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, at least how often must a US amateur station give its call sign while on the air?

Every ten minutes, and again when an exchange ends, a US station must send its call sign; the rule's stated purpose is to make the origin of a transmission known to anyone receiving it.

Under the definition adopted in 1927, what makes a radio operator an amateur?

Personal aim, no pecuniary interest: the 1927 wording lives on in today's rules, which is why hams may not be paid to operate or carry messages for hire.

What is the worldwide umbrella body for national ham societies?

IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, was founded in Paris in 1925 so that radio amateurs of many countries could speak with one voice at international conferences, as it still does today.

Radio hams who practise 'EME' communication bounce their signals off what?

The Moon is the reflector in Earth-Moon-Earth work, nicknamed moonbounce; professionals dropped the technique once satellites arrived in the 1960s, but amateurs kept it going as a challenge.

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.

In a ham radio 'fox hunt', what are the competitors trying to track down?

A hidden transmitter, the 'fox', is tucked away somewhere in town or out in the woods, and the hunters use direction-finding antennas to home in on its signal.

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

Long-distance contact is what 'DX' denotes, from telegraph shorthand for 'distance'; chasing it is a sport in itself, with expeditions travelling to remote, empty places just to put them on the air.

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 goes to hams who submit written proof of reaching all 50 US states, traditionally the QSL postcards that operators mail one another to confirm they really did talk.

Which voice mode is favoured on the shortwave bands because of its efficiency?

Single sideband drops the carrier and one of AM's two mirror-image sidebands, so all of the transmitter's output goes into the part that carries the voice, in about half the bandwidth.

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

CW stands for continuous wave: Morse is sent by switching a plain carrier on and off, a signal so simple and narrow that it can be copied by ear when a voice would be lost in the noise.

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 began around 1909 as a British list of three-letter signals for ships and coast stations, and it spread because operators with no common language could still understand one another.

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

FT8 squeezes each message into a short, tightly coded burst that software can decode even when the signal is too faint to hear; its co-designer Joe Taylor is a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist.

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

AX.25 adapts the commercial X.25 protocol for the airwaves by using each station's call sign as its address, which keeps every packet identified in the way the licence rules demand.

EchoLink and IRLP connect distant ham stations over what?

The internet carries the audio using the same voice-over-IP methods as an app-based phone call, so a handheld radio in one country can talk through a station in another.

On which band does full-motion amateur television typically operate?

70 cm is the lowest-frequency ham band wide enough for a full television picture, which needs megahertz of room that the narrow shortwave bands simply do not have.

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

The shack is what hams call the radio room, a name said to go back to the earliest days, when noisy spark transmitters were often banished to a separate shed or 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.

In the United States, who gives newcomers the test for an amateur radio licence?

Volunteer examiners, themselves licensed hams, run the test sessions in their own communities; the FCC never sees the candidate and simply issues the licence once they report a pass.

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

Foundation is the first of three licence stages in both countries and is meant as a gateway: its course checks that a newcomer can operate a station safely and without interfering with other radio users.

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, conveys every US amateur privilege on all bands; the tempting 'Advanced' is a grandfathered class that existing holders keep but nobody new can earn.

What does a US ham need to keep a licence beyond its ten-year term?

Renewal form, not a retest: a ham who lets the licence lapse even gets a two-year grace period in which to file, though the station must stay off the air until the renewal is granted.

As of 2024, which of these countries bars its own citizens from holding an amateur radio licence?

North Korea issues no amateur licences to its own citizens, which makes it one of the hardest places on Earth for award-chasing hams to reach.

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

Elmers are the veterans who coach a newcomer through the exam and that first nervous time on the air; the nickname is credited to a fellow ham, Rodney Newkirk, W9BRD.

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

Wireless Institute of Australia traces back to a Sydney hotel meeting in March 1910, where experimenters banded together to put their case to the government, three years before Britain's society formed.

What is a self-chosen call sign called?

Vanity call signs let a ham pick a specific available call, and the rules even allow a close relative to claim the call sign of a ham who has died, keeping it in the family.

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

Scotland is shown by GM or MM, just as GW and MW show Wales; the regional letter is now optional, though, so a Scottish station may also sign with a plain G or M call.

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.

The Canadian prefix CY0 is reserved for which remote Atlantic island?

Sable Island, known for its wild horses, is all but uninhabited, so hams need Parks Canada's permission and a full expedition to put CY0 on the air, and award-chasers count it as a 'country' of its own.

Which Canadian prefixes are used for Ontario?

VA3 and VE3 follow a simple scheme: the digit names the province, climbing from east to west with 1 for Nova Scotia, 2 for Quebec, 3 for Ontario and on to 7 for British Columbia.

QRZ.com is an example of what?

An online callbook, QRZ.com grew out of a 1992 CD-ROM on which Fred Lloyd pressed the FCC's whole licence database; today anyone can type in a call sign and see who holds it.

Hams who enjoy 'QRP' operating deliberately limit themselves to what?

Very low power, usually five watts or less, is the QRP challenge: most ham transceivers put out about 100 watts, so enthusiasts take pride in getting through on a twentieth of that.

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

1.5 kW peak envelope power is the US ceiling, yet the same FCC rule opens by ordering hams to use only the minimum power needed to get the message through; Canada's limit is higher, at 2.25 kW.

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 of these is generally forbidden on the amateur radio bands?

Encryption, or any coding meant to hide a message's meaning, is barred because amateur traffic must stay open for anyone to monitor; a narrow exception covers commands sent up to control satellites.

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.

Each June, North American hams set up temporary stations and contact as many others as possible in which annual event?

Field Day sends more than 30,000 hams out to remote spots on the fourth weekend of June; part contest and part open house, it doubles as practice for getting on the air in an emergency.

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.

After which 2017 hurricane did the Red Cross ask for 50 ham radio operators to deploy to Puerto Rico?

Maria destroyed Puerto Rico's power grid in September 2017, so the Red Cross asked for 50 hams to fly in, record who had survived and get word out through its Safe and Well system.

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 what '73' means today, though when the code first appeared in a telegraph operators' guide in 1857 it stood for 'My love to you'; hams now leave that to '88', love and kisses.

What two-letter call does a ham send to invite any station that hears it to reply?

CQ means 'calling any station': inherited from the landline telegraph, it is the general call that opens a conversation with whoever happens to be listening, anywhere in the world.

In shortwave radio networks, what does the abbreviation ALE stand for?

Automatic link establishment has each radio sweep a list of channels, score the signals it hears and pick the best one unaided, sparing operators the old guesswork about which frequency is open.

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.