur (ham) radio, that it’s to The Baby Boomer and Generation X’s youth as IoT (Internet of Things) is to Millennials and Generation Y.

Meanwhile, for old generations, talking to people on the radio (in the absence of Internet, obviously) was an essential, for newer generation interest in “talking to people on the radio” is waning; it’s about talking to machines, and enabling machines to talk to us. That’s why the maker movement is such a hit nowadays, especially with commercial entities also entering the fray with off the shelf, sometimes cheap, IoT devices.

Another ham radio operator, K0NR (Bob Witte) argued on this ideas that for new generations people-to-people communication is trivial, they simply were born on the Internet era and understand this capacity is given for granted, and although some young hams find it really cool to talk to people beyond shouting distance with the raw elements of a radio station, what’s much more interesting and impactful to the new generations is the idea of people-to-machine (and viceversa) communication.

Fine, What does a ham radio operator do in its hobby nowadays?

Much like a “hackaton”, which is a computer software competition where multiple individuals work together on solving a given problem, ham radio operators address multiple challenges on technical aspects related to electronics, physics, power/electricity, hardware and software, just to name a few. More precisely, examples could include but are not limited to:

  • Design, understand, build and repair antennas. Sounds like really simple but it cannot be much different from reality. This specialty is really tough.
  • Build software. Most of the current software for ham radio operators, if not all, was built in the 1990s. They remain so-so operational, but there’s no planned evolution with very picky exceptions. That’s a risk because, today, everything is ruled out with software. Ham radio is not an exception here.
  • Build hardware. Ham radio operators are makers, so anything around radio spectrum handling, networking, automation, IoT, SDR, microwave stations, remote ham radio operation, WiFi, WiMax, LTE, LoRa, ZigBee, P25, DMR, DV, etc… is part of the “normal day”.
  • Run contests. Competing among colleagues to decide who has the better technical conditions, being able to connect with more or farer radio stations than the others, is another part of hobby. This is a demonstration of strength of everything a ham radio operator learnt over time and that could savvily acquire with a reasonable amount of €€€.
  • Deploy and/or enjoy wide spectrum monitors. The well-knowns Web-SDRs fall here.
  • Contact and operate satellites. Yes, you read well. Ham radio operators use LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites as well for communication. And surprisingly for many, we have a ton!
  • Launch atmospheric balloons. Another poor’s man form of studying the near space.
  • Run in QRP mode (very low power conditions). This is my hobby nowadays. Using a portable rig with a portable antenna (sometimes even a simple pice of rather long cable) and a battery pack offering at most a total power of 5 Watts to operate the world without intermediate stations or repeaters. Doesn’t it sound challenging to you?