What use is an F-call?

Over the past few weeks I've been encouraging you to listen to the news, to get on-air and participate. It's easy enough for me to say, but I can understand that it might not be so simple for you to actually achieve.

Imagine for a moment that you have at least got the pre-requisites, that is, you have a license, you have a radio, antenna, power-supply, it's all plugged in and when you move the dial, you can hear stations. I realise that this assumes a whole lot of things which might not yet be true, but bear with me, I'm trying to make a point.

Imagine if you will, that you have your microphone in your hand - or on your desk, and your finger is hovering over the magic Push To Talk button. Now what? What do you say? Whom do you say it to? How will you know it worked? 

The simplest way to start is to jump in and get your feet wet, but I know that might be a little daunting for you, so instead, why not tune to a station and see what's happening?

Last week I was introduced to the 7130 dx net by another amateur. At the time we were sitting on the ocean with our respective radios tuning to see what was around and he suggested tuning to 7.130 MHz. There was a whole group of people talking and at first it was quite confusing.

After a little while some structure started appearing and I could begin to understand what was happening - in short, people from around the globe all tuned to the same frequency at the same time with the single purpose of talking to each other. You might want to have a look at their website which explains in great detail what it is and how it works. The web-address is www.7130dx.net and the net runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 0930UTC on 7.130 MHz. Why am I telling you about this? What's the point?

It's simple, you need to understand the lingo to be able to speak the lingo. Just like speaking Italian in a room full of Japanese is not a good way to communicate, speaking without knowing the words on an Amateur Radio band is a challenge.

Finally a tip, learn your phonetic alphabet! Use it to read out number plates in the car, read out street signs, recite the alphabet, use it, that is, Uniform Sierra Echo India Tango!

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I'm Onno, vk6flab