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This last weekend was ARRL Field day, a huge operating event designed to be "practice" for when the "stuff hits the fan" but also just gets a ton of people on the air using portable stations set up in public and austere environments (like in a park pavilion, not in a cozy basement or office). I made a playlist of as many FD videos i could find on youtube [0]. There's a lot of examples of stations, setups, and the actual contacts - which are very short. Field day is a sort of contest. In a nutshell, the more contacts you make, the more points you get. So, the contacts are short and have a bare minimum of information (callsign, operating class (#radios + power level) and US state/CAN province). "Normal" voice and CW conversations are much different, and just sound like two people chatting about life, the weather, family, health, kids these days, or technical radio-related topics like descriptions of their station, propagation studies, or reports of the last hamfest they went to. There's also "nets" which usually have their "check-ins" give a short report, or none at all (aka short-time). Some nets relay information about severe weather (skywarn / storm spotting), others relay official national traffic in accordance with the Incident Command System (ICS) to practice for wide-spread disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. The radiogram system still runs via ham radio too, and you can hear national traffic system (NTS) nets relaying messages the old-fashioned way. Right now, the majority of amateur radio traffic on HF is currently FT8 [1]. IT's a low-speed weak-signal FSK mode, in which operators exchange only each other's callsign, signal report, location (4-char maidenhead gridsquare), and a few extra characters to say hello (CQ), roger (RR), or goodbye (73) in a 77-bit message. Other stations might not even be hams talking, like APRS, WSPR, or signal propagation beacons. There are quite a few automated stations that perform a variety of tasks. There's a TON of low-earth orbit cubesats that use amateur radio for telemetry and command/control, and a few operate as a repeater that hams use to relay a signal across wide areas. There are even hams aboard the ISS, as well as a repeater. So sometimes we say hi to astronauts. They don't say much since a lot of people are in line to get that highly-desired contact. Sometimes schools coordinate with radio clubs to have students ask questions directly to astronauts via ham radio. It's old-school, but it provides an excellent learning opportunity about the utility of radio. Bottom line, hams talk about anything. And some don't talk about anything at all. And some aren't even people. Some are astronauts. It's a very broad, multi-faceted hobby so there's lots to talk about. --N0SSC [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG8UQxewXrtbT9cBWL-3J... |