Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Amateur Radio

Starting point is 00:00:00 The early days of radio were like the Wild West. There were no rules, and that lack of rules often led to problems. Eventually, frequency regulations were put in place, which left a large swath of spectrum available to amateur radio operators. Over time, these operators created a worldwide community that predated the internet by decades. It is still a community that exists today with thousands of people around the world. Learn more about amateur radio and its origins on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. if your perceptions about the past were wrong. Throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time

Starting point is 00:00:49 to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The early days of radio were anarchy. Literally so. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves, and Gulliamo Marconi demonstrated their practical application with the creation of the first wireless telegraph transmitter and receiver. After that, people began to tinker with simple spark transmitters and crystal receivers. In these early days, there was no distinction between amateur and professional radio operators. Anyone with sufficient technical knowledge and financial resources could experiment with wireless

Starting point is 00:01:42 telegraphy. There were no firm international rules, call signs were inconsistent, and the spectrum felt limitless because few yet understood that radio waves of different wavelengths behave differently. Young experimenters crowded city rooftops with wire antennas and home-bill gear. Their signals were broad and noisy because spark transmission produced a train of dampened waves that splattered across different frequencies. Even so, these amateurs quickly learn the art of practical communication, passing local messages at night when interference from commercial coastal stations quieted down. And while this period of early radio was exciting, all was not always well. Within a decade, radio had become a vital tool for ships and distress. The first widely publicized

Starting point is 00:02:28 instance of radio saving lives at sea was the RMS Republic. After it collided with another ship in heavy fog, its Marconi wireless operator, Jack Bins, managed to send distress calls that brought help. Newspapers hailed the wireless as a miracle technology, but the incident also revealed how chaotic the airwaves could be when multiple stations tried to handle traffic without coordination. There were numerous cases of amateur operators sending false distress calls, imitating naval stations, or jamming commercial traffic for fun. The Navy, which had begun to adopt wireless for fleet communication grew frustrated with the interference from unregulated shore stations and amateurs. In some cases, prank messages caused confusion about ship positions or emergencies.

Starting point is 00:03:16 The Navy began lobbying Congress for tighter controls of the spectrum, arguing that national security and safety at sea were at risk. This resulted in the U.S. Radio Act of 1912, which required station licensing, mandated proficiency, and pushed amateurs into wavelengths shorter than 200 meters or roughly above 1.5 megahertz. Commercial and naval operators believed that those useless shortwaves would not carry beyond a few miles. That assumption gave amateurs a gift because they weren't just wrong, they were spectacularly wrong. More on that in a bit. Constrained to higher frequencies, amateur operators became the first large community

Starting point is 00:03:56 to explore the remarkable properties of shortwave propagation that would sort of shortwave propagation that would soon upend professional opinion. Organizations also came into being. In 1914, Hiram-Piercy Maxim and like-minded operators founded the American Radio Relay League, or ARRRL, to knit isolated amateur operators into a continent-spanning message relay network. The ARRRL also created Structure Training Programs, published technical information,

Starting point is 00:04:25 and advocated for amateur radio interests with government regulators. Similar organizations were four organizations for foreign. formed in other countries, creating an international network of amateur radio societies. These early amateur radio operators were soon given the moniker of hams. The term ham itself has several origin stories, though the most widely accepted explanation comes from early commercial operators who viewed amateur experimenters as hams, or poor actors who interfered with serious commercial traffic. What started as a derogatory term was eventually embraced by the amateur community,

Starting point is 00:04:59 as a badge of honor. And today, amateur radio is still often called ham radio. World War I temporarily silenced all amateur transmissions in many countries. However, many amateur operators served as military radio operators gaining valuable experience with new technologies. When they returned home after the war, they brought professional knowledge back to the amateur community, accelerating technical development. The 1920s marked amateur radio's golden age of discovery. While commercial interest focused on long-wave and medium-wave frequencies, amateurs explored the previously worthless short-wave frequencies above 1.5 megahhertz, and they made an astounding discovery.

Starting point is 00:05:42 These higher frequencies could propagate around the globe under the right conditions, bouncing off the ionosphere in waves that longer wavelengths couldn't. Think of the ionosphere as a natural mirror in the sky that changes its reflective properties based on solar activity, time of day, and sea. reason. Amateurs learn to read these conditions like sailors read wind patterns, discovering when and how radio waves could travel thousands of miles using surprisingly low power. The ARRL organized transatlantic tests in 1921. A small Connecticut station designated 1 BCG using a vacuum tube transmitter on short waves was heard in Scotland by Paul Godley,

Starting point is 00:06:24 which proved that modest power and compact antennas could achieve intercontinental. range. And that result transformed the entire field. The 1920s and 30s saw the development of an international framework. The international amateur radio union was founded in 1925 to represent amateurs at world radio conferences. Nations began to standardize call sign prefixes, band allocations, and operating conventions such as Q codes and signal reports. QSL cards became a global tradition during this period. QSL is the code for a contact made on the radio, and it also refers to cards that are sent via postal mail to confirm the contact.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Some ham radio operators have collections of hundreds or thousands of cards that they've collected over decades from other operators that they've talked to. The Doku Funk Museum in Vienna, Austria has the world's largest collection of QSL cards with over 9 million from ham operators around the world. In the United States, the Radio Act of 1927 and the creation of the Federal Radio Commission, followed by the Communications Act of 1934 and the Federal Communications Commission, clarified domestic licensing and enforcement. World War II again closed amateur transmitting in many countries,

Starting point is 00:07:41 while many operators served as military radio technicians and signal officers, taking their skills to sea to airfields and into code rooms. The War Emergency Radio Service in the United States allowed, licensed amateurs to operate fixed and mobile stations for civilian defense communications. This service provided crucial backup communication for air raid warnings, emergency services, and civilian defense coordination. Similar programs operated in other allied countries. The post-war period brought explosive growth in amateur radio. Returning veterans joined the hobby in large numbers, bringing military radio experience with them. And there was also a large

Starting point is 00:08:20 amount of surplus equipment which flooded the market after the end of the war. The economic prosperity of the 1950s made radio equipment more affordable, and technical publications made advanced concepts accessible to newcomers. This era saw the transition from primarily Morris Code, also known by Hams as Continuous Wave or CW, an amplitude modulation or AM, over to single sideband or SSB voice communications. SSB represented a major efficiency in. improvement in that it used less bandwidth and transmitted power more efficiently than AM. To understand this, imagine AM broadcasting both sides of a conversation along with background noise,

Starting point is 00:09:01 while SSB eliminates the redundant information and focuses all power on the essential signal. The 1950s and 1960s also witnessed amateur radio's expansion into VHF, or very high frequency, and UHF, ultra-high frequency bands. These frequencies behave differently. from traditional high-frequency bands in that they typically provided reliable local and regional communications, not global. Amateur operators pioneered repeater technology during this period.

Starting point is 00:09:32 A repeater receives weak signals from handheld or mobile radios and retransmits them at higher power from elevated antenna locations, dramatically extending the communication range. This technology later became fundamental to commercial cellular telephone systems. Amateur radio embraces

Starting point is 00:09:50 the space age enthusiastically. Oscar 1, which stood for orbiting satellite carrying amateur radio, launched in 1961, and became the first amateur radio satellite. Unlike passive reflectors, Oscar satellites contained active transponders that could receive signals on one frequency and retransmit them on another. Satellite communications opened up entirely new possibilities for amateur radio. Operators could communicate across oceans and continents using handheld radio and modest antennas, as long as they could access the satellite during its orbital pass. This required learning new skills, such as tracking satellite positions, compensating for Doppler shift as satellites moved overhead, and coordinating with other operators sharing the limited

Starting point is 00:10:36 transponder bandwidth. Earth-moon-Earth, or moon-bounce communication represented perhaps the most technically demanding achievement of this era. Operators would bounce radio signals off the lunar surface to communicate with other stations on Earth. This requires enormous antennas, high power and precise calculations to compensate for the moon's motion and the signal loss involved in the 500,000 mile round trip. Personal computers revolutionized amateur radio in the 80s and 90s. Operators began using computers to control their radios, log contacts, and process digital signals. Packet radio emerged as early digital mode, allowing amateurs to send text messages and small files over radio links. Packet radio networks created a form of early internet, with messages automatically routed

Starting point is 00:11:28 through chains of relay stations to reach their destination. Amateur radio operators established bulletin board systems accessible via radio, sharing technical information, emergency communication protocols, and personal messages across vast distances without relying on telephone or internet infrastructure. The widespread adoption of the internet initially posed challenges for amateur radio. Why learn Morse code and radio procedures when email and instant messaging offered easier communication? However, the amateur radio community adapted by integrating internet technologies with traditional radio techniques. Emergency communication services became a renewed focus. Natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and various earthquakes

Starting point is 00:12:12 demonstrated that internet and cellular communications could fail catastrophically, while properly prepared amateur radio networks continued operating. Amateur operators provided crucial communication links for emergency services, hospitals, and relief organizations. Amateur radio operators also maintained an extensive network of internet-linked repeaters through systems like Echolink and the Internet Radio Linking project. A handheld radio can now access repeaters worldwide through Internet gateways, effectively creating a global amateur radio network that combines traditional radio techniques

Starting point is 00:12:47 with modern internet infrastructure. One of the most interesting aspects of amateur radio are what are known as D-X-Beditions. D-X is the code used for distant communications. The ARL has a D-X-Century club for operators who make contacts with other hams in over 100 countries. And likewise, there are other wards for making contacts with things like every state. Amateur radio divides the world into 340 different regions, some of which are nothing more than minor islands which are uninhabited. So there are groups that mount what are called de-expeditions to these remote hard-to-reach places

Starting point is 00:13:27 where they will spend a week or two making contacts with amateur radio operators from all over the world. One of the hardest countries to collect from, not surprisingly, is North Korea, which does not allow people to operate amateur radios. However, from November 2001 to 2002, Ed Gierdadez, call sign 4L4FN, a citizen of the Republic of Georgia employed by the United Nations World Food Program, operated his radio from within North Korea, making contacts around the world. He was eventually kicked out of the country. However, this was the only known amateur radio operator to ever broadcast out of North Korea,

Starting point is 00:14:09 and during that single year, he made over 16,000 contacts with other ham operators. What many people don't realize about amateur radio is that for over 100 years, these amateur hobbyists have been on the cutting edge of radio technology. They were working with AM radio, satellite radio, and wireless data well before these technologies ever became mainstream. The number of licensed amateur radio operators

Starting point is 00:14:35 has decreased over the last several years. One of the original reasons for operating a radio was communicating with people around the world, and that can be done easier online in any number of ways with much less investment in equipment. Nonetheless, there's still a committed core of amateur radio enthusiasts who contact people around the world,

Starting point is 00:14:55 provide communication services during emergencies, and stay on the cutting edge of radio technology. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are, Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.

Starting point is 00:15:17 And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Amateur Radio

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.