I was trained as a US Navy ET. Decades later I finally took my Ham Radio test. I am now also known as K06HAX! It’s a key step towards my whale song project!
Why?
I’ve always been a geek when it comes to communications. I dove into networking the first chance I got - back when Banyan Vines was the standard and the new upstart TCP/IP stuff was just coming into use in the corporate world. I built out a spread-spectrum radio network in 1994-1995 way before the WiFi standard came into being.
But I’m not a “rag chew” kind of guy. I’d rather do just about anything than sit and talk on a microphone to people on the other side of a radio. Not my thing. So there was never a real driving force to get my Ham license - other than the fact that my training and experience would make it an easy test to take.
What Changed?
If you go back to my earlier posts about my whale song project I moved away from the SOFAR technology and started looking at different radio options. And I fell into a rabit hole! RF is a huge field. I’ve been bouncing all around it trying to understand different fequency bands, antennas, and what bands one can transmit on. It became clear to me that if I had my license I could experiment on many more bands. And, if you know me at all, you know that my #1 priority is to LEARN so this wasn’t a shallow effort.
Was it Difficult?
No. For the technician test - the entry level - you need only really basic electronics understanding. If you can identify basic components on a schematic and understand Ohms Law then you have the technical parts covered. The rest is regulations really, and that’s all memorization.
I used the Ham Study App and just drilled and drilled.
When I could take the practice tests and get 85% or better I scheduled the test. I did it online and passed the first time.
What Can I do with it?
I am legally allowed to transmit on a lot of frequencies now, from down low to way above WiFi. I can use some WiFi channels that are not allowed for general use.
I won’t be chatting with other Hams around the world, and I can’t see myself doing the contests for how distant of a contact one can make. I can see myself learning morse code and learning the basics of how to communicate in an emergency. That has special appeal to me because my grandfather (William Ralph Hooper Sr) was a telegraph operator. I grew up on stories of how fast he could relay and what a great “fist” he had.
But the real value for me is that I am legally allowed to transmit and experiment - within certain limits - so I can explore solutions to interesting problems. Problems like a bouy signalling that it has collected whale song.
Keeping the end vision in mind
Radio technology is super fun and interesting, but it’s a means to an end: solving a problem. Science is increasingly finding that animals communicate more than we ever thought, and that AI will let us talk to animals. This is exactly what I hope to happen!
And the radio technology may provide a critical link. If a “telephone system to the whales” is going to happen, we need radio to get from where humans are to where the whales are. With AI on a bouy with a transducer and a radio link to shore, we can build that telephone system.
Next Steps
It’s time to get some practical experience. In the coming months I’ll be writing about building my own antennas and what I’m learning about “high frequency” and “very high frequency” communications - especially about digital modes and protocols. There’s a ton of learning to do. Thank goodness for my Navy ET training, which gave me a solid technical foundation for all this.
Stand by! More to come!