Ham Radio Online welcomes letters from readers. We reserve the right to chose which to publish and to edit the letters as necessary. The opinions expressed in the letters are strictly those of the writer and not necessarily of Ham Radio Online.
Just finished going through the article by Ed Mitchell on your web site. Good stuff and I especially applaud his call for a focus on "wireless and portable communications".
Here in earthquake-prone Southern California I often think about the number of supposed "radio" systems that could get knocked off the air when the "big one" hits. It almost seems as if the only remaining radio service that doesn't depend on some sort of wired connection is the Citizens Band - it's still one self-contained wireless electronics communications system talking to another: no microwave or wire links to transmitter sites or satellites, no hilltop relay stations, no dependency on the phone lines like the cellular system, no multiplexing etc.
Amateur radio began as point-to-point communications and was the first way for ordinary people to chat, at no charge for air time, to people just about anywhere in the world. In their spare time, these chatty hams advanced the state-of-the-art in portable radio communications system that had the ability to go anywhere and achieve point-to-point communications with the rest of the world (propagation allowing) or at least one radio relay away from their destination.
From what I've observed over the years, most hams have lost the ability and the desire to do point-to-point radio communications beyond the county line. What a change from amateur radio 30 years, when even pre-teen Novice hams had the ability to communicate directly to far corners of the world. I think that began to change when the FCC made a relutionary decision: it gave Novice hams "voice" priviliges on VHF, but not on the then-coveted HF bands.
Most of these Novice were kids - adolescent Baby Boomers - who migrated from the HF bands in great numbers when that happened because the FCC had finally given us radio junkies something we'd wanted since watched our first war movie: walkie-talkies!Forget using Morse Code to tap out HW R U to some faceless guy in Italy - we Novices could now talk to our high school buddies on what amounted to our own private radio channels on surplus and/or real cheap equipment! The FCC wouldn't let us talk to the big guys - the ones with the General and Advanced licenses who were priviliged enough to use voice communications on the shortwave bands. We Novices only had CW privileges, so we took our voices to the only places they were allowed: on VHF and UHF (as 15-year-olds in the mid 60's, we had VHF and UHF duplex communications with RTTY's in our bedrooms operating over UHF) and it was no problem at all to find some channels no one else ever used and turn them into your private playthings.
Hey Morse Code was interesting and it was neat the pick up and communicate with a weak CW signal from somewhere behind the then very impregnable Iron Curtain. But, hey those little VHF radio boxes with 3-foot antennas - those things are really neat - just the thing to play with before and after school!Only once a while did we enounter one of the radio oldtimers who'd somehow wandered up to Two Meters (got himself a VHF set for disaster communications) from his usual post of pounding out ARRL messages on 80 Meters or chasing DX on 40 Meters. Sometimes one of these OT's would pop up with a shocked response to perhaps one of our phone-patched prank phone calls (we were shocked to find there was actually anyone even listening outside our group).
Some of the Novice kids matured, studied more theory (forget faster Morse Code) and become Technicans so they could use even more of these marvelous ultra shortwaves. So there it happened - in the early the 60's, the US Government gave to America's teenagers and young people giant chunks of what would become the World's most valuable radio spectrum.
When these teenagers got a little older the government did it again and gave them the FM Broadcasting band, where anyone who'd put a 25-watt Two-Meter rig up could assemble an FM Station for a relative few bucks with an easy-to-obtain license. We didn't need the long distance coverage of the old timers with their 50KW clear channel AM stations: we had no static, and - best of all - hi-fi and stereo for playing our 60's music on-the-air. Other kids who'd gotten started on this free and easy VHF spectrum took their hobby into the business communications business - the licenses were again easy to get if you had some savvy, the techniques were the same as we used on Two and Six Meters, only the equipment was a little sturdier and, naturally, more costly.
The FCC did not give the VHF and UHF bands to America's children as an intentional policy when it opened those channels up to the Novice amateur radio licensees, but they couldn't have made a better decision if they'd tried. Along with launch of the first geosynchorous satellite relay station in the 60's, I think this youthful rush to the then very-underused higher frequenices was partly responsible for a new communications revolution, one that continues today in the amazing selling prices of everything from FM radio stations to UHF spectrum for earmarked for future uses.
America's children today are not going to find a piece of the VHF and beyond where they can get on air for a few bucks and experiment with the technology (beyond trying to interface your computer with your Kenwood walkie-talkie, but as the kids would say, "what's the point, we already use computers")?
Maybe it's time to open up another part of the spectrum to the children: the HF bands - good old shortwave, the stuff of the oldtimers. We often hear the allegation about the "facelessness" of the Internet as a personal communications tool, but beyond that it's voiceless. What an amazing adjunct the HF amateur bands (and some additional HF bands that continue to lose commercial traffic) could be to something like the Internet - a way for people to actually talk to each other!
Radio would have been a lot different for us 60's Novices if the FCC had given us voice privliges on say 20-Meters and 15-Meters instead of way up there at 148mHz. We'd have been happy with the ability to use AM transmitters on shortwave and I don't think we'd have even bemoaned the lack of permission to use SSB (people sounded more like people on AM and it was a very cheap technology to access). If my friends and I (and many, many other Novices and Technicians of the period) had been allowed to flip on the mike of our 40-meter transmitters and limited to Morse Code on VHF, there wouldn't have been near the rush to experiment with VHF.
Why not encourage that now? Citizen's Band has somehow kept alive mass-produced technology for HF communications (as as result I see some incredible low prices for 10-Meter transceivers), but the 11-Meter CB has always been in the netherwold of the spectrum with only sporadic DX capabilities, and fewer short-range advantages than VHF, which is why the FCC has essentially declared it useless spectrum open to anyone who ostensibly operates inside some unenforced rules.
The Citizen's Band would have been a whole different beast if it had been operated under Amateur Radio Service standards. CB could be called one of the FCC's big mistakes - it turned into an unmanageable portion of the spectrum with its only real benefit coming mostly to truckers on Channel 19. When the earthquake strikes, though, I imagine the truckers will be the only ones still able to talk to each other when all the lines are down.
Millions of American gravitated to CB to "try it out" and found it didn't meet their hobbyist or communications needs. Is it possible to try that again with a different part of the HF spectrum, under ham rules and standards that would make it easy for a bright kid, or an adult whose not an engineer, to get a license that would allow them to talk across hundreds or thousand of miles with "unlimited hours of access" for no cost beyond a transmitter and receiver that can cost half as much as a PC.
Of course, if we let the kids loose on 20-Meters, one of them will realize that they can directly send HTML files to places where there aren't even phone lines and then they'll be back to the computer and sending code all over the ham bands instead of talking to each other and that would upset the oldtimers comfortably posted on VHF and UHF with their walkie-talkies. Nah, forget it, wouldn't work.
take care
Bob Hudson
ex-WB4DBV/6 (never did send in that change of address form)
Back to table of contents