The Fast Track to (Finally!) Getting on the Air With Ham Radio

The Fast Track to

(Finally!)

Getting on the Air With Ham Radio

Michael Burnette, AF7KB with Kerry Burnette, KC7YL

All content © Copyright 2019 Michael Burnette. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

The author assumes no liability for your use of the instructional materials provided in this book. The author is neither a professional contractor, mobile installer, nor electrician. Your safety is your responsibility.

Dedication

For Delvin Bunton, NS7U

Thanks for all you’ve done for us, for ham radio, and for your community, Delvin.

Contents

Dedication

What's Stopping You?

Introduction

I Have no Idea How to Build a Station

There Are So Many Rules! I’m Sure to Break One!

I’m a Little . . . uh . . . Mic Shy. . .

Getting Started on the VHF/UHF Bands

Working Repeaters

Finding Your Local Repeaters

Dual-band Handheld Transceivers

Manually Programming a Baofeng UV-5R

Programming a UV-5R With a Computer

Handheld Antennas

Dual-band Mobile Station

Dual-band Mobile Transceivers

Installing Your Dual-band Mobile Radio

Professional Installation

Doing it Yourself

All the Parts

Tools

Plan, Plan, Plan, then Plan Some More

Power

Antenna

Feed Line

Mounting the Radio/Control Head

Dual-band Fixed Station

Your VHF/UHF Shack

Power Supply

Antenna

Antenna Mounts

Feed Line

Grounding the Amateur Radio Station

Fundamentals of Grounding

Ground Rods

Safety Grounding

RF Grounding

Fighting Common Mode Currents

Lightning Protection Grounds

Lightning Basics

Ground Loops

Operating on VHF/UHF

Dual-band Radio Controls

Repeaters

Nets

EchoLink®

Advanced VHF/UHF Operations

Simplex Operation

Contesting

Digital Voice Modes

Digital Hot Spots

Getting Started in HF

Building Your First HF Station

Planning Your HF Station

HF Transceiver Controls

Operating on HF

CW

SSB Phone

HF Nets

HF Contesting

Search-and-pounce on HF

DX on HF

Digital Modes on HF

Closing Thoughts

Amateur Radio Glossary

About the Authors

What’s Stopping You?

Introduction

Here’s a little secret about ham radio; most of the people who walk out of a Technician Class license exam proudly clutching their CSCE (Certificate of Successful Completion of Examination) have just done the next-to-last thing they’ll ever do in ham radio. Their final ham radio action will be checking the FCC web site to see their new call sign. After that, nothing.

It’s even worse.

I know at least two people who have had their Extra Class tickets for over a year and still have never transmitted a single signal.

How can this possibly be? These folks were motivated enough to at least memorize 74% of the correct answers, then find their way to a VE testing session, pay their fee, and sit for the exam. Then what happened?

I can imagine a few scenarios. Others I don’t need to imagine because I’ve heard them directly from people.

There are the people who honestly never particularly wanted to get involved in the hobby. These might include the spouses/children/friends of enthusiastic hams. My own wife got her Technician license mostly because she was curious about that ham radio thing you do. She really had very little intention of ever operating a ham radio. In my mind, her obtaining a ham license was such an unlikely event that when she announced, I think I’ll get my license, I actually asked Uh . . . what license? (Then she got hooked – but that’s another story.) Other spouses/children/friends we’ve known took the exam in the hope they just wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore. You can imagine their level of enthusiasm for the hobby. Without some sort of I’ve seen the light! experience, I really doubt we’ll get many of those people to become active hams.

Another group is the preppers , the folks who are busy preparing for various Doomsday scenarios. Lots of prepper web sites urge them to get their ham radio license for emergency communications in that dire time When the Stuff Hits the Fan. I suspect a lot of them get their license and, figuratively, put it in the basement next to the dried beans and bottled water, feeling – completely mistakenly – that, communications-wise, they’re now ready for the worst. While I know some very competent prepper hams, those prepper web sites seldom seem to mention that effective communications in an emergency are totally dependent on lots of planning, practice, and teamwork – not to mention, usually, much more equipment than a $25 amazon.com radio.

Fair enough; those are a couple of groups who took that exam for reasons that really had nothing to do with becoming an active amateur radio operator.

That still leaves a lot of people who did have every intention of participating in the hobby but ran out of gas shortly after attaining that license.

What happened to those folks?

Based on a lot of conversations with those people, it often seems to boil down to two factors.

First, there’s the result of following this common advice:

Just go on the internet and do practice exams until you can pass the test.

– 10,000 Hams on Facebook

I’ve had countless conversations like the one that follows at various hamfests. It begins with someone sort of staring at our General book, and admitting, Yeah – I did the Tech exam about a year ago – but I don’t really remember any of it.

Oh, really? How did you prepare for the exam?

I just went on line and memorized the answers.

Ah . . . [Awkward pause . . . ]

I realize the advice to just memorize the answers comes from the best intentions, but we’re not doing anyone any favors by advocating that supposedly easy path. The exam material is slim enough preparation for the hobby as it is, even if they take a comprehensive program like The Fast Track, or the ARRL’s, or Gordon West’s. Just memorizing answers is a shortcut to nowhere. I’d suggest it would be best for us to be honest with the people we’re recruiting and let them know it takes a bit of knowledge to make ham radio stuff work. It is not plug’n’play, and if we don’t disclose that up front, we’re just setting them up for later disappointment.

Even with good, solid prep, though, there’s a considerable distance for the beginner to travel from the rules and theory covered on the exams and real, now what do I do? practical application. This book is aimed at bridging that gap.

I notice a lot of new hams turn to the resources that people often use these days when they want information or opinions; Facebook’s ham radio related groups. As you may have already discovered, those are a deep pool of negativity and misinformation; they are often neither useful nor encouraging to the new ham. You may find me on there from time to time, but I openly admit my Facebook time is strictly for business.

Then there’s the anxiety around actually pushing that PTT (Push To Talk) button and, gulp, saying stuff out loud on the radio where everybody can hear it. That’s natural enough, and the tests don’t help much in that area either, because they leave the impression that talking on the radio is really complicated and requires all sorts of cryptic language. Heaven help the newbie ham who said CQ (calling anyone) when they should have said QSL (I acknowledge receipt of the message)! We’ll work on that, too, and we’ve included a massive glossary at the back of the book, starting on page 212, that probably covers far more ham terms than you will ever need to know.

No matter what your level of experience, ham radio always involves overcoming some significant technical barriers – really, that’s what ham radio is all about. These barriers can range from the simple process (note those quotation marks . . . ) of programming a local repeater’s frequencies and tones into a handheld transceiver to building an HF station. I can’t solve all of those challenges for you, but I’ll give you some ways to think about the problems, and some resources.

The book is arranged by frequency bands, because each band brings its own equipment requirements, operating procedures, and modes of operation. We’ll start with the most easily accessible bands, VHF/UHF, then work our way through MF/HF. While there’s some interesting experimentation going on in our newest bands, the Super Low Frequency (SLF), 136 kHz (2,200 m) band and the Ultra-low Frequency (ULF), 472 kHz (630 m) band, those bands are a bit out of reach for most folks just beginning their ham careers. Likewise, the frequencies above the 70 cm band require specialized equipment and are not anywhere near as popular as VHF, UHF, MF, and HF; Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency, Medium Frequency and High Frequency.

This book is not a comprehensive guide to every piece of equipment and mode of operation. In fact, it’s almost the opposite; it’s easy to get lost in the ham radio equipment catalogs and other references, so I’ve kept things as simple as possible.

You should know, I probably have a more casual attitude toward most of this stuff than some hams out there. If you’re a perfectionist about ham radio who must have everything technically perfect before you proceed, you’re probably never going to work up the nerve to push the button and start making contacts. You need to get this in your bones:

Everything you will ever do in ham radio – everything – is an experiment.

You can’t afford the kind of engineering and equipment that would make everything work perfectly the first time every time. Not even professional telecom companies and broadcasters get those kinds of results!

You also won’t make it through your first hour or two on the air without pulling some hilariously boneheaded move, like forgetting your call sign at the most inappropriate possible moment, hopelessly scrambling the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, or one of countless other possibilities. A year from now you’ll laugh about it, but why wait?

Start laughing now!

Let us cast aside perfectionism, embrace the adventure, and boldly radiate!

I Have no Idea How to Build a Station

If you hold a Technician Class license, you have probably realized by now that the Technician license exam doesn’t cover very much in the way of nuts and bolts. If you’re a General, you know the General doesn’t cover much of that, either and, wouldn’t you know it, neither does the Extra.

Ideally, you learned the fundamentals of radio as you progressed to your license, but it’s still a long leap from Ohm’s Law to a working radio station. After all, it took 27 years to get from Ohm to Heinrich Hertz’s demonstration of radio waves, and another 13 years before Guglielmo Marconi announced he had achieved trans-Atlantic wireless communication.

It wouldn’t be fair to blame the exam committees for this gap between theory and practice. The topics of the exams are dictated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, and the exams have always been long on theory and short on practice. Speaking as someone who works full-time at teaching new hams the exam material, I’m not at all sure it would be practical to include much more how-to, because there are so many different how-to’s. The idea of the exams is to assure you have a context of knowledge that will allow you to experiment with and learn the practical stuff. Think of all that theory as the garden soil in which your practical knowledge will grow.

There was a time when new hams were usually taken under the wing of a more experienced ham. Those experienced hams are known as Elmers and Elmas and Elmering or Elmaing was a regular part of the hobby. It was an honor to be someone’s Elmer.

For reasons I confess I do not know that practice has diminished. That’s why this book exists – consider Kerry and me your Elma and Elmer. Much like the Elmers and Elmas of days gone by, we have a limited number of stations to show you, and a limited number of ideas to share: however, our intention is to show you enough attach part A to brace C stuff that you’ll be able to start building your own station(s) with some confidence that you’re proceeding in a useful direction.

Every amateur radio station contains three fundamental parts; a transceiver, a feed line, and an antenna. In a handheld transceiver, those are all in one box and all installed by the manufacturer, but they’re still present. For stations that aren’t handheld, it will be your job to obtain those items, then hook them together properly. Auxiliary equipment for a station might include a power supply for the transceiver, an antenna tuner, and various other gear related to safety and/or convenience. We’ll cover those as we go along.

We’re going to take you through the builds of three distinct stations; a mobile VHF/UHF station, a fixed VHF/UHF station, and an HF station. We urge you to think of these stations as examples – prototypes, one might say. Along the way, we’ll be explaining the principles behind how we’re putting the station together, and those principles are what we really want you to learn from this journey. There are people in the world who are great at following recipes but might starve to death without a cookbook; then there are folks who deserve the title Chef; they know about esoteric stuff like thermal mass and Maillard reactions, and can cook great food without ever looking at a recipe – but those people started cooking by following recipes, too. My advice is start by following the recipes in this book with an eye toward eventually becoming an amateur radio Chef.

There Are So Many Rules! I’m Sure to Break One!

You would think, with all the emphasis the rules and regulations get in the license exams, that we’d all be experts on the subject. A quick scan of just about any internet amateur radio group reveals this is very definitely not the case.

It’s surprising to me how few hams have ever read FCC Part 97. It’s not a long document – only about 34 8½ x 11-inch pages. You don’t need to be a lawyer to read it; it is written in reasonably plain language. It’s even free! You can download it from:

https: //www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2009-title47-vol5pdf

Fast Track Ham Radio Facts contains a copy that is indexed for easy reference.

I think it is because we are, in general, a law-abiding bunch of folks that in the absence of a firm grasp of the rules and regulations, we feel less than 100% confident about what we should or should not do on the radio. Sometimes, we even make up imaginary rules! I followed a long and painful-to-behold thread unfold on one ham radio site about the timing of station identification. The amount of misinformation presented as fact was genuinely breathtaking. It was also hundreds of times longer than the full text of the rules regarding the topic:

(a) Each amateur station, except a space station or telecommand station, must transmit its assigned call sign on its transmitting channel at the end of each communication, and at least every 10 minutes during a communication, for the purpose of clearly making the source of the transmissions from the station known to those receiving the transmissions. No station may transmit unidentified communications or signals, or transmit as the station call sign, any call sign not authorized to the station.

That seems quite straightforward to me. By the way, I constantly hear people fail to identify their station every 10 minutes, and at least one member of our club has, so far as I know, never ID’d at the end of each communication. Does anyone care? Nope.

The truth is, the FCC is not going to roll up in front of your house with a SWAT team to take you off to radio jail if you bobble a rule. They have neither the budget nor the interest to enforce the amateur radio rules, even in the case of a few blatant and repeated abuses of the airwaves. If you’re making a good faith effort to operate your station in accordance with good engineering and good amateur practice, and you’re observing common courtesy, you’re not going to have a problem. Almost certainly, the very worst that would happen is a warning letter from the FCC – and those are very, very rare. In the very unlikely event you should get one, just comply with the letter, notify them that you have done so and will continue to do so, and all will be well.

The FCC is also almost certainly not going to pay you an unexpected visit and inspect your station, despite what that question about this on the Technician exam says. I spent almost a quarter-century working full time in commercial broadcasting – where the FCC is a lot more concerned with station operations – and I never saw a single FCC inspector. (One did visit our station for about 30 minutes once while I was out to lunch. Nothing bad happened.)

It seems to me that the exam process has an unanticipated outcome: It leaves a lot of people feeling like the title of this section; There are so Many Rules! I’m Sure to Break One!

Let’s go over the stuff you must do and the stuff you must not do. Table 1.1 shows the rules that apply to what I’d call normal, day-to-day ham radio operations, and there aren’t very many of them.