Nice use of solar. I admire that.

I use two rigs, one on the 2m band (or 145MHz as you were calling it) and one on the 10m band (28/29MHz). The 2m rig is an Icom T2H handheld, connected to a Ramsey PA10 amplifier (gives me 30W) into a 3dB antenna. The other is a RadioShack (I think they're known as Tandy in the UK) HTX-10 though a base-loaded antenna that stands around 75cm tall (very short for that band).

I can get into FM repeaters through both rigs.

Talk to me for a minute about how the 2m band is laid out in the UK. I understand it is a bit more organized than it is here.

Yes, the problem with the current breed of radios is that they are all GMRS/FRS hybrids, something that a lot of folks over at Popular Wireless have declared to be a Bad Thing[tm].

These radios operate in FRS on the FRS-only channels (8-14) and in GMRS on the GMRS-only channels (15-22). Most operate as GMRS in the FRS/GMRS channels (1-7), and so need a license. Kind of silly, if you ask me. If they are going to make radios that need a licence, then they should make radios that are worth having a license for (5W, perhaps?)

Besides the power level, there is also the deviation issue. GMRS allows a 25kHz bandwidth, which usually is met by doing 5kHz deviation with a 3-5kHz audio bandwidth, giving 16-20kHz bandwidth. FRS explicitly says 2.5kHz deviation and (IIRC) 3125Hz audio bandwidth. Undoubtedly, this adds to the difficulty of getting it to mimic the other radios.

Hi Bruno.

You can check Part 97 (or arrl.org) for current allocations and emission modes for all license classes; typically, the morse code element of the FCC exam is there as gateway to any HF communications (communications apt to propagate beyond the local area without further help from technology, once it leaves your antenna). This makes sense; spectra are scarce in the HF bands (everybody wants a slice) and HF signals perforce are international in nature.

I'm only on VHF and have quite forgotten the exact sub-bands allocated to which license classes; I think the old Novice 80m band was 3700-3750 when I was using it; I knew the 40m and 15m allocations at the time, since I only operated on 80m, 40m and 15m CW initially (a Novice license did not permit telephony, only CW! Code requirement for this License was 5 wpm).

I learned morse from a retired military member who learned using a peculiar method involving mnemonics. For example, H is 'hitting the hip' (di-di-di-dit). W is 'the world war' (dit-dah-dah). Q is 'here comes the bride' (dah-dah-dit-dah) (mnemonic: Q for Queen; a bride is the man's queen etc. -- it's mnemonic, not Gospel hi hi). Worked very well for me at 5 wpm; not sure what it does to my mental process at 20wpm!

My younger brother heard me calling a 3x3 CQ on CW (heard the sidetone in the shack) pretty often when we were growing up (I got my ticket at age 14). More than a decade later, at a family gathering, he was able to recite the 3x3 call-up perfectly -- and didn't know morse whatsoever or what it was he was reciting. But not a dit or a dah was misplaced; he said:

dah-dit-dah-dit
dah-dah-di-dah.

dah-dit-dah-dit
dah-dah-di-dah.

dah-di-dit
dit.

di-dah-dah
dit-dah
di-dah-dah-dah-dah
dah
dah-dit
dit-dah-dit.

di-dah-dah
dit-dah
di-dah-dah-dah-dah
dah
dah-dit
dit-dah-dit.

di-dah-dah
dit-dah
di-dah-dah-dah-dah
dah
dah-dit
dit-dah-dit.

dah-dit-dah.

He could not tell you to this day what any of it meant, but I bet he can still recite it, accurately. My other brother can give my ham call in ICAO phoenetics, but never processed what it meant (can't decode it!)

I think both are indicators of how these things act upon the mind.

I used to send CW (morse) in the high school radio club while conversing in the room with people (essentially participating in two simultaneous conversations; one in spoken voice and the other in morse). I also learned to send morse left-handed, so I could take notes on paper, using my right hand.

I wrote a program in gforth (a Forth) to cause a microcontroller to sound arbitrary morse using a piezo buzzer (a somewhat inexpensive transducer). The idea at the time was to gain meaningful output from a microcontroller that a human could understand as a message, without the bother of an LCD display.

There's a way to (somewhat) mediate amplitude of the resultant morse pattern (louder or softer) as well as pitch and the rest of it. It worked pretty well. I've taught nearly every machine I've had my hands on at least some morse annunciation capability (often as simple as leveraging any existing 'beep' type of command the system already offered; my job was simply to organize program I/O into morse-recognizeable patterns.

As far as learning morse in the first place; I used W1AW code practice transmissions as my primary means to get someone (or something) else to encode an uknown message in morse, send it on a schedule, with an easy means to verify I'd copied it correctly (by looking up that text in Q-Street from a prior month's issue). It was fun since the text was often something I did not pay attention to when my subscription was delivered via ground mail; and also it wasn't random text, which I don't think is appropriate for starting out as a novice CW radio operator. After all, today I hear 'the' and not 'tee ache ee' -- short words and the roots of words tend to be heard as that word, not as their component characters; this is a language like any other.

de Chris WA1TNR since 1974

(and WQAP464 since a few days ago)

Not sure where you could find such audio files at this time, but certainly if you find them, share the wealth here :)

The program I had written was actually a set of short C filters and a BASH script gluing them all together, running on Linux. It turned out a raw PCM file of 16kHz 16bits/sample mono, which I could then pipe into an MP3 encoder. Since my workstation and my web server shared some drive space, I just had the output written to that drive space and presto! it appeared instantly on the web. I could probably do it again, but this time I'd probably just have the web server run it directly, since it has been upgraded from the '486 I had at the time.

There is something to be said for the ARRL code tests with respect to the reality of copying code, yes. However, when you take the test, there is no pumping or fading, it's just rock-solid tone.

On General vs. Tech.... Tech has all privilidges above 50MHz. the higher classes of license only add privs in the HF/MF range. One of my favourites, though, is to operate FM on 10m, and you can't do that under a Tech Plus license.

As a Tech Plus, you get no access to 160m, 30m, 20m, 17m or 12m. Of these, you will probably want access to 20m. It seems to be the single-most popular band for fixed ops below VHF, and second-most popular for mobile ops below VHF (after 10m).

Regarding young blood, how young :-) I know a couple of young operators, John, KC2HRP, from Rotterdam, NY and Chris, KC2HSU from Utica, NY are both under 18. Chris makes a point of seeking me out at every hamfest.

Regarding the overall population of ham radio operators, I have an explanation I've given a few times (maybe it's even in this thread, but I don't feel like looking back at the second). The theory is this: There are, historically, four classes of ham radio operators:

1. Those who need access to the telephone network wirelessly. These folks would use autopatches to get that access, but have since moved to cellular phones, because they are so cheap and ubiquitous now.

2. Those who want to make long-distance communications without spending an arm and a leg. These folks used HF historically, but have moved to the Internet or even started using the phone, now that phone service is cheap.

3. Those who need some form of intra-family communications on an ad-hoc basis. 2m repeaters do this admirably, but may be overkill sometimes. The bravest of these folks moved to CB for this purpose, but since the late 90's, FRS has been the killer app for this purpose. Of course GMRS has been there a long time, and is starting to rise in popularity, but I honestly believe that the larger portion of the GMRS population today is pirate, since GMRS requires a license like CB used to. Then, of course, there is MURS, which I use for my family, since it is much more thinly populated, and interference is rare.

4. People who genuninely love radio. Are all of these folks hams? No. Some are CB'ers, others take up a career in commercial or broadcast radio or cellular telephony, whatever catches their interest.

So you see, the problem is that the population has been decimated down to what it really should have been in the first place.

Lastly, you asked how this affects credibility, and I regret that I don't know the answer to that one.

Thanks for the kind words, and good luck.

P.S. If you don't want to go up to General straight away, you don't have to. Your code test is good for one year after passing, IIRC. That being the case, if you decide, within a year of going Tech Plus, to go General, it's just a written test away.