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ON THE HAM BANDS
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF AMATEUR RADIO
T.J. “Skip” Arey, N2EI
tjarey@monitoringtimes.com
Applying Your Monitoring Skills
Another year has come and gone and
there are still a few of you folks who
haven’t taken up the challenge that Old
Uncle Skip makes every year at this time. Once again
it is time for the annual tradition of amateur radio
resolutions. Don’t skip down, because at least one
always applies.
1. If I do not have an Amateur Radio license I will
get licensed this year.
2. If I do have a license I will upgrade it to the next
highest license until I am an Extra class.
3. If I am an Extra class I will find somebody who
isn’t licensed and help them get licensed. (Spend
some time trying to track down folks from number
1 above)
4. I will repeat number 3 until I can meet all my
friends and family on 2 meters.
And now… This year’s special challenge:
5. This year I will apply my radio monitoring skills
to my amateur radio practice
A little bit of honesty with one another at this
point. While I know you folks hang on my every word
and cannot wait for the next issue of MT to hit your
mailbox to read my latest sage ham radio advice, I
suspect most of you may have come to reading this
magazine by way of the listening aspects of the radio
hobby and not the transmitting side of the house. After
all, this is Monitoring Times, not Ham Radio Times.
(There used to be a fun magazine geared to amateur
radio beginners called Ham Radio Horizons, but this
isn’t a nostalgia column, at least not this month.)
It occurs to me that anyone coming to amateur
radio by way of listening to shortwave or scanner
monitoring should have an obvious leg up on folks
without such experiences.
What got me thinking about this was my participation
in last Fall’s CQ World Wide DX and ARRL
Sweepstakes contests. As I have said in the past, I am
not a particularly avid contester but I do like the big
shows as a place to fill in blanks on my country lists.
This last contest season has been particularly exciting
for me because I am only a very few entities away
from qualifying for QRP DXCC. Nailing down 100
countries with a full gallon amplifier pumping RF into
a mega beam antenna mounted on an airplane-spooking
tower can be accomplished in a single contest
weekend (and often is by many of the Big Guns out
there in ham radio land). But nailing down membership
in the Century Club running 5 watts into a dipole
at 35 feet is a whole different can-o-worms.
As I bring this accomplishment to fruition, I can
clearly state for the record that the greatest assets I
brought to the table were the skills I mastered as a
shortwave broadcast listener. I wouldn’t be half the
ham I am today, nor would I have many of the awards
that hang on my walls if I didn’t cut my radio teeth
on the monitoring side of the business. And while
you may not enjoy the masochism inherent in QRP
60 MONITORING TIMES January 2005
operation, you, too, should find that your radio listening
skills will help you get ahead when you key the
mike to get that new one on 20. Everything I’m going
to talk about here can probably be applied equally to
the pursuit of any of the other radio activities you will
find in the pages of MT.
❖ Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
It’s happened to the best of us from time to
time. We go to get on the air and we can’t because
something has gone wrong. Oh, we tend to blame
it all on Captain Edward A. Murphy, but when you
stare into the cold hard reality of the radio hobby, the
simple truth is that Murphy gets the blame way more
often than he deserves. When push comes to shove
we make our own luck in this hobby. Good fortune
(and good contacts) go to the prepared among us.
Early on in my shortwave listening days, I came
to understand a (very) little bit about propagation. I
understood that there were times and seasons when I
just wasn’t going to be able to hear what I wanted to
hear. Not enough or too many ions in the sky between
me and Radio Freedonia. Those down times became
opportunities for me. Opportunities to go over my
equipment, check my antennas, and restock necessary
supplies.
These preventative maintenance rituals now
include performing system checks and data backups
on the shack computers. PC’s have become nearly
essential for modern amateur radio practice. That
being said, I keep plenty of pens and paper around
anyway.
What you need to be thinking about are all
those things that will facilitate success when the DX
Spotting Net lets you know that some rare lump of
rock in the Antarctic has just been activated for the
first time since Marconi was a pup and you only have
a 1 hour window to shout your lungs out before the
band goes away. That is not the time to discover an
intermittent broken wire leading to the 9 pin connector
on your microphone. This being a “smart” mike with
additional features, every time you key down to make
a call, your transceiver now changes frequency.
Capt. Edward A. Murphy, the unfortunate
founder of Murphy’s Law
Or maybe you thought you could get one more season
out of that run of coax up to your antenna. You
didn’t take the time to (safely) climb up for a visual
inspection. Had you done that, you might have noticed
that little spot behind the mast where a friendly
neighborhood squirrel chewed through to the braid.
Of course, Mr. Squirrel decided that it would be best
to do this on the windward side of the wire to allow
the maximum amount of moisture to enter and run
down all the way to your base connector.
You see my point? Captain Murphy was
nowhere around. A little time spent on preparation
always makes for good results.
❖ Listen, Listen, Listen
This is the greatest skill that a radio monitoring
hobbyist brings to the amateur radio realm. Run
through the bands on any contest weekend. You hear
lots of folks shouting, but it becomes very clear that
most of them are not doing all that much listening.
A rather common occurrence is the station that sends
his or her callsign for about 15 seconds and then only
listens for a second or two before they start sending
their call once again. I always wonder how many
multipliers that kind of station misses out on because
they don’t give anybody a chance to key the mike.
Notice, too, what I just reported about that station.
I learned that station’s rather dubious operating
procedure only by taking the time to listen. With a
little patience I can pick up that ham’s pattern and
timing and then get my call out in that brief moment
between his or her key downs. In that way I’ve put
the station in my log and did that ham the favor of
getting a contact on the books as well, in spite of poor
operating technique. Getting a sense of a station’s
operating pattern is the key to breaking a pile up. The
most successful DXers don’t just blindly key the mike
and shout in hopes of being heard. Even Big Gun stations
can be frustrated by this method, not to mention
peanut powered operators like Old Uncle Skip.
A good DX hunter will take the time to listen.
To notice such things as the DX station listening for
a few seconds and then pulling a call out of the tail
end of the pile up. You can also learn when it just isn’t
your time. If you are operating out of 2 Call Land
and the DX station is only coming back to 5s and 6s,
you may be a victim of a bad propagation path or the
operator is working regions in a pattern that makes
sense to his or her needs.
How do you figure out which situation applies?
You listen. Someone once said we have two ears and
one mouth so we should listen twice as often as we
talk. On the ham bands that would be the minimum.
❖ Tune, Tune, Tune
Someone once asked Willie Sutton why he
robbed banks. His famous comeback was: “Because
that’s where the money is.” Unless you are operating
from a rare DX location, you are a big gun with