By Eric P. Nichols, KL7AJ on May 22, 2010
I can't count the number of times I've heard some Technician Class licensee say something like “I want to get my General so I can have H.F. privileges.”
If you are a licensed radio amateur, you already HAVE H.F. privileges. Some doggone good ones, too. You have prime real estate on 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters. Despite the conspiracy of silence to the contrary, there is more to Technician Class life than 2-meter repeaters.
Look here:Hambands
Most of us relative old timers started out our ham “careers” as Novices. The old Novice privileges still exist, with little change from the ancient of days. Most of us worked the world with these H.F. allocations long before we got our Generals.
“Only” CW
Oh, did I neglect to mention that the privileges on 80, 40, and 15 meters are CW? This leads us to:
This is NOT a handicap! Well, it MAY be one, if you don't happen to know CW, but nobody has EVER prevented ANYONE from learning the code. What's your excuse? A few hours of practice and you'll have WORLD WIDE communications, with none of the repeater politics. Why operate with a self-imposed straight jacket?
CW is no longer a stick to beat you with; it's a carrot. You don't even have to have the thing memorized to operate CW legally. You can look up the letters as you go along, if you have to! Granted, this doesn't make for real FLUENT CW operation, but it DOES give you the world at your fingertips, RIGHT NOW. And, if worse come to worst, (and trust, me, this IS the worst) you can even use computer generated and copied CW, if you want to. However CW readers are still pretty lame; nobody's really perfected a CW reader that will reliably copy hand-sent code...which is probably a good thing in the long run.
H.F. is CHEAP!
The next time I hear anyone complain about how “expensive” H.F. is, I think I'll hang him from the rafters with an RG-8 noose. You can get a ROCKMITE transceiver, which, by the way, has an absolute KILLER front end, for about $50, INCLUDING a really nice cabinet AND a set of paddles.
Your first car probably wasn't a Maserati; it was probably something like a Yugo. Why should your first ham rig be any different? And the fact of the matter is, in almost ANY community, you can probably find someone to GIVE you an H.F. rig...or at least LOAN you one indefinitely. It may not be pretty, but it will get you on the air. And if you can get by with a CW rig, it will get you on the air even cheaper.
Think your 2-meter handheld is “economical?” Do you have a CLUE what it takes to get, or keep, a repeater operating, both in equipment, electricity, rent, and Man Hours? Most repeaters are a HUGE drain on club resources. I have seen more clubs go belly up because of the repeater burden than I care to mention. This is why the bylaws of the Hutchison Amateur Radio Experimenters' Society (HARES) explicitly state that no club dues will EVER be used to support any repeaters. (On the other hand, we do actively support any efforts to build, modify, and develop equipment for any of the 12 unoccupied Amateur microwave bands).
One result of this is that we have the YOUNGEST (to the best of our knowledge) average member age of any club in the state. It would be even younger if I wasn't in it! Our ultimate goal is to have the youngest average age club member in the COUNTRY.
We have a LOT of privileges as radio amateurs...even No-Code Techs. We need to use ALL our privileges. If we don't, someone else will.
Eric Nichols, KL7AJ