Ham Radio

Only one day after Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, I noticed that radio amateurs from both regions started to yell at each other on 20 meters. The same was probably true for other bands too, but I haven’t been on other bands for a while. In only 10 minutes, my vocabulary expanded quite a bit.

Politics and our hobby should be seperated by a wall of at least a mile high, but that’s nearly impossible in this case, as both groups share the same prefix. Let’s hope they can figure things out, preferably in a peaceful manner.

Just a pic of my antennas. Simplicity all over the place. I have no other choice, really. I live in a rental house and landlords aren’t quite fond of antennas. I’m not complaining though.

I now have three verticals and a bunch of dipoles on my roof:

• Discone antenna (Diamond, stainless steel version, also usable for transmitting on 6 meter, 2 meter, 70 centimeter and 23 centimeter)
• Diamond X50 (2 meters, 70 centimeters)
• Sirtel GPE (5/8 wave for 10 meters)
• Multi-band dipole for 10, 15, 20 and 40 meters (all dipoles end up in one feed point)

It works, and it works even better than expected.

English has been my second language since elementary school. As far as I’m concerned, English is quite easy to master, although its rules not always consistent.

A slim chance and a fat chance turn out to be the same, but a wise guy and a wise man are definitely two different people. A house can burn up as it burns down, a form is filled in by filling it out and an alarm goes off by going on.

There’s no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither pine nor apple in pineapple, English muffins do not come from England and French fries do not come from France.

People recite at a play and play at a recital, they ship by truck, park on driveways, drive on parkways and people have noses that run and feet that smell.

Oh well.

Many Hams started out as a pirate. I’m no exception. I built my first medium wave transmitter in the sixties, at the age of eight. The range was only about 10 meters, but I was proud as one could be. Technology progressed quickly. I started to use tubes (EL84) and better antennas. We made many QSOs, my friends and I. Playing music wasn’t done much, if at all.

CB (still illegal at the time) replaced the medium wave band, the FM broadcast band replaced CB. It didn’t take long before I discovered the 2 meter and HF amateur bands. A number of old friends joined me. Most licensed Hams knew me personally and didn’t care much about my activities, neither did they report me to the authorities. The reason was probably that I built everything myself and blended into ‘the scene’ perfectly. Internet didn’t exist at the time, making it nearly impossible for listeners to find out whether a station was licensed or not. Call books were always out of date by at least a year.

Pirate stations still exist, but something has changed. They don’t care about technology and probably can’t tell the difference between a capacitor and a resistor. Jamming is now the main activity, especially on repeaters. We shut down PI2FLD (Almere) for a while and now PI3RTD (Rotterdam) has been switched off.

Sad, really sad.

Nice looks, small, wide band receive, good medium wave reception and powerful enough for every day work. What can go wrong?

One important thing. European amateurs expected the European version of the VX-3 to support 6.25 KHz channel steps. Channel steps of 6.25 KHz have been standard in Europe for a while now, and are (amongst other services) used for PMR, the EU equivalent of FRS.

The VX-3 doesn’t. Maybe a future model (VX-4?) will. Until that time, many radio amateurs will be better of by ignoring the VX-3 and wait until Yaesu does it right.