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!