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.

Sailing This Weekend

I finally have a weekend where I don't have any other commitments. I don't have to go camping. I don't have to do any projects around the house other than mow the lawn. That means I get to do what I want and that means I am going sailing.

Sailing at the end of summer is always the best. The weather has cooled a bit yet is still warm enough for shorts and t-shirts. The wind is generally pretty good. Most importantly, the hectic summer schedule draws to a close and ski season hasn't started yet.

About five years ago this month, I was sailing a 37-foot race boat from Hawaii to Los Angeles. It was a 21-day trip. Cell phones stopped working about 5 miles from shore and so communication required different technologies. Even though I was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it was still important to stay in contact with family and friends.

Sailboats doing trans-oceanic voyages are generally equipped with single-side-band radios (SSB). They are very similar to HAM radios and bounce the radio signal off the ionosphere to communicate with people half way around the world. The only problem with SSB is that very few people have them. Not to fear, there is SailMail which allows you to connect your laptop computer to a special MODEM that works with SSB. That allowed me to send and receive daily e-mails to and from the family. My wife would then update everyone with my position and how things were going on the boat.

It was great to have e-mail for the trip. However it is also nice to be able to talk to someone directly. For that you need a satellite phone. There are three companies that you can use: Inmarsat, Iridium, and Globalstar. Globalstar generally only works 200-miles offshore and so that was not an option. We opted to rent an Iridium phone which worked flawlessly all the way from Hawaii to Los Angeles. The only problem was that talk time is about a dollar a minute. You really want to keep calls to a minimum at those rates. However it was good to talk to the family on Sundays and Thursdays.

Communication is very important and it is nice to know that with today's technology it is possible to stay in contact even when crossing an ocean. Luckily for me, my cell phone will work just fine when I am out sailing this weekend.