The use of an Amateur Radio License in the Era of modern Telecommunication

I lately got into ham radio. Working on a side project which receives ship’s AIS Signals¹, I wanted to build an antenna for receiving them well. I read up on the internet and got a reccomendatin to meet up with the local ham radio folks that are building all sorts of antennas. Being curious about it I attended one of their community meetings at E13 in Bramfeld which is within cycling distance. They gave me some recommendations and said that, if I was interested in how antennas work, I should join their ham radio classes which had just started. I would go there once a week and learn all the basics that would be tested during the exam for the general license.

I have to say ham radio is quite a world of it’s own. A rabbit hole that is quite fun to go down. Especially since I enjoy learning about the history of communication technology and computer science. There is quite some overlap of these topics. For example morse code being the predecessor of radio teletype² which was used as the basis for the tty shell interfaces of the first computers. And rtty and morse code based radio telegraphy³ are still being used to this day by amateur radio operators!

But why would one care to learn all these things that are not used by the public anymore since we’ve developed far more advanced ways of communicating in the recent decades? First of all it’s fun to operate your own amateur radio station. There are quite some techniques to master in order to be able to have radio contacts with people hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. It just feels pleasant.

Then I think it is cool to keep the history of radio communication alive by talking to other tinkerers using old equipment. Ham radio operators are also allowed to build their own equipment. Antennas of cause but also transmitters and receivers which can also be a lot of fun. It’s a wide area of activity so there is a place for anybody.

So in the end I passed the exam and now am the proud owner of the international call-sign DL2XU.

If your interested I’d like to hear what you think.

Footnotes