Hello and welcome! I'm Norm, I've been a licensed amateur radio operator since 1975, and I still get a kick out of it every single night. There is nothing on the Internet like sitting in your basement at 11 p.m., turning a knob, and hearing a fellow in New Zealand say your name back to you off a wire strung between two trees. Nothing.

I made this page because a couple of the young people at the club asked me what they should read first, and because everybody who sees the antenna in the yard asks what it's for. So: here is what ham radio is, how you get a license in 1999, what to buy first, and what my own station has been doing this fall.

Your call sign is public. The FCC's license database is a public record, and by now there are computer look-up services that will turn any ham's call into his name and home street address in about two seconds. That's fine on the air — it's the whole idea of a license — but I'm not going to print my call on a page that anybody on the World Wide Web can find, alongside my e-mail address, and hand the world my front door. My wife agrees with me, strongly.

So on this page I'm KD0XYZ, which is a real-looking call in the right format for my part of the country (the "0" means the tenth call district: the middle of the map, Dakotas down to Missouri) but it's made up for this page. If you meet me on the air, you'll know my real one. If you e-mail me and you're a ham, I'll tell you.

Amateur radio ("ham" radio) is a licensed hobby. The government gives you the use of certain slices of the radio spectrum, from just above the AM broadcast band up into the microwaves, in return for passing a test and following the rules. You can talk by voice, by Morse code, by radioteletype, by packet (computer-to-computer over the air), by bouncing signals off the Moon if you're that kind of person, and through amateur satellites. You can talk across town on a handheld through a repeater or across the ocean on a wire. No airtime charges, no monthly bill. The catch is you can't use it for business and you can't use it to broadcast; it's for talking to other hams.

Hams also do a real public service. When the ice storm took the phones out two winters ago, the county emergency office was talking through our club's repeater for a day and a half. Field Day, which I'll get to, is practice for exactly that.

How to start, in order:

1. Find your local club. Every decent-sized town has one, and the club is where the license classes, the test sessions, and the used equipment are. Ask at the electronics store, or listen on 2 meters with a scanner and you'll hear them.
2. Get a license manual for the Technician class from the national league or one of the other publishers. The whole question pool is public; the book has every question and answer in it. Study it for a few weeks.
3. Take the test at a club session. It's given by volunteer examiners, three of them, on a Saturday morning in a church basement or a library. Small fee. Nobody bites.
4. Wait for your call sign to show up from the FCC, which these days is a matter of a week or two. Then get on the air.

This is the part that confuses newcomers, so read slowly. Right now there are six license classes in the United States. Here's the ladder from the bottom up:

The plain English version: if you don't want to learn Morse code, get the Technician license and you can do a tremendous amount on VHF and UHF. If you want to work other countries on the shortwave (HF) bands by voice, in 1999 you still have to pass a code test. That's the rule as I write this.

Changes are coming next year. The FCC put out a proposal last year to simplify this whole ladder — fewer license classes and, most likely, lower code speeds. As of September 1999 nothing is final and I'm not going to guess at details, but everyone in the hobby expects a decision and expects it to take effect sometime in 2000. If you're studying now, my advice is: don't wait for the new rules. Get the Technician now, get on the air, and whatever they change, your license carries over. A license in hand is worth two in the Federal Register.

(And for the record, I am on the side that says code is a fine skill and a good gate, but I won't be sorry to see the 20 wpm test go. It kept some very good people off the bands for no better reason than nerves.)

Don't buy anything until you have your license and have been to three club meetings. Then:

• For a new Technician: a 2-meter handheld (a "handie-talkie" or HT). Any of the major Japanese makes. Around $200 new, and there are plenty used from hams upgrading to the dual-band models. With it you can hit the local repeater from your car, your kitchen, or the top of the parking garage, and talk to every ham in the county. Get a better antenna than the rubber one it comes with; a quarter-wave whip on a magnet mount on the car roof makes a world of difference.
• Then a 2-meter mobile rig for the car, 25 to 50 watts, if you get bitten.
• When you have HF privileges: a used HF transceiver. Here's where the club matters. A solid, ten-year-old 100-watt transceiver from one of the big three makers, bought from a ham you know, is the best value in the hobby. $400 to $700 used. Don't buy somebody's project rig that "just needs a little work." Buy the one that works.
• A wire antenna. A half-wave dipole for 20 meters is about 33 feet long, costs about $15 in wire and insulators, and you hang it between two trees as high as you can get it. That is all I used for my first six years and I worked over a hundred countries with it. Everything else — towers, beams, amplifiers — comes later, if ever.
• A power supply (13.8 volts, 20 amps or so), coax, an antenna tuner if your wire isn't cut for the band, and a logbook. Paper is fine. I still use paper and copy it into the computer on Sundays.

Total for a beginning HF station done sensibly: under a thousand dollars, most of it used. People spend more on golf.

The shack is a corner of the basement, next to the furnace, with a door I can shut.

• HF: a 100-watt all-band transceiver from the early '90s (Japanese, the one with the big tuning knob), through a tuner, into either the beam or the wire. No amplifier. I have thought about one for fifteen years and I've decided the antenna money is better spent.
• Antennas: a three-element triband beam (20, 15 and 10 meters) on a 40-foot crank-up tower in the back yard, put up in 1992 with the help of six club members and a great deal of coffee. An 80/40-meter dipole strung from the tower to the big maple. A 2-meter vertical on the chimney.
• VHF: a 2-meter/70-cm mobile rig on the bench for the local repeaters and the Tuesday night net, and a handheld that lives in the car.
• Code: a straight key from 1975 and an electronic keyer with paddles. I still work a lot of CW. It gets through when voice doesn't.
• Digital: a packet TNC hooked to an old 486, and as of this summer a sound-card setup for a brand new mode called PSK31 that came out late last year. It uses about the bandwidth of a CW signal and you type back and forth. Weak signals, very little power, and the whole 20-meter PSK crowd fits in a few kilohertz around 14.070 MHz. I'm hooked.
• The computer: a Pentium II running Windows 98 for logging, PSK31 and this page. The 486 does packet only. The two do not get along and are kept apart.

Awards on the wall: Worked All States (1979), DXCC (100 countries confirmed, 1981), and my DXCC total stands at 214 countries confirmed as of this month, the last two being the confirmations that came in the mail from a Pacific island and from Mongolia. A QSL card is a postcard confirming the contact; you mail yours, they mail theirs, and the shoebox fills up over twenty-four years.

September 1 through September 25, 1999. Mostly 20 meters, evenings and early mornings, 100 watts to the beam. Sunspot cycle 23 is climbing toward its peak next year and the high bands are coming alive; 15 and even 10 meters have been open to Europe in the mornings, which they were not two years ago. This is the best fall I've had since 1990.

New ones this fall: none for DXCC, but two new band-countries on 10 meters. My wish list still has North Korea and a couple of the Indian Ocean islands. Everybody's does.

Field Day is the fourth full weekend of June, every year, all across North America. Clubs haul their radios out to a park or a farm field, put up antennas with rope and ladders, run everything off generators and batteries, and make as many contacts as they can in 24 hours starting Saturday afternoon. The point is emergency practice: can we get on the air with no wall power and no permanent antennas? The other point is it's the most fun you can have with a tarp.

This year the club set up at the county fairgrounds again, two HF stations and a VHF station, running the "2A" class (two transmitters, club, emergency power). We strung a dipole from the grandstand to the flagpole, which I'm told we did not exactly have permission for. Highlights:

• It rained from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday. The tarp held. The coffee did not run out, thanks to Doris and her camp stove.
• Our newest Technician, age 14, made her first ever HF contacts on the club's General station under my supervision (that's allowed with a control operator), and worked 22 states before she had to go home. She has since passed her 5 wpm code.
• Around 2 a.m. the CW station was the only thing making contacts. Told you.
• Final score: a little over 1,900 contacts, up from last year. Nobody got hurt, which is the real score.

The film from Field Day came back from the drugstore with the lens cap on for half the roll. I'll describe the good ones in words if I ever figure out the scanner.

Our club meets the second Tuesday of the month, 7 p.m., in the community room of the public library, and everybody is welcome, licensed or not. The club runs a 2-meter repeater, holds a license class every winter (January through March, one night a week, Technician and General), and gives license tests every other month. There's a net (an on-air roll call and news session) on the repeater Tuesday nights at 8. We have around 60 members, ages 14 to 91. The 91-year-old was licensed in 1931 and still works CW faster than I can.

If you're anywhere near, e-mail me and I'll point you to the right library. If you aren't, find your own club; there's one near you, I promise.

• Skywatch: Satellites You Can See — some of those satellites carry ham repeaters.
• Weather Watching with Walter — hams and weather spotters go together.
• The Y2K Watch: 100 Days to Go — sensible. Emergency communications folks are paying attention to the rollover, and this fellow is calm about it.
• The Henderson Family Home Page — neighbors.
• ResearchTriangle neighborhood directory