HAM Radio

I recently mentioned that I am studying to get my HAM license. Today I spent a couple of minutes on the Internet trying to look at how much a HAM radio will cost. Like any piece of electronics, the range varies greatly. You can pick up a small hand-held unit for around $100 or shell out over $10,000 for a top-of-the-line unit. And I thought computers were expensive.

My only experience with HAM radios before this past summer was when I was sailing from Hawaii to Los Angeles. We used a marine single-side-band (SSB) radio to send and receive daily e-mails as well as check in with other boats sailing roughly our same course. It was great to be so far from land yet still be in communication with family and friends.

After looking at the $10,000 HAM radio, I had to ask myself why anyone would pay that kind of money for something that can be done on the Internet for a fraction of the price. I can understand having a radio on a sailboat because it is tough to get an Internet connection in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. However the SSB we used to exchange e-mails was significantly less than the $10,000 radio.

On Sunday evening I was involved in a radio drill that simulated a major earthquake. While most phones continue to work even during a power outage, the Internet is questionable. Throw in a major disaster and it could take a while to get through to loved ones with conventional communication methods. Just ask anyone trying to get in touch with family or friends in any of the recent natural disasters.

Sunday night's drill was very interesting to watch. We had five or six different radios all listening to the various traffic going on. One radio was listening to neighborhoods communicate with eachother while another was tuned to local emergency services. The idea is that if help is needed in the neighborhood, a HAM radio operator can take down the important information and relay it to emergency services. There were other relays we listened to as well. This helps keep people from talking all over eachother on the same frequency.

That is what brings us back to that $10,000 radio. The $100 HAM unit is limited in the number of frequencies available. It can also only listen to one channel at a time. The more expensive radio has a much larger number of frequencies it can use. It also can listen to multiple channels at the same time. That would have been very helpful for our drill.

It was fun to look at the various types of radios and compare the differences. When the time comes to get my own HAM radio I still am not sure which one I want to get. However it probably won't be the $10,000.