Foundations of Amateur Radio

There's a confession I'd like to share with you. Chatting on air is something I rarely do.

When I'm working distant stations, so-called DX, my typical exchange is: AB0XYZ, you're 5 and 9. If the station has some questions to ask, I'll answer, but often times there is no conversation and I'll move on to the next one.

Some of that can be explained by my initial training as an Amateur. I started working lots of stations in a contesting environment. I took to it as a duck to water and never looked back. No doubt I have lots to learn and I cannot guarantee that my callsign recollection is as good as I think it is, not to mention being able to detect an incorrect callsign, since I still have little knowledge in which callsign prefix, the first part, belongs to which country.

Another explanation is that I'm often QRP and just very happy to be able to make the contact in the first place.

I hear stations on-air having a great chat, a so-called rag-chew, but I never seem to find something interesting to say or relevant story to share with a stranger. Sure I can talk. As you might have gathered from listening to me here, I'm never short of something to say, or an opinion to venture, but being sociable is not one of my stronger traits, never has been.

A few of our local Amateurs have a tendency to tell stories that go on for so-long that they time-out the local repeater, to the point where one repeater has been set to a 15 minute time-out just to cater for verbose exchanges. I immensely enjoy the stories, but often find myself wondering what I might contribute without sounding like I have tickets on myself.

I recently was asked by a new Amateur what to talk about. Their daily commute is a 30 minute car ride to and from work and chatting on the repeater seems like a logical thing to do, but they asked me what to talk about. Stuffed if I know.

Seriously though. The very first part of chatting is to actually turn on your radio. The next part is telling others that you're there. Then when they do, ask what they've been up to and before long there is a conversation under way.

The funny thing about all this is that while I'm pretty quiet when it comes to being on the local repeater, I do host a weekly 'net for new and returning Amateurs and when asked I'm more than capable of standing my ground and venturing my opinion.

Perhaps I just need to practice more and perhaps if you find yourself at a loose end on a topic of conversation, feel free to make fun of me or to raise a topic that's something I've talked about. Who knows, we might both learn something.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB