HAM N00b

Last week, I became a ham radio operator.

Some people may ask, "why the heck would you wanna do that?" Well, there are a few reasons.

For starters, I'm a geek. I'd gone pretty much as far as I wanted to go with photography, and I needed another hobby that would give me reason to read books and absorb information. In comparison to other hobbies, (like say, restoring a car,) amateur radio has some real benefits. It takes up less space. At least, for now. It can (mostly) be done indoors, which is very helpful during the cold winter months. There's less of a chance I'll find myself laying under a car in the mud trying to force stubborn pieces to fit together. And overall, it doesn't cost as much. Again, for now.

Secondly, I like math. And while there's bucketloads of math in everything we do, a lot of it seems to have concentrated itself around radio. And it's the special kind of math, made of imaginary numbers and black magic that makes your head want to turn itself inside out. All of that math boils down to how long to make a certain piece of wire and where to put it so that you can talk to another geek on the other side of the planet. That may sound condescending, but it's not. Geeks are awesome. Without geeks, we wouldn't have cell phones. Or the internet. Which means we wouldn't have Angry Birds or Candy Crush, but it also means we wouldn't have a man-made object drilling holes in a comet.

And then, there's the Zombie Apocalypse. Or ice storms. Or aliens. Or anything else you can think of that can cause a large-scale disruption of the infrastructure that makes civilization work. One of the reasons the government sets aside portions of the radio spectrum for the use of amateur operators is that, given time and geeks being what they are, eventually a communications network springs up that is completely independent of any commercial venture. This comes in handy when those commercial networks fail, such as when a car crash on the highway knocks out a fiber optic cable. Or an ice storm brings down power lines and leaves whole communities without electricity for weeks at a time.

It also comes in handy when someone is lost out in the bush, where there's no cell service and the mountains are too close together to get a signal to a satellite phone. These are places where industry has no need to build a communications network because normally there isn't anyone out there to use it.

For all these reasons, and more, I wrote my test and got my ham license.

Now it's time to start learning.