A question I think most hams get asked at least once when someone from outside the hobby finds out what they do is ‘what’s the point in ham radio, why not just email the other person or text/phone them?’.
I got asked this very question when working from a local park not so long ago. A dad came up to me with his young son who, at a guess, was around 11 or 12. The dad was very interested in what I was doing and tried, enthusiastically, to get his son involved. ‘But what’s the point?’ the boy asked, ‘you can just use your phone’.
‘But’ I said, ‘phones are meant to just work, the internet is meant to just work. This is magic’. I pointed to my radio and simple antenna and said, ‘With this I can talk to anyone anywhere in the world by sending a signal from this antenna, bounce it off the edge of space, back to the Earth to bounce back to the edge of space. The someone in Europe, America, Brazil, wherever, will pick that signal up with their simple antenna and talk back to me.’.
‘That’, I said, ‘that is really cool’.
The boy looked at me for a moment and replied, ‘Yeah, I admit that’s pretty cool.’.
Hopefully, his encounter with me may have planted a seed and one day soon, he too will become interested in becoming a ham.
The image at the top of this page shows where my signal reached when I was calling CQ (calling CQ basically means shouting out on air for people to talk to) on various bands on 11 November 2024. As you can see, I reached most of Europe and across to the USA, Canada and Central America. Pretty cool!
Another time I was working up in the moors and a group of girls were out hiking. They kept looking over to me and eventually one of them asked what I was doing. I explained I was being a geek and sending morse code to people around the world. I unplugged my headphones so they could hear what I was doing and they too thought it was, in their words, not geeky but cool.
Again, I’ll never know but I can hope I may have encouraged one of those girls to investigate the hobby a little more.
I have met many adults too when working portable and they often ask what I am doing and all have been fascinated by it. Encounters like this are so important to helping promote the hobby in a positive light and to maybe lure some newcomers into it.
Indeed, you may be a newcomer to the hobby yourself. If you are interested in finding out more, have a look around this website (and others related to ham radio) and please feel free to drop me an email with any questions you may have.
Vy 73 de Danny M0SDB