Hey, is this thing on?
My first two years as an amateur radio operator in Canada
Pst, hey. You. Yeah you. This is my first ham radio blog post. I’ll get better as I go, amateur radio seems to be one of those hobbies that grows with you for a long, long, long time.
How long ‘till I made a QSO?
Too long. I had to wait ‘till my Baofeng would come from Amazon. Longest next day shipping I’ve ever had to sit through. I was practicing clicking the PTT button like an air guitar.
Anyway, I finally got the radio, mashed the PTT from my BASEMENT and heard absolutely nothing in return. Oh how naive I was (and still am). I quickly plugged it into my Mac to program it, and ran into about a thousand driver issues, then finally got my channels programmed in. I remember hitting “Program” and then the screen going flush orange, meaning I was transmitting. I had a mini panic attack because I figured I was emitting the programming sounds. (I was, but it’s not like I hit a receiver anyway)
Later that night was the weekly OARC (Ottawa Amateur Radio Club) net, so I rushed upstairs to my brother’s bedroom, and tried hitting the repeater. Nothing. (that is, nothing but my Roger Beep TM) Unfortunately I was fooled by the “10-20km” range of HTs. I think I actually managed to barely engage the repeater for a split second, but all I did was kerchunk it.
The next week, I was ready. I got my bike, went to the highest mountain I could find, and was read 599 across 3 repeaters. (At this point my basic training kicked in and I instinctively turned down the power of the radio, because “only use the power you need to hit the station!”)
Part two
About a month in is where I started to really branch out. I started doing:
- EchoLink
- Building my own 40m CW transceiver
- Learning, learning, and more learning
- SDRs
- Joining my school’s amateur adjacent club
In the coming time, I will be writing about all of these in much greater depth individually.
Thanks for reading my first blog post!