Foundations of Amateur Radio

Today we have a world where radios are more and more like appliances. We can buy them at a store, ship them to our location, open the box, plug in the radio to an antenna and start operating.

I said, "like" an appliance, because a transceiver is not like a toaster in all aspects and it's those little gaps between the toaster as an appliance and a transceiver as an appliance that I want to highlight.

I was with a farmer recently who had a CB radio in his troopie, or if you're not familiar with that, a Toyota Land Cruiser, this one had 400.000km on the clock and was just getting run in. According to the farmer, the CB had never worked right. He joked that it was often easier to yell across the paddock than to use the radio. On a farm there are lots of things happening, during harvesting, heavy equipment is moving everywhere and communications are vital.

I was with a friend and the first thing that we noticed about this CB is that it was a UHF CB, that is, it was using 70cm, or 470-odd MHz. The antenna however was a HF CB antenna, 27 MHz. As a radio amateur you know that this is never going to work well. In fact it's amazing that there was any contact using this particular CB at all.

Another thing we noticed was that the connector between the radio and the antenna was loose, so it's entirely possible that the actual communication was happening around the connector on the back of the radio, rather than the antenna on the bull-bar.

You might be listening to this and shaking your head. If you're uncharitable, you might even scoff at those silly CB'ers. I think that's both unhelpful and wrong.

Precisely this is the difference between a toaster as an appliance and a transceiver as an appliance. It means that any radio training, any license at all, even a foundation call, is sufficient to learn enough to be able to diagnose such issues.

You might think that this means that I think CB'ers are stupid. Far from it. I think this means that radios are not appliances and that there is ample opportunity for the skills we take for granted as amateurs to propagate through the community.

If you're a CB'er yourself and you're not a radio amateur. Perhaps you might consider spending a weekend and getting your introduction to Amateur Radio. You are likely to learn lots of things you've never heard or understood, or more likely have been told incorrectly.

If learning how to use your transceiver, be it CB, HF club or otherwise, is important to you, have a look at Amateur Radio. I think it's important.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB