What use is an F-call?

Recently I got to thinking about this hobby of Amateur Radio. It's not like any other hobbies I've had in the past. It's different in so many ways that it took me a little by surprise.

When I played with lego, electric trains or on my home computer in my teens, I was a hobbyist. I spent time, effort and money on my hobbies. When I came across another enthusiast, I exchanged ideas and findings and carried on with what I'd learned. Sometimes we combined efforts and I recall making a huge railway yard in the attic with about six friends, each of our tracks hand-marked to prevent inadvertent ownership transfer.

With the age of the Internet, you'd expect that you'd see an evolution beyond that. You'd see people getting together in communities and sharing their hobby. While this does happen, much more than when I was a teenager, there are hundreds of places for each hobby, most of them insular and self-contained, region specific, language specific, what ever.

Amateur Radio is different.

We have a scarce resource that is shared around the globe, our radio bands. When I first turned on my radio I recall thinking that these bands were huge, infinite, there was just so much to choose from, how would I ever find anyone?

Turns out, running your finger over your VFO, or programming your radio to do it for you, gives you a great sense of what's happening where and when. It turns out that as you start using the bands, you realise that these huge bands are not infinite at all. During some parts of the day, some of these bands are not helpful in getting radio signals out across the countryside. Turns out that people become grouped together in smaller bands at different times of the day. The side effect of this is that all the people with this hobby are all in the same place at the same time. More or less anyway.

You get my point, we're all talking together in the same place, all of us, so we have a built-in system to make us participate with each other in the same place. Of course it helps that a large part of Amateur Radio is to do with communication, so not only do we congregate, we also talk.

Other aspects of this hobby that took me by surprise are that it's more encompassing than other hobbies. Amateur Radio is about communication and all that this embodies. It's about learning skills, it's about socialising, it's about building and testing, it's about competitions, about professionalism, it's unlike any other hobby I've participated in.

I've had my license for about a minute and a half, but one thing I realised today is that I'd never heard of Amateur Radio in any meaningful sense until a month before I got my license. I'm technically minded, have worked in broadcast radio for many years, I'm heavily involved in Information Technology, do Research and Development daily and talk to many people about skill development, training and communication. I've been self-employed for over a decade, but I'd never heard of Amateur Radio.

Imagine that.

One realisation I came to is that I'm not alone in this historic lack of knowledge about Amateur Radio. I think that going out on Field Days with a club, going into the community, finding other like-minded individuals and getting them excited about Amateur Radio is going to open up a whole new group of Amateurs.

For me, I've already started creating a list of clubs and communities I'm aware of, or even a member of and I've started thinking about how to communicate about this hobby, what it means for the individual participating and for the community in which that individual lives - because let's not forget that Amateur Radio is also about the wider community.

Amateur Radio, what a hobby. Tell your friends.

I'm Onno, vk6flab