99 Fun Facts About Ham Radio

The 'ham' in ham radio began as an insult aimed at whom?

Telegraphers with poor Morse skills were mocked as 'ham-fisted' by 19th-century professional wire operators; radio amateurs later adopted the jibe as a badge of pride.

Which body establishes the amateur radio service through its Radio Regulations?

International Telecommunication Union Radio Regulations define the amateur and amateur-satellite services and allocate their bands; each national government then licenses operators and issues call signs.

Under FCC rules, how often at minimum must a US station give its call sign?

Every ten minutes during a contact, and at its end, a US station must transmit its call sign under FCC Part 97 rule 97.119; some other countries allow longer intervals.

What 1927 definition distinguished a radio amateur from commercial operators?

Personal aim, no pecuniary interest: the 1927 Washington International Radiotelegraph Convention defined an amateur as a person interested in radio technique purely for personal aims and without any monetary reward.

What is the worldwide umbrella body for national ham societies?

IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union founded in Paris in 1925, federates national societies such as the ARRL and RSGB and represents amateurs at ITU conferences.

In 2011, about how many people worldwide were estimated to be active in amateur radio?

2 million people worldwide were estimated to be regularly active in amateur radio in 2011, including about 830,000 stations in the Americas, 750,000 in Asia-Pacific and 400,000 in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Radio amateurs are credited with discovering which propagation phenomenon?

Skywave propagation — signals refracted back to Earth by the ionosphere — was demonstrated by amateurs in 1923, when transatlantic contacts on short waves showed bands dismissed as useless could span the world.

How many amateur stations did the 1909 Wireless Blue Book list in the US and Canada?

89 amateur stations appear in the First Annual Official Wireless Blue Book of the Wireless Association of America, published in 1909, the first such callbook for the United States and Canada.

In amateur radio, what does the abbreviation 'DX' denote?

Long-distance contact is what 'DX' denotes — the term was telegraph shorthand for 'distance' — and chasing DX, especially rare countries, is a core amateur pursuit.

What are scheduled on-air meetings of operators called?

Nets are directed by a net control station that calls in participants in turn; some are emergency-preparedness drills, others weekly social round-tables or traffic-handling sessions.

Which of these is an amateur radio operating award?

Worked All States (WAS) is an ARRL award for confirmed contacts with all 50 US states; DXCC, for 100 countries, and Worked All Continents are other well-known awards.

Which voice mode is favoured for long-distance contacts because of its efficiency?

Single sideband suppresses the carrier and one sideband, so all transmitter power goes into the remaining sideband in about 3 kHz of bandwidth — far more efficient than AM for long-distance contacts.

Morse code transmission is also known by which two-letter abbreviation?

CW stands for continuous wave, the keyed unmodulated carrier used to send Morse code; it gets through under weak-signal conditions because it needs only a few hundred hertz of bandwidth.

Until what year did international rules require Morse proficiency for frequencies below 30 MHz?

2003 was when the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-03) made Morse testing optional for access below 30 MHz; the United States dropped its own requirement in February 2007.

Which internationally understood shorthand system is used in Morse contacts?

Q code signals are three-letter groups beginning with Q, such as QTH (location) and QSL (acknowledgement), devised for maritime telegraphy in 1909 and adopted by amateurs in Morse and voice contacts.

Which digital mode, popular since 2017, allows efficient weak-signal shortwave contacts?

FT8, released in July 2017 within the WSJT-X suite by Joe Taylor and Steve Franke, exchanges 15-second structured messages and decodes signals well below the noise floor.

Packet radio, developed in the 1970s, uses which protocol?

AX.25, an amateur adaptation of the X.25 data-link protocol, frames packet-radio data with station call signs as addresses; TCP/IP is often carried over it.

EchoLink and the Internet Radio Linking Project are examples of what?

RoIP — radio over Internet Protocol — describes systems such as EchoLink and IRLP that link repeaters and operators worldwide by carrying voice across the internet with VoIP techniques.

On which band does fast-scan amateur television typically operate?

70 cm — the 420–450 MHz band in the United States — has room for a full-bandwidth analogue or digital television signal, unlike the narrow lower bands, so fast-scan amateur television lives there.

What do hams commonly call the room or building housing their station?

The shack is the hams' name for the room or building housing their station, a term dating from early wireless days when gear was often kept in a makeshift outbuilding.

Through which programme do astronauts make amateur contacts from the International Space Station?

ARISS — Amateur Radio on the International Space Station — schedules contacts between licensed crew members and schools; it succeeded the SAREX shuttle programme of the 1980s and 1990s.

What must most countries' candidates pass to receive an amateur licence?

An examination covering electronics, propagation, operating practice and regulations is the standard route; most administrations tie licence privileges to the level of exam passed.

What is the entry-level amateur licence in both the UK and Australia called?

Foundation is the first of three licence grades in both countries — followed by Intermediate and Full in the UK, and Standard and Advanced in Australia — with a short syllabus and modest power limits.

Which US agency issues amateur radio licences?

Federal Communications Commission Part 97 rules govern US amateur radio; the FCC grants licences on the basis of exams run by volunteer examiner teams and assigns call signs from its database.

What is the highest US ham licence class?

Extra — formally Amateur Extra — sits above Technician and General and grants every amateur frequency privilege; it requires passing a 50-question exam drawn from a published pool.

How long is a US amateur radio licence valid?

Ten years is the FCC licence term, renewable without re-examination; the exam question pools, by contrast, are published in advance and refreshed on a four-year cycle.

Which two countries do not issue amateur radio licences to their citizens?

Yemen and North Korea are the two states that issue no amateur licences to their own citizens, although foreign operators have occasionally been permitted short DXpeditions from each.

In North America, what are experienced hams who mentor newcomers called?

Elmers, the mentors who guide newcomers, take their name from a 1971 QST column by Rodney Newkirk, W9BRD, who wrote of the helpful 'Elmer' every ham remembers.

Which is the oldest national amateur radio society, formed in 1910?

Wireless Institute of Australia, founded in Sydney in 1910, predates the Radio Society of Great Britain (1913) and the American Radio Relay League (1914) and is recognised as the world's oldest national amateur society.

What is a self-chosen call sign called?

Vanity call signs, chosen by the licensee from available combinations, have been issued by the FCC since 1996; the agency dropped its vanity fee in 2015 and introduced a $35 application fee in 2022.

In a UK call sign, what do the prefixes GM and MM indicate?

Scotland is indicated by GM (G-series calls) and MM (M-series); GW/MW is Wales, GI/MI is Northern Ireland and GD/MD is the Isle of Man.

In a standard US call sign, what does the numeral indicate?

The district where first licensed — one of ten numbered US call areas — is what the numeral shows, although since 1978 hams who move have been allowed to keep their original call sign.

Canadian call signs beginning CY indicate operation from what?

Geographic islands off Nova Scotia get the CY prefix: CY0 is Sable Island and CY9 is St. Paul Island, both counted as separate DXCC entities and requiring special permission to visit.

Which Canadian prefixes are used for Ontario?

VA3 and VE3 are Ontario's prefixes; VE1 and VA1 cover Nova Scotia, VE7 and VA7 British Columbia, VY1 the Yukon and VO1 the island of Newfoundland.

QRZ.com is an example of what?

An online callbook such as QRZ.com lets anyone look up the holder of a call sign, replacing the printed Radio Amateur Callbook that was published for most of the 20th century.

Since Ofcom's 2024 changes, what is the power limit for the UK's lowest licence class?

25 W is the limit for the lowest UK licence under Ofcom's February 2024 reforms, up from 10 W; the middle tier rose to 100 W and the full licence to 1 kW.

What is the peak power limit for the highest US licence class?

1.5 kW peak envelope power is the US ceiling for the top licence class under FCC rules, though lower caps apply on some bands; Canada allows 2.25 kW, Italy 500 W and Oman 150 W.

Which bands are best suited for worldwide communication?

HF — the 3 to 30 MHz bands — refracts off the ionosphere to reach around the globe, while VHF and UHF serve mostly local and regional contacts and microwaves carry amateur television and data links.

Which amateur band is nicknamed the 'magic band' for its sudden long-distance openings?

6 m, the 50 MHz band, is nicknamed the 'magic band' because sporadic-E and other openings can suddenly carry signals over thousands of kilometres on a band that behaves like VHF most of the time.

US amateurs can register with which system to operate on military frequencies?

MARS, the Military Auxiliary Radio System, enrols licensed amateurs to provide contingency communications and morale messages for the US armed services on assigned military frequencies.

Which practice is generally not permitted in amateur radio?

Encryption, or any coding meant to obscure a message's meaning, is barred because amateur traffic must stay open to all; narrow exceptions cover control commands to satellites and model craft.

What does SSTV stand for?

Slow-scan television sends a still image over seconds to a couple of minutes as an audio-bandwidth signal, so it fits in a normal voice channel; radiofax and fast-scan ATV are the other image modes.

Which IARU region number covers the Americas?

2 is the region number for the Americas; Region 1 covers Europe, Africa, the Middle East and northern Asia, and Region 3 the rest of Asia and the Pacific.

Unlike other spectrum users, hams may usually do what with their transmitters?

Build or modify them without certification is the amateur privilege: unlike commercial users, hams need no type-approval for home-built or altered transmitters, provided the gear meets rules on spurious emissions and bandwidth.

What kind of equipment keeps hams on the air when commercial services fail in disasters?

Battery- or generator-powered gear — often a simple transceiver and wire antenna — needs no grid, phone network or internet, which is why hams can pass traffic for agencies such as the Red Cross when those systems fail.

Which personal radio services need no licence, unlike amateur radio?

CB, FRS and PMR446 are licence-free personal radio services with fixed channels, low power and type-approved radios; an amateur licence instead buys wide spectrum, many modes and far higher power.

What does the sign-off '73', inherited from telegraphers, mean?

Best regards is the meaning of '73', one of the 19th-century telegraphers' numeric codes kept alive by hams, who sign off with it; '88' means love and kisses.

In Australia, SSB may use 400 W but FM is limited to how much?

Output limits can depend on the mode as well as the licence class.

Which protocol's abbreviation, ALE, keeps HF networks linked automatically?

Automatic link establishment lets stations sound the shortwave bands, pick a usable channel and set up a link by themselves; the technique came from military radio standards such as MIL-STD-188-141.

In Stranger Things, what X-Men name does Dustin give the ham radio tower he builds to reach Suzie?

Cerebro is meant to reach his girlfriend from summer camp, but the first thing it catches is a secret Russian transmission that sets the season's plot moving.

After which maritime disaster did the US Congress first require radio amateurs to hold licences?

The sinking of the Titanic gave urgency to a bill already before Congress, and the 1912 Radio Act also confined amateurs to wavelengths of 200 metres and shorter.

Hiram Percy Maxim, who co-founded the American Radio Relay League, invented which firearm accessory?

Silencer sales made Maxim's name years before radio did, and he applied much the same technology to mufflers for car engines.

Which satellite's beeps on 20 and 40 megahertz were tracked by radio amateurs all over the world?

Sputnik 1 beeped for about three weeks until its batteries ran flat, and the Soviets asked radio amateurs everywhere to tape-record the signal.

Which Godfather star ran a ham radio station from his private atoll in French Polynesia?

Marlon Brando appeared in American licence records as Martin Brandeaux to protect his privacy, and also held the US call sign KE6PZH.

In 2019, part of the internet address block set aside for ham radio in 1981 was sold to which company?

Amazon was the highest bidder for about four million of the block's 16 million addresses, which it wanted for its cloud computing business.

Which 1947 Pacific raft expedition kept in touch with the world by ham radio as station LI2B?

Kon-Tiki carried two wartime Norwegian resistance radiomen, whose contacts with hams in the Americas relayed the raft's progress to Norway's embassy in Washington.

In the film Frequency, an old ham radio lets a New York detective talk across thirty years with whom?

His father, a firefighter played by Dennis Quaid, died on duty in 1969, and a warning sent over the radio lets him survive the blaze.

Which American news anchor, call sign KB2GSD, narrated a film on ham radio's role in disaster relief?

Walter Cronkite held a Novice licence, the entry-level class, yet voiced the League's film Amateur Radio Today.

Which Eagles guitarist, call sign WB6ACU, slipped Morse code messages onto two of his own albums?

Joe Walsh used the dots and dashes on Barnstorm and Songs for a Dying Planet to urge listeners to the ballot box, and later supplied the theme tune for the podcast Ham Nation.

Which Middle Eastern king, on ham radio as JY1, insisted that fellow operators drop his title?

Hussein of Jordan was a life member of the American Radio Relay League, and his call sign later named JY1-SAT, his country's first cubesat, launched in 2018.

In which sitcom does Tim Allen play Mike Baxter, a ham radio operator with the call sign KA0XTT?

Last Man Standing makes Mike Baxter the marketing chief of the Outdoor Man sporting goods chain, whose video blog doubles as a soapbox for his opinions.

Which British comedian's 1961 episode The Radio Ham has him fumbling a stricken yachtsman's distress call?

Tony Hancock breaks his pencil, feeds the electricity meter and muddles latitude with longitude, and the yachtsman is saved by another operator on the far side of the world.

From which spacecraft did astronaut Owen Garriott make the first ham radio contacts from orbit?

Columbia carried Garriott, call sign W5LFL, on a ten-day Spacelab flight in 1983, and he talked to hams on the ground with a handheld Motorola two-metre radio.

OSCAR 1, the first amateur radio satellite, spent three weeks beeping which two-letter Morse message?

HI doubles as laughter in Morse shorthand, and the small box that sent it rode to orbit in 1961 as ballast on an American reconnaissance-satellite launch.

Illinois ham Grote Reber built a dish in his back yard in 1937 and pioneered which branch of science?

Radio astronomy owes him the first parabolic dish ever used as a radio telescope, which he finished in September 1937 in Wheaton, a suburb of Chicago.

Which Nobel-winning pulsar astronomer wrote weak-signal software now used by radio amateurs around the world?

Joseph Taylor, call sign K1JT, was licensed as a teenager, which drew him towards the science that won him a share of the 1993 physics prize; his program is called WSJT.

Which Arizona senator, a ham since the 1920s, held call sign K7UGA and fronted films promoting the hobby?

Barry Goldwater's call sign K7UGA is kept on the air by an Arizona club as a memorial to him.

The first two-way amateur radio contact across the Atlantic, in 1923, linked America with which country?

France got there first when Léon Deloy reached American Fred Schnell on 27 November 1923; Britain's hams managed the crossing the following month.

Borrowed from landline telegraphers, the letters CQ sent by a ham radio operator invite what?

Any station to reply is the invitation: CQ is a general call to whoever is listening, repeated in a rhythm that helps listeners pick a weak caller out of the noise.

Which three-letter signal names the postcards hams exchange to confirm that a contact took place?

QSL began as the question of whether a message had been received, and shortwave broadcasters also send the cards to listeners who report hearing them.

In a typical ham exchange of signal report, QTH and name, what does the QTH tell the other operator?

Location is what QTH conveys, and in its official wording the question asks for a position in latitude and longitude.

Hams who call themselves QRP operators take pride in keeping what deliberately small?

Transmit power of five watts or less is the usual QRP limit, a pursuit popular since the early 1920s whose name comes from the old request to turn a transmitter down.

Whatever her age, a woman on the amateur bands is addressed by which two-letter abbreviation?

YL comes from young lady, an old Morse operators' phrase, while a man of any age is an OM, short for old man.

Which two-digit number, handed down from the telegraph offices, do hams send to mean love and kisses?

88 comes from the old wire-service number codes, as does 73; the most famous list of them was adopted by Western Union in 1859.

Which telegraph-era phrase do hams use for a fellow operator who has died?

Silent key grew out of SK, historically the closing Morse signal a station sent before switching off its transmitter.

Using the standard phonetic alphabet, how would a ham spell out the call sign letters K and Z?

Kilo Zulu comes from the spelling alphabet defined for civil aviation in the mid-1950s, which has barely changed since Nectar gave way to November in 1956.

A ham's RST signal report, devised in 1934, rates readability, strength and which third quality?

Tone is scored from 1 to 9 and applies only to Morse and digital signals, so a voice report drops the third digit altogether.

Which European capital's name is the standard word for timing Morse code speed in words per minute?

Paris takes exactly 50 dot-lengths to send, so an operator working at 20 words per minute is making dots 60 milliseconds long.

Which automated hilltop station picks up a ham's weak handheld signal and sends it out again at higher power?

Repeater sites favour hilltops and tall buildings because the added height widens their coverage, known as the footprint.

Which layer of the upper atmosphere bends hams' shortwave signals back down to Earth?

The ionosphere is created by solar radiation, and amateurs pushed onto short wavelengths that officials thought useless were quick to discover what it could do.

The Yagi-Uda beam antenna, a favourite of ham radio operators, was invented in 1926 in which country?

Japan's Shintaro Uda did most of the work at Tohoku Imperial University, yet the name of his boss, Hidetsugu Yagi, is the one that stuck.

Which playful nickname do hams give the short, flexible antenna supplied with most handheld radios?

Rubber duck antennas hide a springy coil of wire inside a rubber or plastic jacket, replacing a whip that would be awkwardly long on a pocket radio.

Which natural rhythm of roughly eleven years decides how far hams' shortwave signals will travel?

Sunspot cycle peaks improve propagation on the higher shortwave frequencies, which is why radio amateurs and broadcasters follow forecasts of solar activity closely.

In the ham radio sport known as fox hunting, what are competitors with directional antennas racing to find?

Hidden transmitters are chased by car in North America, where vehicle hunts are most popular, and on foot with map and compass in the formal racing version.

The Vibroplex semi-automatic Morse key, patented in 1904, is known to operators by which insect nickname?

Bug keys make their own strings of dots with a swinging pendulum, letting a skilled operator send at more than 40 words per minute.

The G5RV, a multiband wire antenna popular with ham radio operators, takes its name from what?

Its inventor's call sign was G5RV: Louis Varney came up with the design in 1946, and hams hang it flat, sloping or as an inverted V.

The quad antenna was devised to beat corona discharge in thin Andean air at station HCJB in which country?

Ecuador was home to HCJB, a missionary shortwave broadcaster known as the Voice of the Andes, where engineer Clarence Moore patented his looped design in 1951.

Hams know their 160-metre allocation, for decades the lowest in frequency, by which nickname?

Top Band sits just above the AM broadcast band and lost its place as the lowest amateur frequencies when two newer allocations arrived, in most countries after 2000.

North American hams set up outdoors for Field Day on the fourth full weekend of which month?

June brings more than 30,000 operators out for what is typically the largest emergency-preparedness exercise in the United States, first held in 1933.

Hamvention, one of the world's biggest ham radio gatherings, began in 1952 in which Ohio city?

Dayton hosted the first Hamvention at the Biltmore Hotel, and although the show moved to a fairground in nearby Xenia in 2017 it has kept the city's name.

The American Radio Relay League's headquarters and memorial station W1AW stand in Newington, in which state?

Connecticut has been the League's home since Hiram Percy Maxim proposed it to a Hartford radio club in 1914, and W1AW was built after a 1936 flood wrecked the earlier station.

The DX Century Club award asks hams to confirm contacts with at least 100 different what?

Countries here means the 300-odd 'entities' on the award's list, which counts some far-flung territories separately from the nations that govern them.

The grid locator system hams use to pinpoint stations is named after which English town?

Maidenhead hosted the 1980 meeting that picked John Morris's scheme from twenty rival proposals for dividing the globe into lettered squares.

Which uninhabited Norwegian outpost in the South Atlantic drew the 3Y0J ham radio expedition in early 2023?

Bouvet Island is so hard to work from that the team had to scale the operation back and then cut it short as the weather worsened.

What do hams call their 30, 17 and 12 metre allocations, after the 1979 conference that granted them?

WARC bands honour the World Administrative Radio Conference, and by gentlemen's agreement they stay free of contests, a quiet refuge on the busiest weekends.

QO-100, the amateur radio transponder aboard the geostationary satellite Es'hail 2, belongs to which country?

Qatar's satellite sits in geostationary orbit, so a fixed dish can reach its amateur transponders at any hour from Brazil to Thailand.

Which tool for punishing sloppy operators hangs framed at American Radio Relay League headquarters?

The Wouff Hong was dreamed up in QST magazine by The Old Man, the pen name of League co-founder Hiram Percy Maxim, who sent the editors a specimen early in 1919.

Europe's largest ham radio fair, known simply as Ham Radio, takes place in which German city?

Friedrichshafen drew 17,080 visitors in 2015, and it ranks with Ohio's Hamvention and the Tokyo Ham Fair as a place where makers unveil new radios.

Which control on a ham transceiver mutes the speaker's background hiss until a strong enough signal arrives?

Squelch is a kind of noise gate: it holds the receiver's audio shut and opens it only when a signal rises above the level the operator has set.