HAM Signal Received

My HAM radio is disappointed in me. It’s not the other way ’round; my most recently purchased radio is fine (probably excellent) and I’m glad to have it. The failure is on my end. I’m just too damn lazy to finish setting it up.

Last fall I picked up a new old stock radio (now that I think about it, I still haven’t paid for it!). I fiddled a bit with an old power supply I had hanging around and soon it was powered. I tested it with a crappy antenna and it seemed to work; so I ordered up a new antenna and…

…nothing.

Wading through a thigh deep snowdrift to fabricate a mount for an antenna translated to a whole lotta’ nope. Winter sucks and it seemed to never end. I had plenty to keep me occupied and left it at that. The new antenna sits in the corner… judging me.

Other people are more productive in the HAM world than I. Recently, UnidentifiedHam sent me a message. Check it out:

The evil, manipulative, powerful world of cell phones may have dulled your amazement so let me elaborate. This photo was sent from the forest to me, mostly through radio. This is not a cell phone selfie. It was not filtered through a cell tower. It was neither transmitted from a cell phone nor received by one.

At any time prior to about 1996(?), a message like this would be impossible to a normal consumer. (HAMs don’t count, they’ve been doing shit like this since forever.) The methods used to shift that photo from a rocky chunk of forest to yours truly is closer to a 1980’s “news van” reporting from the scene of some sort of event. (Remember the old days when news mostly reported things that actually happened in real life? Pepperidge Farms remembers. But I digress.)

I’d like to say the message was relayed entirely “off grid” but that’s not quite right. The better way to think of it is that HAMs have a grid all their own. Their grid is different, better, weirder, more capable, more complex, sometimes parallel, and usually more dispersed than the network that turned your cell phone into a propaganda hub for the TikTok masses.

There’s a price to be paid. It’s a stone cold bitch to learn how to use the HAM’s “grid”. You have to have an FCC callsign. You have to buy and configure your own equipment. You need to be at least smart enough to sorta’ define watts and ohms. A monkey can run a cell phone but it takes skill to be a HAM

So enjoy it! In a world full of automatic transmission, join me to marvel at this stick shift image!

Warning: My explanation is Fischer-Price level. There are layers and layers of fascinating details I’m leaving out.

The grid that sent that photo from pine tree to yours truly and then on to this blog happened because UnidentifiedHam knew what he was doing, he used repeaters, WinLink happens to exist, and several technologies worked together. Oversimplifying greatly, UnidentifiedHam began by taking a photo. UnidentifiedHam used a cell phone but any digital camera would do.

Then, he (in his words) “spent about half an hour finding a winlink station that heard me well enough to quickly send the picture of camp”. Once he found the winlink station, he transferred the image via radio signal from his campsite to the station. From there the station handled the rest.

Here’s where I try to explain things HAM-ish without going down the rabbit hole. There are a zillion “radio bands” from which to choose. The band is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which the HAM wants to use. Nature, because it’s awesome, handles different bands in different ways. Some bounce off the ionosphere, others heat popcorn in your microwave, some go very far, some go very short. UnidentifiedHam chose the 80M wavelength which impresses me as a pretty long distance “bend around the planet” sort of band. (I’m open for correction.)

Being a N00b, I use mainly the 2M band (a wavelength of two meters) which is pretty much sort distance, line of sight type stuff. (Note: Don’t be led astray thinking 2M is “beginner land” and therefore lame. “Line of site” is still powerful. I consistently hit repeaters 20+ miles away with a cheap ass Baeofeng handheld. Depending on elevation and the curvature of the earth, “line of sight” is more than you’d think. On the other hand, 80 Meters is way cooler.)

To continue our story, UnidentifiedHam fired up his radio at camp and started hunting the airwaves for a suitable repeater. The repeater heard his signal and responded on a slightly different offset frequency. HAM radios do a “send on one frequency, hear on the other” shell game without breaking a sweat. They’re good at it.

Once some repeater said “I hear you on XYZ frequency” and did this by responding at XYZ+/- a smidge, UnidentifiedHam used software which told the repeater (I’m paraphrasing) “I’m about to send a signal designed for use within the WinLink system”. The repeater knew then to turn it to an e-mail at its location (or some other location) and fire off the e-mail.

The Repeater said “right on boss”. (Obviously the electronic handshake isn’t “right on boss” but you get the point.) All this happened with beeps and boops and tones and maybe, but probably not, CW (Morse Code).

The handshake done, UnidentifiedHam fired off a 9 minute blast of radio information at a set frequency with a set structure. The repeater understood the data because of its format and metadata. The repeater digested it and properly converted the data to an e-mail. The e-mail went to yours truly just like any other e-mail.

No cell phones were harmed in this process… but I suspect their feelings were hurt.

Elaborating further, UnidentifiedHam’s contact with the repeater didn’t have to “go to e-mail” instantly. He could have told the repeater to forward the message along in various ways. Some repeaters relay the message further to other repeaters using roughly the same band but with more power. Others convert to different bands. Others are electronically linked such that I could send a radio frequency message to a repeater in Albuquerque and a linked repeater in Miami might rebroadcast the message three time zones away. (I’m picking locations out of a hat here as examples, not listing actual repeaters. Please don’t get caught up in the minutiae. Just know that two or more repeaters over widely dispersed geography might work together as a net.)

Oh, and one more thing. My side of the “conversation” was on a computer receiving e-mail through regular broadband but it doesn’t have to be that way. I can setup my HAM to receive e-mail via radio frequencies too. I haven’t yet done so, but it’s on my to-do list.

Also, it doesn’t have to be e-mail at all. If UnidentifiedHam and I had planned out agreed upon times and protocols we could probably send messages with repeaters in the middle but never dump the message “down” to the internet.

Furthermore, if we had sufficient signal strength between radios we wouldn’t even need the repeaters. It’s common for HAMs to send and receive messages thousands and thousands of miles. There are contests where a HAM (or a group of them) will try to contact as many dispersed places on the globe as possible, usually in a limited time and often with outlandish success. I won’t be contacting Micronesia from my homestead any time soon but there are people who do things like that all the time.

HAM is nerd stuff that goes so deeply down the rabbit hole that it emerges again in the dimension of cool. In a world where your cell phone tracks your every move and seems to serve mainly as a vector of miserly maybe you might enjoy a different way to communicate? My modest goals involve receiving an e-mail even if the power is down and even if my rural IP craps out. But I know there’s a frontier to explore and I anticipate more with time.

Can you get a modest 2M HAM (like mine) and do the same thing? You certainly can! (You might even level up to an 80M rig rather than staying limited to what 2M can do.) Can you buy gadgetry right now that’ll make it work? Yes, absolutely! How expensive is it? That’s up to you. You can start with a handheld Baofeng that’s the size of a TV remote and cheaper than a couple of pizzas. You can expand until your house is bristling with fancy gadgets that draw magnificent levels of power and give you the aura of a mad scientist. In between is a hobby called QRP where people fiddle with the very smallest bits of power. They’ll get by with a 9volt battery with some diodes and shit in an Altoids tin. With that they’ll send a message halfway around the world. (It’s not magic but is sure feels like it.)

You can start by chatting with the neighbor and wind up bouncing signals off the moon. (Yes, “moon bounce” is literally a thing HAMs can do).

UnidentifiedHam made my day. I hope you enjoyed it. I want to thank him for his positive reminder of the clever things people can do.