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Reply to: Beginner’s guide to amateur (ham) radio for preppers Posted January 27, 2019

There is one case where you can do this, but it’s not useful for the case requested. You CAN let your child talk on the radio if you are PRESENT and can control the station. You are the “control operator”, and the child is operating under a third-party exception. This is useful for situations such as giving demonstrations or teaching kids about ham radio, but CAN’T be extended to your child being a block away on a handheld, since you aren’t present to control that station. There is no lower AGE limit to getting an amateur license, however. If your kid can take the test and pass it, they can get a license. There have been kids under 10 who have gotten their licenses. It’s quite common for teenagers to have their licenses, and it used to be VERY popular for them to have them back in the mid-20th century, and even build their own gear. That’s another aspect of ham radio — because there isn’t a “type acceptance” for ham gear, amateurs can build their own radios. They’re responsible for the radios working properly, within certain specifications, but they don’t have to have them inspected by a government official or anything. I’ve built a bunch of radios in the 19 years I’ve been an amateur, of varying power and with varying features. I’ve got a couple of very low power Morse-code only transceivers I put together that cost $30 each. They even have a code key as part of the PC board you can assemble. (Search Google for the Cricket 80a for 80 meters, and Cricket 30 for 30 meters. Frequency is controlled with a quartz crystal instead of a dial, but you can get crystals on Ebay cheap.) It’s a good beginner project. There’s lots of low-power kits available, and even some full-power gear you can build, and you can always get schematics and build your own gear from scratch, or design it yourself if you have the skills. Many modern radios are actually computers, the radio functions being defined in software. I’ve built three radios that used Arduino boards as the “brain”, and a digital frequency generator for the “brawn”. I recently bought a very portable radio by Elecraft, their KX3, that has the features of a base station but low power, only 10 watts. It’s about the size of an older CB walkie-talkie, but works on all of the HF bands in all of the modes. I got a 100 watt amplifier for it to use as a base station. Add a battery pack and an antenna, and you can set it up anywhere and work the world. The MODE of operation also affects performance. Voice communications (or “phone”) is the lowest-performing of the modes, but the easiest to use. The hardest to use but one of the best-performing is Morse code, called “Continuous Wave” or “CW”. Voice has limited range because the bandwidth of the signal has to be very wide in order to carry intelligible voice. It can be easily interfered with and requires more power to go a given distance. CW requires very little power, can travel very long distances, and since it’s the most primitive digital mode, can usually be picked out of lots of noise on the airwaves easier than voice, as it only needs a minute bandwidth for your radio to detect its “on-off” signal. You can get a very simple CW transceiver on Ebay for about $10, assembled and delivered, with a plastic case. It’s code only and less than a watt of output power, and the receiver is very noisy and subject to interference, but it works. You can cut the cost in half if you buy a kit. Look for a “Pixie” or “Super Pixie” on Ebay. You can get a “Super Octopus” Rock-mite kit for about $25 that has significantly more power and a somewhat better receiver. Both are crystal driven. If you put in a crystal socket instead of soldering it in, you can change the frequency by putting in a new crystal. There are new digital modes that can use very low power and narrow bandwidth to transmit signals very long distances, but they require a fairly beefy computer to encode and decode the signals. The benefit is that you get the durable and long-range signal of CW but don’t have to encode and decode it in your brain, the computer does it for you. (You CAN send and receive CW using a computer, but it’s not as reliable and generally considered “cheating”. Take the time and effort and learn CW — you don’t HAVE to know it, but it’s valuable and fun once you learn how.)

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Reply to: Beginner’s guide to amateur (ham) radio for preppers Posted January 27, 2019

There is one case where you can do this, but it’s not useful for the case requested. You CAN let your child talk on the radio if you are PRESENT and can control the station. You are the “control operator”, and the child is operating under a third-party exception. This is useful for situations such as giving demonstrations or teaching kids about ham radio, but CAN’T be extended to your child being a block away on a handheld, since you aren’t present to control that station. There is no lower AGE limit to getting an amateur license, however. If your kid can take the test and pass it, they can get a license. There have been kids under 10 who have gotten their licenses. It’s quite common for teenagers to have their licenses, and it used to be VERY popular for them to have them back in the mid-20th century, and even build their own gear. That’s another aspect of ham radio — because there isn’t a “type acceptance” for ham gear, amateurs can build their own radios. They’re responsible for the radios working properly, within certain specifications, but they don’t have to have them inspected by a government official or anything. I’ve built a bunch of radios in the 19 years I’ve been an amateur, of varying power and with varying features. I’ve got a couple of very low power Morse-code only transceivers I put together that cost $30 each. They even have a code key as part of the PC board you can assemble. (Search Google for the Cricket 80a for 80 meters, and Cricket 30 for 30 meters. Frequency is controlled with a quartz crystal instead of a dial, but you can get crystals on Ebay cheap.) It’s a good beginner project. There’s lots of low-power kits available, and even some full-power gear you can build, and you can always get schematics and build your own gear from scratch, or design it yourself if you have the skills. Many modern radios are actually computers, the radio functions being defined in software. I’ve built three radios that used Arduino boards as the “brain”, and a digital frequency generator for the “brawn”. I recently bought a very portable radio by Elecraft, their KX3, that has the features of a base station but low power, only 10 watts. It’s about the size of an older CB walkie-talkie, but works on all of the HF bands in all of the modes. I got a 100 watt amplifier for it to use as a base station. Add a battery pack and an antenna, and you can set it up anywhere and work the world. The MODE of operation also affects performance. Voice communications (or “phone”) is the lowest-performing of the modes, but the easiest to use. The hardest to use but one of the best-performing is Morse code, called “Continuous Wave” or “CW”. Voice has limited range because the bandwidth of the signal has to be very wide in order to carry intelligible voice. It can be easily interfered with and requires more power to go a given distance. CW requires very little power, can travel very long distances, and since it’s the most primitive digital mode, can usually be picked out of lots of noise on the airwaves easier than voice, as it only needs a minute bandwidth for your radio to detect its “on-off” signal. You can get a very simple CW transceiver on Ebay for about $10, assembled and delivered, with a plastic case. It’s code only and less than a watt of output power, and the receiver is very noisy and subject to interference, but it works. You can cut the cost in half if you buy a kit. Look for a “Pixie” or “Super Pixie” on Ebay. You can get a “Super Octopus” Rock-mite kit for about $25 that has significantly more power and a somewhat better receiver. Both are crystal driven. If you put in a crystal socket instead of soldering it in, you can change the frequency by putting in a new crystal. There are new digital modes that can use very low power and narrow bandwidth to transmit signals very long distances, but they require a fairly beefy computer to encode and decode the signals. The benefit is that you get the durable and long-range signal of CW but don’t have to encode and decode it in your brain, the computer does it for you. (You CAN send and receive CW using a computer, but it’s not as reliable and generally considered “cheating”. Take the time and effort and learn CW — you don’t HAVE to know it, but it’s valuable and fun once you learn how.)