Amateur radio

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I just wondered if there were any other amateur radio users here. I have recently bought a Yaesu FT-4XE 2m/70cm handheld and am totally addicted to listening to it, mainly to Hubnet which I can listen to via the North Wales repeater so I can hear people from the states, Australia and New Zealand etc.

My callsign is M0GXL

Last edited by Rossall on 16 Nov 2021, 1:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My brother is on but he mentions the South Wales repeaters like the one in the Port Talbot area.

Never caught the bug myself, though I've seen this meme a lot recently. Any twangs of recognition?

There's a bloke from Holland on at the moment. You can listen to the worldwide Hubnet here:

http://g7rpg.hubnetwork.uk:8689/test/listen.html

I hold an Amateur Extra license.  What do you need to know?

I don't need to know anything. I was just seeing if there were any other radio hams on WP.

We're here.

Extra class here as well.

I sense that Ham Radio is rather like model trains.

I used to want a CB radio just to get chicks. Never succeeded in doing so.

Ham Radio might be like pen pals under the best scenario.

In some cases, more like grown-up CB. In other cases, more like pen pals, provided you made your own pen and paper. There are also contests for how many countries/regions you or your radio club can communicate with.

We also help out doing public service at various events (Boston Marathon is a good example), provide ground truth information to the National Weather Service (in USA) through SKYWARN and pass general welfare messages after a disaster to areas where all other communication has been lost.

That's only beginning to scratch the surface.

BTW I was rather successful in 'getting chicks' through CB radio. That was a lot like a prehistoric version of Facebook.

Can Ham Radio replace cellular service in emergency situations?

It can't replace cellular, but we can let people outside the disaster area know that you're OK (and whether you need anything).

Just set this thread to 'notify', finally.

Amateur radio still has it's uses although they are somewhat more limited to what they were in the past.
We had some severe fires in regional areas of Australia a year ago which took out significant mobile phone and emergency services communications. The mobile base stations and emergency services repeater sites were destroyed by the fires and electricity supply also lost. A small contingent of amateur radio operators including the organisation WICEN were able to pass messages between different sites that would otherwise have been isolated.

Thats impossible to imagine. How anyone could use CB radio 'to get chicks'. You use it while driving at high speed down the highway. You talk in brief blurts to mostly other males. Mostly truck drivers. It more like airtraffic control than like any dating ap.

I guess for anyone who wasn't there, the late 1970s would be hard to imagine. CB radio became a fad for a while. Many people had them in their houses and cars. As I said, the best modern analogy I can make is that is was like Facebook a long time before Facebook.

You wouldnt expound upon your ... philosophy life or whatever, on a CB radio like you can here on WP, or on Facebook.

More like Twitter (which limits you to X number of characters in a tweet). On CB you had to make it brief, and talk fast before someone could "step" on you (slang for talking over you). And that was another thing. You had to learn the colorful trucker lingo to use it. "Bear" means "state cop". "Beaver bear" means "a female cop", and like that. You needed a "handle", or nickname to id yourself(like we have nicknames to id ourselves here on WP).

It was more like "texting while driving". Except you didnt have to text. You could keep your eye on the road while talking into a mic. That was the good thing about it. The bad thing is that your boss probably did NOT have a CB set so you couldnt use a CB to tell your job that you're "running late" (the most common reason I ever text myself).

We have been having difficulty getting through to Tonga since the eruption, although some HF stations have come back on the air under limited power.

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