How did you get here?

Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week I celebrated my ninth birthday. You might think that I'm quite eloquent for a nine year old and you'd be right if it was related to how I came to be born. My ninth birthday as an amateur appeared in my diary unexpectedly on a Monday and I took the liberty of telling a few people.

On one forum it started a wonderful series of comments from amateurs and would be amateurs about their experience coming to our community. I've shared mine before, so instead I'd like to share some of the stories that truly show just how diverse our amateur friends really are.

Floyd KK3Q says: My Dad was into CB radio (back when it wasn't so bad) and I was his antenna guy. He had black lung so I was the one who took down and put up his antennas for him. In the process I learned a lot (ask me later about a "smoke poles" and "buried 12V batteries") Well, Dad and I got into the illegal SSB frequencies and one night we visited one of the locals who happened to be using a Kenwood 520 on 11 meters. One look at that rig and I was in love. I never heard of ham radio and when I asked about it the owner said the radio was a "ham" radio and you needed a license to run one. Which she didn't have by the way. So I says, "Maybe I'll get myself a ham license and a rig like the Kenwood." She laughed at me, "You're just a stupid truck mechanic, you'll never get a ham license."

I never run from a challenge, skipped over Novice and got my Tech, wanted on 20 meters so under incentive licensing I had to upgrade to General which meant 13WPM CW and me partially deaf. Next I wanted SSTV but you had to be Advanced class so I upgraded. Finally I lusted after a short call sign so I upgraded to Extra back when 20WPM CW was still required. Been a nice run, learned a LOT from a lot of elmers.

Floyd has been a ham for 42 years.

Bill WK2KX has been a ham for 33 years. Will be 34 this January. Licensed at age 11. He goes on to say:

My dad and I did it together, but most of my family are licensed as well. My grandfather started it. His main claim to fame is that he served as general Eisenhower's radio man during ww2 for about a month. Now I have both my parents, a bunch of cousins, aunts, uncles, etc who are all licensed - enough that I've considered creating a "worked all (our last name)s" award, haha.

Tyrell KD7TKJ turned 18 as an amateur in September.

My stepdad wasn't a ham, but one of the kids he grew up with was... And my stepdad told me a story at a young age about how he and this neighborhood kid would go to the auto wreckers to pick up scraps to build radios out of, and then use said radios to talk to Australia... The details of said story really were never complete, and I've never met anyone since that claimed to have built a radio from car parts... But it was enough to get me to (get my mom to) get the ARRL Now You're Talking book and get licensed. I've been addicted to this more than any money making Enterprise ever since.

One amateur writes: I got my license 48 years ago. In high school, every day I'd pass a door with no window, just a sign "W2CXN". When I got the courage to knock, I was met with a person I knew liked his job. So happy to help. I remember thinking, how cool is that?

Peter KD2TCQ has been an amateur for 4 days and got interested because of packet radio as well as the ability to do on HF (which he needs to upgrade to do via phone but he's studying for that)

Ron K7UV says: I'm at 62 years and was licensed at age of 12. My dad and I built two receivers together and I wanted to do more than listen... the rest is history. Yup, I go way back before transistors and computers and remember cycles, mmF, aerials and condensers.

My original Hammarland receiver had around 13 tubes, the transmitter had 6 tubes plus the 2 meter converter had 4 tubes and my SCR522 had at least 7 tubes. It kept my bedroom quite warm in the winter and sweltering in the summer when there was no air conditioner, just fans.

The weird thing... I miss those days, maybe it's just my nostalgia kicking in. But radio and my interactions with my father were essentially what led me to radio.

Matt KD2MGM says: I suppose We're only 3. My brother and I put CB radios in our trucks in the summer of 16' but we quickly realized living out in the country that there weren't really any people on the air waves and that 4 watts wasn't enough to talk over the hills to each-other. These days we are not super active but still hop on the air once in a while.

You can find all these stories and many more on the amateurradio sub on Reddit.

For me, reminiscing over how you came to be part of this amazing community brings us all together. Our stories are not that different, we're all cut from the same cloth. Curiosity killed the cat, but it just makes amateur radio stronger.

How long have you been an amateur and what got you in the door?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB