JonathanB wrote:Can I ask why and what you do with your callsigns and radios?
Quite a lot, or nothing at all.....
There’s a lot of aspects to this particular hobby, just like people who fly for fun (aka Irv Lee ‘Hobby Pilots’) there’s aerobatics, bimbling, air racing, tail dragging, strip flying, going places, etc etc.
In Radio, theres a lot of different frequencies you can use, some primary user some secondary and a lot of different modes...
For example I used to run TV transmissions on 23cm band, via local repeaters and between a load of friends. Theres a wide Frequency spectrum, From microwaves, UHF, VHF, HF...
Bouncing signals off the moon...bouncing signals round the world via the ionosphere, talking to space station, communication with amateur satellites. A lot of the challenge is understanding sunspots, how radio is affected by solar activity, how different bands (or frequencies) change during the course of a year, something called propagation. Then there’s meteor scatter, sporadic e layer.... these are the challenges of operating on different frequencies..... Then there are different modes, voice (AM, FM, single sideband) carrier wave, using morse, slow scan TV, RTTY, digital modes, (lots of new stuff on digital now days)....
building aerials, using different types of aerials, building transmitters, decoders and receivers, using computers linked to radios...
mobile, portable, home base operation..
Basically it’s such a wide range of aspects to this, that’s why it’s so interesting, there’s just such a lot to do.
If your mildly interested and can stand it, then this load of YouTube videos covers many of the aspects of the hobby.
The views I express here are entirely my own and are not intended to represent my employer.