Ham Radio Options

[djellison]

Anyone on UMSF into Ham Radio?

I'm thinking of getting in to it, but only as a means to an ends (setting up a groundstation for Balloon flights, and Cubesats)

I'm booked into the Amsat UK conference at the end of July in Guildford. I know a few of the CUSpaceflight badgerworks guys are going to be there.

My current plan is to grab a fairly cheap UHF/VHF handheld to get my license with. A hand-held UHF/VHF arrow antennae to 'manually' listen in to sats to begin with - which can then be mounted on a rotator at some future point, and then upgrade to a better receiving set at some point.

Doug

[RoverDriver]

Anyone on UMSF into Ham Radio?
...

I know that quite a few on the MER team are. JPL has a group of course. I am considering it as well and a fellow driver lent me a book to get the license. Last March I gave a talk where I was explaining how the rovers manage to DX to Earth every day with a few tens of watts.

Paolo

[djellison]

Lecture 10 from here - http://www.batc.tv/channel.php ( http://www.batc.tv/vod/AMSAT-UK_L10.flv direct link ) actually has the maths behind Ham Radio DIRECT from Mars to Earth if Amsat-DE can put together the cash to get a satellite up there. Just a 60cm dish would get 400bps

[Astro0]

Not me personally, but we have a Ham radio set-up at the Canberra DSN.
I'm keen to learn how it all works.

[MahFL]

K2MAH here .

Thats my callsign, I have a "handy talkie" as they say in the USA. I am not active on it but its handy to have incase of a Hurricane disaster.

[ElkGroveDan]

Ham radio! I remember that. It's a way to communicate with people on the other side of the world without the cost of a telephone call. Sounds intriguing.

[nprev]

Back in the day when I worked for NOAA we had ham setups on some of our ships. Never got too serious about it (i.e., logging contacts, follow-up mail confirmations, etc.) but it was a fun way to pass the time during long nights out at sea.

[Marz]

Ham radio! I remember that. It's a way to communicate with people on the other side of the world without the cost of a telephone call. Sounds intriguing.

There's some pretty cool networks HAMs have established:

-- Most cities HAMs have established repeater networks, so your "handy" UHF/VHF can retransmit your signal at a much highter power.

-- Some repeater stations can allow you to patch into the phone network, which kinda makes it like a cellphone (except since you're also using HAM frequencies, your 'call' must follow the rules of the airways, and of the repeater.

One of the most amazing demonstrations I've seen is commanding a repeater to patch into a VoIP network, which terminates at another repeater, potentially in another country. So your cute, little VHF handy could talk from Pasedena to London. This requires coordination of computers and repeater stations.

Packet radio networks are also pretty interesting.


The tests here in the USA are fairly easy if you know a little electronics. The only thing really to memorize are the HAM frequency bands, with most of the rules being common sense. I think automated transmissions, like the telemetry of a balloon, might get classified as a Beacon signal and require some coordination to ensure nobody else gets trounced at its frequency. Most HAMs are very enthusiastic about electronics projects, so great resource to tap into.

Alas, I earned my license 10 years ago and haven't done much with it.
Cheers,
Tom - KD5MLJ

[Marz]

FYI: here is the cool Handy -> repeater -> VoIP networking.

http://www.irlp.net/

Maybe not directly useful for the balloon experiments, but maybe something like this could be setup with a webpage for live streaming data, or field observations, or ???

[SFJCody]

There's nothing like a DS19/87B radio valve...

[djellison]

Well - without any books infront of me, I've been looking thru the Hamtests.co.uk foundation licence tests. 64-75% scores on the 25 question quiz, which isn't too bad. A short course should see me thru that fine I think

[ddeerrff]

Here's an example of Ham radio tracking a balloon. (you can use any random characters as your nick.)
http://aprs.fi/?call=KB9ZNZ-3

[aggieastronaut]

I'm KE5RDD. I mostly use mine when out storm chasing to keep in touch with our caravan.

[dvandorn]

Back in the '70s, when I seriously looked into HAM radio, there was still a requirement to learn Morse code, both sending and receiving, at a minimum rate of 12 wpm in order to achieve your HAM license. Learning all that felt a lot too much like work, especially since I didn't anticipate using Morse at any point. So, I sort of lost interest.

My understanding is that the Morse code requirement was dropped several years ago.

-the other Doug

[nprev]

I think all you need in the US now is a General Radiotelephone Operator's License (GROL). They used to have several classes of licenses, but there's only one now. I got mine several years back (it's also needed to do inspection work on commercial aircraft avionics), and no Morse was needed.

Not to say that the test is a walk in the park, though. Also got the radar endorsement, which was an extra exam section.