The Dark Secret of Amateur Radio

The dark secret of amateur radio is that it’s just like any other hobby: more expensive than it looks.  And when I say that, I don’t mean it has to be *expensive*.  After all, expensive, like rich, is a moving target.  The more money you have the more money rich means.  But, like any engaging hobby, it will take all of you disposable income, maybe more if you aren't disciplined...

My reentry into the hobby came via a $35 Bao-Feng HT.  A pretty minimal investment to be sure, but a gateway drug just the same.  The repeater I wanted to listen to wasn’t reachable at my home or on my commute with the crappy rubber duck antenna that comes with the radio.  Also, of course, the truck is a Faraday cage and any antenna inside is doomed no matter what the quality.  So the next item was a $19.95 unity gain mag mount with the appropriate male SMA connector (the Chinese radio makers felt it necessary to be backwards from the Japanese radios). 

That was much better, I could at least listen to my net of choice, but it was noisy and a bit of a chore to connect the radio each day.  Next was a $9.95 programming cable.  Calling the Bao-Feng hard to program via the keyboard is a laughable understatement.

I’d walk you through an example, but my therapist warns against it.  The software was at least free though it was no charmer to install either.  The USB drivers for the cable were a bit picky (and they have to be installed separately for each port you plug it into).

The HT came with an ear-piece/PTT mike setup that is usable, so that’s good.  I decided I needed a better walking around antenna and so added a $12.95 rubber duckie that’s a little over 2dB gain for 2m and closer to 3dB on 440MHz.  The final (so far) piece to the HT is a “battery eliminator”.  For somewhere around $5 there is a plastic block that simulates the battery and has a 12V accessory plug wired to it for use in the car.

I think that is the limit to the commercially available accessories for this radio.  However, I am already amassing parts for a screw on Yagi antenna for reading the satellite downlink signals. This project it probably in the $5 range and is held up more by time than anything else.

So, let’s recap:

HT	$35.00
Antenna	$20.00
Cable	$10.00
Antenna	$13.00
Battery	$5.00
Yagi Parts	$5.00
Total	$88.00

Approximately a 40% efficiency (cost of the radio divided by the total cost). As we’ll see later, this is a great number and the HT stands up as a great value even totally pimped out.

Getting the Technician Class License Part 2

I felt I was ready, it was time to find an exam. As I mentioned before, the exams are now administered by the amateur radio community through VECs (Voluntary Examination Coordinators) and most clubs had an accredited VE team. In fact, the Laurel (MD) club is the major VEC for the mid-Atlantic area and I could get to no less than 3 regularly scheduled monthly exam sessions within 20 miles of my house. In addition, exams are held at almost all the hamfests of which there are one or two a month within reasonable driving distance. So finding an exam was really about figuring out who had them this weekend and/or how far I felt like driving.

As it turns out, it was AARC's (Anne Arundel Radio Club) weekend for exams.  That was cool since it was at AARC that I studied for and got my Novice license 30 years ago.  I had no idea what to expect, it had been so long and all of my preparation has to this point been in isolation.  How many people would show up for a monthly exam?  Was amateur radio still that popular?

As it turned out, there were about a dozen people testing that day including an older gentleman who was blind.  The testing team didn't miss a beat in setting up for him and also accommodating a visiting VE team from a neighboring club that was about to start up testing and wanted to observe.

They did testing in batches of 6 as that was what the big table could accommodate with the testers stationed around it.  Since I was early (i.e., on time) I got into the first batch.  One or two others were testing for Tech in my batch and one was going for Extra. 

You are supposed to have an hour to complete the exam.  For Tech and General classes the exams are 35 questions, for Extra it's 50.  Mastery is a ridiculously low 74%.  That means I can miss 8 and still pass.  That doesn't sound like much but remember the exam covers A LOT of ground in terms of subject matter.

By the end of the test I felt like I might have over-prepared.  I finished in something like 12 minutes; no one else was close.  I hate being "that guy".  You know the one you wish you had a voodoo doll of in Chem 101 when he blew out of the exam in less than half the allotted time and looked happy.  Might even have been sober. So I went through and checked every answer carefully after all, it's easy to get out of sequence on the answer sheet, so it was good to check.  By the time I was done the young guy taking the Extra had finished, so I felt I could turn it in at this point.

They tried to make it dramatic, but I knew I had passed, the only question was the score.  For some reason, the FCC doesn't want them to tell you specifics of the results of the test, so all I got out of the tester was that I had missed "a couple".  I was in fact a little disappointed.  It was not initially my intention to roof the exam, but it really was rather easy.  So then it became a competitive thing.  There was, in fact, a flaw in my preparation since there were 2 or 3 questions that I don't remember seeing before.  If I am studying carefully, my (short term) memory is close to photographic, so I missing something somewhere.  I would have to correct that for the General exam...

Anyway, it took close to 3 hours end to end, but I had my Technician license, finally.  Well, I would as soon as my call sign appeared in the FCC online database, generally 2-3 days.

As it turns out it took them most of the week to get around to uploading the test data, so it wasn't until Friday that it appeared:  KB3ZYJ.  Kind of a nutty sequence, but by that time I decided that I needed at least to get my General upgrade because it allows access to HF bands I really wanted to get into.  Whenever you upgrade, you can request a new call sign.  You could also pay extra and get a "vanity" call sign if one you like is available.  I am not into vanity, especially the paying part.  I just wanted something memorable and easy for the other guys to get out of a pileup.  Well, we'll see what the upgrade brings.

Interlude I

I'll have these interludes occasionally here on the blog where I attend to matters that aren't about amateur radio directly.  Basically, meta posts.

I'll "try" to keep the posts to around 500 words.  I hate blogs whose entries are too short (less than 200-250 words), you just get into the mindset for the blog and it's over.  I tend to read those guys once a week (if they posts semi-daily).  But I sometimes get wordy and I think that long chunks of prose will scare away the casual reader.  So that's my target.

Also, I will give the call sign of folks (if they have one) to get you into the radio milieu.  For most people the call sign becomes a part of their identity.  I could do a whole post just on the interesting psychological implications there, maybe someother time... Anyway, in a real sense their call sign is a part of their identity and I will quote it when it's known to me.

Likewise you'll get tidbits of electronics and radio terminology thrown at you.  I'll endeavour to define it the first time, after that, you're on your own.  Amateur radio has a larger than usual Thieve's Cant or Inside Baseball terminology.  No doubt this is from its intersection of technical material and radio history.  This can be intimidating to the neophyte but, unfailingly (so far), every ham I have met will fail to comment if you missed a term or misused one.  Everyone is very easy going.

Getting the Technician Class License Part 1

My desire to get back into amateur radio coincided with my preparations to return to the corporate world. After 18 months of working for myself vending antique hand tools online and building custom woodworking projects and various knick knacks, it was time to get some steady income going. That meant brushing off my resume and catching up with what's been going on in the areas I had specialized in. After hooking up with an agency, landing a decent job took only 2 weeks.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it was now the holiday season, which would slow down what they termed the "onboarding process." Also, since this was a "Position of Public Trust", it required a "Public Trust" clearance by the Federal government. The preliminary phase of which takes 3-4 weeks.  At that time you'll get a conditional clearance and are able to get IDs and get started.  At some point it ends, but I am not sure when.  After 2 months I got interviewed by an OPM agent (really a contractor to the FBI) and in the two months since, I have heard nothing.  I've been going on the assumption that any day that doesn't end with handcuffs and a raincoat is a good one and leave it at that.

Also, the interviewing process revealed some holes in my programming toolbox and some rust on some existing skills.  Really, I was personally shocked how fast the minutiae of programming leaked out of my brain. The hiring manager suggested I make good use of the time to bone up on these areas and be ready to roll when the clearance came through. Actually I have to thank her for hiring me on the strength of my resume and realizing what 18 months "off" might do.

The boning up process jump started my technical reading, which can't be approached in the same way that fiction or pleasure reading can, at least by me. I actually enjoy this mode of learning and it took no time at all to knock down 6 books on Java programming, well, really associated technologies like the Struts2 framework, jQuery, etc. Once my mind is in that mode I end up reading some fairly technical stuff "for fun" as a break. This is how I've ended up reading so deeply on subjects like Cosmology and Astronomy and such.

Of course, my new target was radio and electronics. I had a pretty good layman's grasp of electronics and how most things work. Like, for instance, that current really flows the opposite way from what most people think (current is composed completely of electrons, which are negatively charged, I'll wait while you think this through...).

OK, moving on.  But, I was troubled that couldn't answer some basic questions that I felt were pretty obvious and likely to be ones asked by my children. For instance, how, exactly, does a capacitor or a transistor work. I knew what they did, but why did that really work? Why aren't transistors "used up" over time? So I started off really researching basic electronics.

You'd be surprising how poor an explanation you'll get from the typical electronics text on the nature of semiconductors. They get to a certain point and then some hand waving occurs and they move on.  The implication is that they details delve into particle physical or astrology or something.  If you were to ask my questions of an electrical engineer or, heaven help you, an EE professor you'll quickly get into an area of physics not meant to be tread by folks hoping to get laid ever again. So, I had to supplement these books with a lot of quality time with Professor Google. Happily, there are some talented people out there willing to make web pages for idiots like me.

While this was going on I picked up the book by Technician Class 2010-2014 Gordon West (WB6NOA). If you've never heard "Gordo" talk, it's hard to explain. There are few people that speak so enthusiastically about...whatever he's speaking about at the moment. He has a "big" voice, like one you get through a lifetime of public speaking and radio/TV hosting. The book comes with a breathless 60 min audio tour of amateur radio on the accompanying CD.

The book is specifically a study manual for the FCC Element 2 exam, which is what the FCC calls the Technician class test (Element 1 was the now defunct Novice class written exam).  As I've mentioned before, the question pools for all the amateur radio exams are publicly available.  So why shell out $17 for a study guide?  I may have mentioned this, but the material is fairly technical.  Having a distilled version of the stuff you need to know to pass is handier than researching all the answers yourself.

In a good/bad thing, Gordo slightly reorganized the material from the tests.  There is some overlap between the various areas on the test and in an effort to make the progression of material more logical and comprehensible he moved some stuff around.  If I were coming at this with no knowledge, this would have been even more of a good thing.  As it was, I hopped around a bit to follow a thread when I was studying the exam pool itself.

That was part two: I printed out the whole 350 question exam pool and basically read through it about 3 times.  Between the end of the first pass and the end of the third I started taking the practice exams on eHam.net.  Highly recommended.  By the time I got through the third pass I was pretty sick of these questions and was scoring a pretty consistent 90% +- 5%.


Continued...

The Gateway Back

As I mentioned in the last post, I was in the process of pulling together some electronic stuff to do with Marcus.  One of the things that I got was an Arduino microcontroller.  It's all the rage these days in the maker/hacker crowd and it's cheap.  For $17 you get a microcontroller on a board with a bunch of standard ports for IO and expansion. It also has a series of header pins in a standard arrangement that allows people to make expansion boards (called shields).  It's a nice expandable system where you don't have to do all the low level work but there is still a lot of room for hacking (in the original sense of the word, as I will use it throughout this blog.

Anyways, at some point in comparing the various versions of the Arduino board and accessories I came across this BAOFENG radio.  This is a Chinese made dual band hand held transceiver for the 2m and 70cm ham bands.  All such handhelds are known as HTs regardless of brand.  And this radio came in like 8 colors and ran from $35 to $75 on eBay and Amazon depending on the vendor and exact version.  An amazing price, if they worked.  Back in the day, a 2m handheld ran a couple hundred dollars and was a pretty basic affair.

So I looked around and there was a very active user community on Yahoo providing things like programming support and a user manual that didn't suck.  So they must be real I supposed.  Well, one way to find out, I ordered one.  And in a few days I had a UV-5RA of my very own.  Then it was time to plug in a few of the local repeaters and hear what was going on.

Just for clarity's sake since not everyone reading this, assuming anyone is reading this, it is legal to listen on the ham bands without a license, you just can't transmit.  And enforcement of the amateur radio rules is something the FCC takes fairly seriously.

Well, the next step was pretty obvious, I needed a license.  My Novice ticket had long expired and that license level didn't have privileges on the 2m band anyway. What I needed was a Technician class license, the lowest level to have such privileges. 

Well, some research showed that while I wasn't looking, the FCC had simplified the licensing process.  There are now only 3 levels of license with increasing privilege levels: Technician, General and Extra.  And there was no longer a requirement to demonstrate Morse Code proficiency along the way, yay!

There used to be 5 classes, starting with the Novice class and with an Advanced class stuck in between General and Extra.  At Novice you needed to be able to do 5 wpm of Morse Code, at General 13 wpm and Extra was 20 or 25 wpm.  The other classes didn't have a code requirement and were like a stepping stone type thing between levels.  In addition, the FCC turned over the administration of the tests to VECs (Volunteer Examination Coordinators). So you no longer had to troop down to the Federal Building to take the test.  The tests are also free in most cases.  The VECs also coordinate the question pools for the exams and the pools themselves are public.

How different that is from the various certification tests I have taken in the IT industry where the tests are "secret", as if anything was truly secret from Google, and focused on corner cases and trivia.  The Amateur Radio exams focused on the stuff that you actually needed to know without too many tricks. 

Like most cert exams, the bar is crazy low, 74% is mastery.  The tests are 35 multiple choice questions in 9 or 10 areas from a total pool of about 350.  All I needed to do was pass the first of these tests and I was back "in" and could talk with my handheld.

Our next installment will cover the study process and the test.

Stay Tuned :)

Returning to the Hobby

It all started innocently enough, I gotten Marcus one of those old “unsafe” electronics experimenter kits that Radio Shack used to sell in the 80s and 90s.  Happily you can still find them unopened occasionally on eBay.  The manual was written by Forrest Mims III, an icon in the hobbyist circles.  He wrote a series of “Engineer’s Notebooks” for Radio Shack in the 80’s.  These thin and inexpensive books were/are very accessible for the teenage mind.  They contain just enough explanation and theory to let you build the circuit diagram that followed.  Letting you learn experientially the theory that makes it all so dry from any other source.  As it turns out, this is how I learn best. I spent countless hours building stuff on a solderless breadboard.

The watershed moment was when my mother discovered the freezer had been wired with a light sensor and an alarm…yeah I forgot to take it out, oops.  Well, we had moved to Severna Park by that time and it turns out that the retiree living next door was the president of the local Amateur Radio club, AARC.  He was more than happy to redirect the energies of a curious 14 year old from scaring the crap out of his parents to learning about radio and satellites. 

I had a lot of fun hanging out with Mr. Bill (Bill Cooke, K3CN).  His TV was a Heathkit, meaning he built it out of parts and they *expect* you to be able to fix it, that was fun.  And of course he introduced me to amateur radio.  Under his tutelage I learned Morse Code (required in those days) and was enrolled in one of the first Novice Class training sessions held at AARC.  In due time I passed the Novice exam and was licensed as KA3ARM; this was about 1980 or 1981.

Time moved on and Mr. Bill developed some health issues that necessitated a series of surgeries that took him out of circulation for about 2 years.  In the meantime I the license every *other* teenager dreams about: my driver’s license.  And the voices in my head started chanting stuff about girls and as we all know, cars are like a gateway drug to girls.  So… I never really got any further into the radio hobby.  

It was something I'd always wanted to get back to, but never really seemed to have the time or money.  I still don't have the time, really, but in my next post, we see how cheap it can be to jump into HAM Radio.