Foundations of Amateur Radio

Boating adventures

The other day I was on a boat. That's right, me, on a floating thing, on the water, the ocean actually, steering and everything. I should confess that when I was younger I spent most weekends sailing as a sea scout in Holland.

Managed to become a bootsen, that's the bunny in charge of a boat. Sea scouts, zee verkenners, was also my very first introduction to amateur radio through JOTA, Jamboree On The Air, where scouts across the globe come together, though it didn't make quite as much impression as breaking the middle finger on my right hand an hour later, but that's a story for another day.

So, me, on a motorboat, a tiny one, but still.

You may be wondering where this is going, trust me, it's relevant.

In preparation for my boating adventure I pulled out my trusty hand held radio, a waterproof Yaesu VX-7R. If you're not familiar with it, it's a tiny radio, capable of tuning between 500 kHz and 1 GHz, not quite DC to Daylight, but impressive nonetheless. I have it programmed for all registered Australian repeaters. One state per group in case you're planning to program yours.

One of the in-built options is to select Marine Channels. They're numbered from 0 to 281. I've looked in the past and in Australia the channel numbers don't follow any logic as simple as that. Numbering is all over the place, 84 channels as far as I can tell, I had to count them, the highest channel number is 2086 and there's channels with names like AIS 1 and AIS 2 rather than numbers.

If you're a yachtie, you're laughing your head off right now, but I'm making a point about Amateur Radio. We don't do channels here, well mostly we don't, unless we picked up an ancient radio cheap from somewhere and re-purposed it for Amateur Radio, but to coin another sailing term, by and large, we do frequencies.

So, here's the thing. My radio is perfectly able to transmit on marine frequencies and being a responsible person I thought it would be smart to bring my radio, just in case. I will confess that I didn't. After discovering that the marine documentation was all about channels, and decoding frequencies was beyond a quick look-up, I thought that it would be prudent to leave my radio at home. I had a mobile phone with me, was staying near to the marina and the boat owner actually supplied a radio.

So here I am, a semi-experienced radio amateur, completely clueless about marine radio. While I was figuring out how to tell you about this, I managed to find the government website which referred to a training website which referred to a user guide that actually had a list of channels and frequencies side-by-side. You'll be pleased to learn that channel 16 on my radio, the emergency marine channel is on the same frequency as the official channel 16 in Australia.

My point is this. We have a common interest in communicating. In the case of an emergency it would be useful to know what marine channels relate to what frequencies and how we as radio amateurs can help if required. It also means that we as radio amateurs are not the all knowing beings we believe ourselves to be. Of course we already knew that, so we keep learning.

I know I'm going to learn how marine radio channels work. I'll probably have a look-see at other channel spectrum users and see how they relate, so I can know how their system works in case I ever need to.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB