What IS Ham Radio?

Ham Radio is the slang term for the Amateur Radio Service. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says "The amateur [radio] services are for qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest."

Here is my own brief explanation:

Ham radio operators are known for helping in emergencies. They bridge the communication gaps when catastrophe strikes. When a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, terrorist attack or whatever disrupts the communications of the authorities, ham radio operators step-up to keep the lifesaving communications going in times of disaster. When hams are not helping with emergencies, they communicate with each other just for the fun of it!

Many people that I have met on the air (radio) have become life-long friends. I can talk to ham radio operators in my own town or all around the world. One of the coolest things that I have ever done on the radio is talk to Astronauts and Cosmonauts in the International Space Station (ISS). Hams are the only people authorized to make contact with the space station besides NASA!

HOW TO BE A HAM:
To be a Amateur "Ham" Radio Operator, you have to obtain a license from the FCC. The license will give you a unique letter/number sequence called a "call sign" to use to identify your radio station. My call sign is NX1Z. To get the license, you have to take a test. There are 3 license levels and each one has a progressively harder test. The entry level license is the "Technician Class" license. The intermediate license is called "general Class" and the highest license in the Amateur Radio Service is the "Extra Class". Each test consists of questions about the rules of operating radio , some basic electronics theory and some radio theory. You should know that there are elementary school students that have passed all of these tests.

I may edit this post in the future to be a bit more informative.
For now, if you are interested go to the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) website at www.arrl.org

The ARRL is like the NRA of Ham Radio.

SSB Contest this weekend

The SSB contest this weekend is still going on as I write this. Propagation is pretty good on 20 meters, there are stations all over the band-scope on my Icom Pro3. Its been fun searching around the bands and looking up all the callsigns to find out what countries I am hearing. For those of you who don't know how a radio contest works: basically ham radio operators try to contact as many other radio stations in a given time period as required by the rules of the contest. Instead of competing, I like to take advantage of the increased radio traffic to search for countries that I have not yet made a contact with and try to get just them in my log. But so far this weekend I have not heard any countries not already in my log. I have only made one contact this weekend. It was the only one I tried for: CU2A in the Portuguese Azores Islands in the mid Atlantic. My wife was born in the Azores (or Acores as the Portuguese spell it) on the island of Graciosa. Whenever I hear a Azorian station, I make contact. Then I like to let my wife know I made a contact with her home in the "old world".