I was recently talking Ham Radio with my work buddy Jonathon KJ5HAQ/AG (Congrats Jonathon!) and we were discussing his getting started in Amateur Radio.  We spent a good 30 minutes of company time talking about operating digital modes, learning CW, and shortwave listening to military "Spy" stations like HFGCS and decoding maritime weather information like WEFAX etc.  I told him my history in amateur radio and then started a sentence with "If I had to start over from scratch, I probably would have ...".   That sentence gave me the idea for this article.  What exactly would I do differently this time if I could start again from a bright-eyed and eager teenager pursuing a Novice license but failing to get it back in 1980-something, to finally getting a Technician license in 2006?

Well before I get into what I would do differently next time, you need to know what I did do last time.  It all started one late night around 1980 or so, I would have been 10 or 12 years old.  I had an old General Electric AM table radio in my bedroom.  It sat on my windowsill near my head when I lay in bed, close enough in fact that I could plug in one of those old white earphones into the radio and listen while I was in bed pretending to be asleep.  One evening I was listening and turning the dial and just seeing what I could hear.  On a normal night I could easily hear stations all through Alabama, Florida, and Georgia from my bedroom in southeast Alabama.  Sometimes I could hear stations form far off and exotic locales with strange names like Chicago and Los Angeles or New York.  That night was to be different.  I heard a couple of men speaking with a strange accent.  It was certainly english but sounded very strange to my ears.  After a few minutes one of them mentioned Sydney Australia and discussed the weather or local news or whatever.  I don't recall exactly what they were discussing, but did I really hear "Sydney Australia"?  Sure enough, I did!  I listened for another hour or so until the signal faded and then drifted off to sleep.  I was hooked, the bug had bit, only it would take quite a long time to make it official.

After talking with my friends at school Chris mentioned the Dothan ham radio club had meeting in the civic center and he an I soon went to one.  After the meeting Chris and I called my parents to come pick us up, but not using the payphone.  One of the hams called up my parents using the club's autopatch.  Making a phone call over radio completely blew my mind!  

A few days later, Chris and I rode bikes over to Archie W4GNG's (SK) house to see his radio.  Literally just yelled "Hey Mom, I'm going to a strange man's house to see the radio he keeps in his shed!"  and she was fine with it.  I don't remember what equipment Archie had, but I remember talking to several people across the states.

Back then we had to learn morse code at 5 words per minute in order to get a Novice license.  I'm sure there were other requirements and restrictions, similar to Tech licenses now, but it didn't matter.  I tried to study morse code for a little bit but soon lost interest.  What a load of BullCrap! I didn't want to listen to beeps and boops!  I just wanted to talk to Sydney Australia!

Well that was that for pursuing my Novice ticket.  Fast forward 25 years or so.  a Lot of life has happened. Married and divorced, raised a couple of kids, spent 10 years in the Air Force calibrating and repairing electronic equipment,etc.  I was living in Thornton Colorado and working at Space Imaging for Raytheon and my co-worker Freddie (AF4BY) started talking about ham radio.  Well once I found out that I could earn a Technician license without learning morse code I dove in.  A short while later and there I was, KC0ZCT, the world's newest Technician.  I installed a 2 meter mobile rig in my truck and got on the local repeater ... occasionally.  I would check into nets every so often, sometimes I would join in a rag chew while driving, but I didn't really "engage" into the hobby as much as I thought I would.  I started attending the Longmont ARC (LARC) meetings when I could make it and basically I just "was" a ham without really doing too much.

Eventually Freddie talked me into upgrading to General.  I resisted with the usual rebuttals; I don't have space for an antenna, HF radios are really expensive, I don't have the time, etc, but Freddie persisted. I started studying and finally tested and upgraded.  I scraped up a little money and bought myself an ICOM IC-718 and a LDG tuner and some wire for an antenna and hurriedly set it all up.

I set it all up only to be rewarded with an S7+ noise hash on every band. Ugh.

Sure I made a few contacts but nothing too exciting.  No Sydney Australia.  So I slowly started to work on my station.  Little by little I learned that I had (severe) RF intrusion into my station.  I had noisy AC power lines, noisy feedline, noisy power supply, extremely noisy phone charger wall warts, rf hum on my microphone.  Piece by piece I fixed things; a Common mode choke here, a better power supply filter there, a coax balun up there, a different antenna over there.  Some things worked and some didn't, but slowly I eventually had my noise floor down to manageable level and I was actually getting out pretty well. 

Mostly I was just cruising and slowly learning.  Sure, There were times when I would get involved in something, but they were fairly far in between.  For instance I bought a Kenwood TM-D710G upgrade for my truck and got really into APRS for a little bit.

Somewhere along this line I had upgraded to Extra and I was starting to enjoy radio.  Still I was mostly doing local repeater stuff and some digital modes on HF.  I would occasionally grab the mic on HF, but it was rare.  I used to laugh that I was one of the rarest sideband DX stations out there.  Almost nobody had me in their log.  In retrospect I think got into the digital modes because I was having such noise issues.  Digital modes lend themselves well to dealing with noise and they also gave me a way to vaguely quantify the effects of changes to my station.  I could look and see if I had made things better or worse in a sort of meaningful way.

I was finally rolling!  I was engaged in the club. I had operated LARC's field day station a few years in a row and finally one year I noticed that the field day setup was really noisy.  It was the same as last year mind you, I just realized "Hey, I have a better signal at home on my modest station than here with better radios and a spiderbeam."  Later that night from home I checked. Indeed I was running a lower noise floor (s3+) and getting out much better at home than the club station.  Finally after 10 or so years I felt like I was starting to get the hang of this stuff.

So I rewarded myself with a new radio, a brand new Kenwood TS-2000.  Loved it! got even better signals out and in, and upgraded my antenna to a Hustler 6BTV.  Yes the vertical hustler was noisier than my other antenna, but I was able to deal with that. A few chokes and filters everywhere and I was back in business.

This was how I rolled for a few years. Slowly learning, acquiring more equipment, getting more involved in the LARC club, upgrading to a cobbweb antenna, exploring little interesting corners of the hobby like listening to HFGCS and WEFAX like I talked about earlier.

In February 2021 I moved to Campbell Texas.  Once the snow had finally melted and I was unpacked I looked around. I had 2+ acres of perfect "Antenna Farm" land.  I unpacked my ham gear and stuck my Cobbweb antenna on a pole in the back yard and a 30/40 dipole.  I turned everything on and HOLY CRAP! I had S0 to S1-ish noise floors on basically every band.  For a moment I thought something was broken.  I was able to hear things I never knew where there before. It was exciting, I was on the air every evening spinning the dial and making contacts.  Over the next few months I slowly get all my stuff unpacked and installed in the new house.  I was also operating nearly every night.  It wasn't long before one night I suddenly noticed a loud S3 hash happening every 60 khz or so.  I went and unplugged everything I had plugged in that day and eventually found a noisy wall wart.  I started looking. I found noise sources all over the house.  I'm still finding them. I need to do another round of "turn off the whole house at the breaker box and turn them back on one by one."  Noise is the enemy.

Other than being on the air I have obviously become much more involved in the club.  Starting last year as the Veep and continuing this year as Prez, I have found the club involvement very rewarding.  As Veep and Prez we're involved in everything by default.  Yes it's a lot of work sometimes but mostly it's just a lot of like-minded people working toward a common goal.  whether that goal is teaching a class, managing comms during an eclipse, or running a weekly net, it's basically all just about people.  I alluded to this in last issue's Letter from the President.  At it's core, ham radio is about communicating with other people.  Sometimes that's just a RR73 over FT8, sometimes it's a dit-dit over CW, sometimes is hours in a conference room teaching slides, but it's always about transferring information from one person to another.

So here we are at the end of this (unexpectedly long) article.  I think I'm a pretty good operator, certainly I still have a ton to learn and I wish I could get on the air much more often than I do, but I think I can finally answer the question.  

If I had to start over from scratch in this hobby, what would I do different?

Step 1: First and foremost, I would start day one by asking questions.  I would want to see what ham radio was about.  I would want to see what a "Good" station looked and sounded like, I would want to see and hear what a "Bad" station sounded like.  In short I would seek out knowledge early and often.  There are so many options out there it is extremely difficult to a) come up with a set of equipment to call your stations, and b) to know that your choice is working correctly and you're not suffering horrible interference issues.  When I started I had no idea what "Good" looked like.

Step 2: I would start with simple equipment and work my way up.  This is mostly focused at HF.  Dual band FM mobile rigs and handhelds are fairly easy to know if they are functioning well.  they either hit the repeater or not in most cases.  With HF this is certainly not the case.  As I was beginning I was never able to find the shallow-end of the HF privileges.  There wasn't an apparent way to ease into HF.  Now looking back I would take it in steps with simple equipment.  I would buy ANY of the mainline big 3 HF rigs out there.  IC7300? yep.  FT-710AESS? Yep.  TS-590SG?   sure!  Any modern transciever is not likely to be the worst part of your ham radio station for quite a long time if ever.  More likely the worst part will be your antenna and feedline. i.e. the difference between the best and worst modern HF rig is many orders of magnitude less than the difference between the best and worst antennas and feedlines.  If I was starting over today I would confidently walk into Ham Radio Outlet and say "Give me THAT one" and point at any name brand HF rig.  Then I would buy decent coax and an Alpha Delta-C Antenna Hardware Kit.  Then I would drive to Home Depot and buy a few hundred foot roll of good ol' cheap lamp "zip" cord wire.

Step 3: I would go home and cut 17 1/2 feet of said Zip cord and build myself a 20 meter 1/4 wave dipole.  I would try to get SWR reasonable, but not stress out over it too much.  I would put it up in the air as high as I could either in flat top or inverted vee.  Then I would put down my tools and make myself some coffee for the next steps.

Step 4: I would completely turn off the power to my house at the circuit panel.  Flip the big switch up top.  Then powering my HF rig with battery I would scan 20 meters.  make note of how it sounds (My noise floor from my neighborhood)  Turn the house back on 1 breaker at a time and sweep the band again.  Note any changes and GO FIND THE SOURCE!  Unplug things one by one until the noise stops.  Keep going until all the breakers are back on (My noise floor from my house and contents). Get the HF rig connected to your AC power supply and computer and other gadgets and sweep again. (My noise floor when all hooked up). Find any noise and locate it's source again

Step 5: Get a pen and paper handy, Grab the mic and start making radio waves!  Have fun, get flustered, etc.  All the while scribble down anything you don't know.  Don't know how to answer a CQ? write it down.  Heard someone say QSY up 5? write it down.  Hear a weird sound on 14.230? write it down.

Step 6: Find your Elmer and repeat step 1

The point of all this is to simplify your station and get on the air with a known good station.  Dipole antenna's are easy to build, efficient, quiet, and sort of un-screw-up-able.  You'll know your system is reasonably quiet and well setup right from the start.  You'll have a list of questions to start researching, and 20 meters is a good all-round band.  If 20 meters doesn't do it for you then just build a 40 meter dipole in Step 3.  It doesn't really matter which band you're on, it matters more that you have just learned what "good" sounds like.  You have a baseline with with you can start making reasonable comparisons as to what does and doesn't work.  You've learned a valuable noise finding technique.  And almost as important, you have a small productive band to learn in.  You can spend months operating only in 20 or 40 meters without ever doing it all.  Spend the time to learn what works first before wandering all the bands wondering why your do-everything antenna isn't pulling in that rare DX on 15 meters in the middle of the night (been there, done that).  If you see or hear something that doesn't make sense, WRITE IT DOWN!  Take note of what works, what doesn't etc.  When you find yourself getting bored, grab that leftover zip cord and hack off another dipole for a new band.

Bonus Step:  If I could grab young Kenny again and tell him something I would say "Buy Bitcoin".  After that I would tell him to get involved in the club leadership.  Any position.  Field day planner, Secretary, Teaching class, whatever.  This hobby survives on human interaction, give it some of your time and it will reward you.

Anyway, this got a longer than I expected.  Go get on the Air!
73
Ken
AC0TG