In the day in age where you can check email on your phone. You can look at people while you’re talking to them. You can basically do anything but brush your teeth with my phone.
You might think amateur radio would be a thing of the past. You’d be wrong. Interest is actually growing.
“Right now the number of amateur radio licenses is at a 10-year high and it’s growing rapidly. There’s tremendous interest,” said Kevin Grantham, from the Dallas Amateur Radio Club.
“You set your antenna up and you put out your call sign and somebody answers and they’re in Romania. Someone else answers and they’re in Kenya,” he said.
So, you never know who you’re going to run in to and you know that you would all at least have some basic common interest with the radio?
Grantham describes it as the “ultimate party line.”
“There’s the useful side of it like the emergency and the disaster relief, and then there’s just the fun side of it,” he said.
7 Comments to “Interest is buzzing in Amateur Radio”
December 20, 2012 at 3:50 PM
"In the day in age…"
Incorrect grammar in the very first sentence!
January 10, 2013 at 3:03 AM
Boy, you could never tell that in Hawaii, where the new State Hawaii RACES Assn- KH6HPZ, has taken over all the best & most important repeaters in Hawaii and made them "emergency use only" in the name of the State Civil,(Who didn't know about this until recently) and have systematically kicked off all the Amateur radio operators with squirrel-ly and baseless 15 minute QSO rules and drummed up accusations of Part 97 FCC rules as if they were the FCC authority themselves.
They've even made D Star repeaters unlink-able and done the unthinkable. They've made the state of Hawaii isolated from communicating with each other on other islands and outside it's own state waters unless you can afford to do this by HF.
They've even gone to great lengths to cover the chaos they caused over the airwaves during the October 2012 Tsunami,caused by a underwater sea quake just offshore from Canada. Only half of the states tsunami sirens went off during this tsunami due to poor or the lack of Amateur radio communications that would normally have been able to report these problems with great efficiency and in a timely manner.
If there was to ever be the worst place in the world to do such a thing,with the state of Hawaii being 2600 miles from the nearest land mass, this is it !!
A self-proclaimed expert of Amateur radio communications,AH6RH Ron Hashiro, appears to be the brainchild of this ultimate disaster waiting to happen. A contradiction of his former self, after five tsunamis in three years,this has seemed to of gotten the better of him. We've lost most of our on-the-air training nets including one of the best EmComm nets in the country,that use to be held of Sunday nights at 1900hrs. No more is the training for current and new Hams to learn the proper procedure of the ICS 213 messages and the Tactical message form due to the same silly 15 minute QSO rule that got everyone off the airwaves from Kauai to Maui. The only sanity left in Hawaii can be found on the Big Island of Hawai'i, where this infection hasn't quite reached yet but where Amateur radio operators there have heard that this bad infection is coming like today's Flu outbreak in 2013. Now is the time to write to your congressman,the FCC and State Civil Defense about how you feel about this important matter before this spreads to your state.
As Mr. Hashiro AH6RH has said,these airwaves are not for socializing, they are for emergencies only. That everyone should learn to do simplex only and know your own equipment before you get on the air like he did when he first started out. Maybe we should also go back to using cans and pieces of string also, because that was also designed for emergency use only too before there was repeaters. I wonder what he uses to make smoke signals….
January 10, 2013 at 11:30 AM
That is truly a shame. I guess all the repeater owners have all bought into the hype. Public service is a great thing but it should not be used to essentially privatize amateur radio frequencies by a chosen few. If we don't use our spectrum then it will continue to come under attack from parties looking for spectrum for commercial purposes.
January 10, 2013 at 9:54 AM
One wonders how 'they' are able to do this? Where and how does AH6RH gain the authority to do this?
January 10, 2013 at 12:24 PM
In our area, repeaters are open for Amateur use at all times. But when an eminent disaster is approaching, or some emergency pops up, ALL Amateurs follow the basic gentlemen's understanding that the repeaters are now being used for the crisis and they do not jump in unless they have important information to pass along or if they can answer a question quickly.
This was VERY apparent during the approach of Hurricane Sandy and it could not have sounded more professional if they had tried. THIS is how Amateur radio is SUPPOSED to be!
**********Thanks to our statewide ARES/Emcomm/Races groups, the WAN Repeater System, our local repeaters and clubs, and to all that helped and pitched in for that situation. Everyone of you were amazing!**********
We are just what our title implies………… Amateurs for the betterment of the hobby first and foremost, assistants to public service as needed secondly. Exactly as it is stated in the FCC rules. If he considers himself a professional, tell him to drop his Amateur license and get a commercial license to setup his very own system for emergencies and try to get paid for it then. Oh, wait, that is what public service is for and is already doing. Right?
January 10, 2013 at 3:02 PM
Unless I was a radio dealer, I'd be careful about building false expectations. In my 30+ years as a ham DX QSOs are still uncommon and I've never had 2 DX stations call me in the same session. Maybe he by "setting up your antenna" he means a megabuck tower and beam.
January 25, 2013 at 11:39 AM
The only hope you have is for "many" of the island's hams to jointly file a complaint with the FCC — and then begin violating the QSO rules on the repeater and Dstar. Also stop sending any money to the individuals and or clubs that run these repeaters.
When the money dries up the repeater operation will change. You could also band together and establish your own "free and open" repeater network. If you could get 20-30 hams together it would not be expensive to do this.
73