Keep in touch with family and friends using mobile
and hand-held radios. Hand-held ham radios look like portable cellular phones and
can link you to hundreds of mountain-top repeater systems.
Talk with people in other states and countries.
Hams around the world are cruising the international radio bands looking for
contacts. Most hams around the world speak enough English to have a great
contact. Other languages are plentiful too!
Exchange QSL cards with people you have talked with.
QSL cards are postcards with your callsign that show proof of two-way radio contact.
There are awards for collecting contacts in different states and countries.
Join a local repeater group. Meet new friends and get
help learning amateur radio. Repeaters give reliable coverage from mobile or
hand-held radios over large local areas. Most club repeaters have fancy features
including phone calling from your radio, voice message boxes, links to other bands, and
more.
Transmit and receive packet radio from your computer
to someone else's computer across town or miles away using a small antenna on your
desk. No phone link required. The amateur packet radio system is a complex
nationwide network like the Internet. It has news groups, email, and other
services. There is even full TCP/IP available, although at slower data rates than on
the wired Internet. Wireless networking may be new to business, but hams have had it
for years!
Join a local emergency service team. Train in
emergency communication. Practice by providing communications for public events like
bike races or parades.
Build a small TV transceiver from a kit. Find
an old video camera and TV at the flea market. Video conference with someone across
town who has done the same thing. Even better, point your antenna toward a
mountain-top amateur TV repeater and be seen and heard by other amateurs for a hundred
miles.
Communicate by satellite. Point your antenna up
to any of several Amateur Radio satellites. Talk to someone on the other side of the
world using the satellite as a repeater. Query the satellite for its telemetry. Find
a satellite tracking program for you computer. Use it to tell you which satellites
are up and where they are.
Communicate directly with the Space Shuttle. Many
of the astronauts are hams, and the Shuttle is set up for various modes of amateur
communications. There is also now an amateur radio station set up on the
international space station. (QSL cards from the space station are definitely
"keepers"!)
Learn Morse code, and communicate with thousand of
others around the world using the simplest and least expensive radio mode there is.
Morse code is no longer required for entry level amateur licenses, but it remains a
popular and fun medium. Morse code remains as the best method to communicate even
during the worst of conditions.
Build a tiny transmitter into an empty tuna fish can
for less than ten dollars and a couple hours work. Hook a piece of wire to it for an
antenna. Use it to send Morse code to someone on the other side of the world.
For real!!
Bounce your radio signals off the moon. Build a
giant antenna system in your (very large) backyard. Communicate with someone on the
other side of the world using moon bounce. Other hams around the world are pointing
their antennas to the moon waiting to hear from you.
Never mind the moon. Bounce your radio signals off
of approaching meteors! As you read this, hams are sitting at their radios with
antennas pointed up waiting for pebbles to streak into the atmosphere as shooting
stars. The fiery light of the shooting star is a streak of ionization in the
atmosphere that radio signals will bounce off of. The band comes alive for several
seconds, and hams feverishly get in a quick contact before it dies down.
Weird? Perhaps, but no more so than IRC or alt.any.wierd.newsgroup.
Get cool ham radio plates for your car. These
are not personalized plates. They are special plates, and you have to show your ham
radio license to get them. People requesting personalized plates are not allowed to
choose plates that could be construed as an amateur radio call sign. Your callsign
plate awaits you only. What reason would there possibly be not to get it? My
car plate says N0COJ, and I am proud of it. It lets people know I am a ham.
There are millions more things to do. Amateur
radio is very diverse hobby. I suspect no one ham has ever done it all. It can
be inexpensive, or it can cost thousands depending on what you decide to get involved
in. So what are you waiting for? Locate a ham radio club in your area and get
them to help you get a license.
