Amateur Radio Station W4EKQ
This where it all happens so to speak. You
talk into a microphone, it goes into a little black box full of
all kinds of electronic parts, then it goes into a big black box
(sometimes) full of the same stuff, then into a special kind of
wire that goes out the window. From there it goes to the
conglomeration of tubes, wires and angles in the picture below.
There will be a slight pause while we seek inspiration.
There are more kinds of antennas than there are Campbell's soups. Beams, verticals, quads, dipoles, long wire, V's, rhombics and so on. This antenna is called a quad. There are wires stretched around the tips of the two "X's" you see to form quadrangles -abbreviated to quad. The loop that the special wire coming from my window is attached to is called a "driven element". The other loop is called a director if it is slightly smaller or a reflector if it is slightly larger. Takes a bit of doing to get one of these things just right. The overall length of each loop is pretty critical, as is the spacing between the loops. So much for the high tech stuff.
Well, now it is up again. That big bulb just below the boom is called a rotator and it lets me point the quad in asny direction I choose. Once it is pointed where I want I can just listen or try to talk to someone who might be calling "CQ". "CQ" is a sort of a general call, and translated it means "Hey, anybody out there wanna chat?". If I decide I want to talk to him, I talk into my mike, it goes through the black boxes, into the special wire, then up to the driven element. From there it squirts out into the atmosphere in a big lobe. Amateur signals don't go just straight where you point them - they all go up at some angle, the amount of the angle determined by the kind of antenna you are using. They keep going up until they hit the ionosphere, referred to as the "Heaviside Layer", bounce down to earth then back up again, back down again and so on, ad infinitum. If the person I want to talk to is in the area of one of the earth bounces then chances are we can communicate if my signal is still strong enough. Each bounce takes a little out of it. And of course all of this is affected by the magnetic disturbances on the sun. Strong magnetic storms - nobody talks to nobody. And then there are days when you can talk to almost anybody almost anywhere. That's what makes amateur radio interesting. I get a lot pleasure talking to Australia, New Zealand, the Isle of Man, Reunion Island (Look THAT one up on the map!) and dozens of other fascinating places. I've made a lot of friends and some of them I have even had the pleasure of visiting. You'll see when the Australia-New Zealand photo album gets done.
OK, this ends my little dissertation on amateur radio. Hope you found it interesting.
e-mail me at
| This
page has been visited |