Fiction Writer w/Questions re: HAM / Amateur Radio

• The protagonist, Peter, is located in Wilmington, North Carolina. He's calling Walpole, Massachusetts. Would that distance be any especially long distance, requiring any extra license or anything special?
  
  Well, you have several bases to cover here. During the daytime, Peter might use 40 meters, or maybe 30, 20, or 17 meters, depending on whether he's using Morse Code, which hams call "CW", or voice transmission. Thirty meters is limited to Morse Code, but 40, 20, and 17 may also be used for voice. At night, Peter might get through on 80 meters if he has a powerful transmitter, although that's more likely in the winter. It all depends on the time of day, the season, the kind of radio Peter has, and how busy the bands are. If he has a powerful transmitter, possibly with an amplifier, and thus has what some hams call "Strap" or "Scroat" (yes, it means what you think it does), Peter will be able to burn his own path into the ionosphere by running "QRO". If not, he'll experience fading, which a ham would call "QSB", noise, a.k.a. "QRN", and/or interference, or "QRM". (See Amateur Radio "Q" Signals for a list of the "Q" signals: they were created to shorten transmissions sent via Morse Code, but have become a universal shorthand for voice calls as well.) Peter would need a "General" or "Extra" class license to use these bands.
  
  Peter has another option, and it's available even if he has the Technician class of license, which isn't allowed to use voice modes on most of the frequencies below 28 MHz: he could make a call from North Carolina to Massachusetts by using a VHF or UHF transceiver, and sending Touch-Tone control signals to his local Ham repeater to ask it to "link" to another repeater in Massachusetts via the Internet. The linking protocols are either "iRLP" or "Echolink", and there's plenty of information on both at Google. As a writer, you may be interested in knowing that Echolink can be accessed both via ham transceiver, or directly from the Internet, so he wouldn't even need a radio if he had a laptop, a WiFi Access Point nearby, and an Echolink ID. However, iRLP connections are strictly repeater-to-repeater, so Peter would have to have a walkie-talkie or other VHF/UHF ham rig to use two iRLP-connected repeaters.
  
  
• Peter lives on a trawler that has a mast. If you were him, where would you put the antenna for the radio? On the mast or on top of the wheelhouse? (I'm envisioning a lot of blowing around if it was on top of the mast; maybe I'm wrong.) Roughly, what size would the antenna be? I don't need specs, only approximations. I'm seeing on the Internet antennas that look like TV antennas – that would be noticeable on top of a boat, so it must be described during the overall description of the exterior of the boat.
  
  There's a judgement call you'll have to make here: although it's possible to mount a "beam" antenna on a boat's mast and get more distant stations by using it, you risk being accused of a deus-ex-machina, since the antenna would be big and bulky, and would be a literal hazard to the boat during ice storms or when it was rolling badly. Although your readers might stay involved if you write some explanation of why Peter would put so unconventional an antenna on the top of his mast, I'd recommend that you stick with the tried-and-true wire antennas ships have used for almost a century now. If Peter loves the boat, he wouldn't want it to be thought of as a "dock derelict" or "party boat" which couldn't set to sea.
  
  
• The callsigns I use are expired and inactive, according to the directories. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the one I've chosen for him, so I'll write it like this W3*RF, removing the middle digit. It's a vanity callsign, from my understanding in my research.
  
  If you don't mind using a call that might be assigned in the future, you can use any combination of (A|K|N|W)-4-(A-Z)(A-Z)[(A-Z)]. Since Peter is relatively young and new to ham radio, he's likely to have a "2-by-3" call, such as "WB4ATR", since call signs issued in North Carolina use the number "4" to indicate the FCC Radio Inspection District where the call was originally issued. See Amateur radio licensing in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for more information about callsigns: certain combinations are rarely issued, and the FCC's press office might even set one aside for you, e.g., "NK4ZRF". Some hams might grimace when they read it, but you won't be duplicating a valid call.
  
  
• To make a general call, it would be: “This is W3*RF, anyone using this frequency?”, “CQ CQ CQ this is W3*RF, is this frequency clear?” Or “Calling CQ CQ CQ.” Things like that?
  
  That depends on the band. On the bands from 40 to 10 meters, Peter would probably call "Is this frequency in use, please?" before he calls CQ, since there might be a "QSO", or existing conversation already in progress, where radio propagation was preventing Peter from hearing the station which was transmitting at that time, and if that was the case, he'd probably receive a short reply, such as "Please QSY", which means "Please move to another frequency". If there was no answer to Peter's courtesy call, he could use any of the formats you wrote.
  
  However, if Peter was using VHF or UHF, he'd be able to hear someone who was already "in QSO", and would then wait for one of the hams to turn it over to the other(s) on the channel, at which point Peter would probably say "Call, please" or something similar. The word "break" is sometimes regarded as an announcement of a non-emergency, but still serious, call - and "break, break, break" is almost always regarded as an emergency.
  
  Hams rarely use "Mayday" for emergencies, since when a ham is "passing traffic" for a third party, the sender, and not the ham, determines if the message deserves "Emergency" precedence, and hams are leery of being cited for using the distress prosign when a message someone else wrote turns out to be less-serious-than-the-sender-thought. No matter what, a ham who uses the "Mayday" or other prosigns such as Pan-pan or Sécurité, must file a written report with the FCC, and experienced traffic handlers don't want to be bothered. Although Peter would most likely not be using a formal message sent via the National Traffic System, anyone who has taken a ham test will know that "Mayday" and it's lesser-priority cousins are only for very serious events, and Peter, like other hams, would probably use the code words he would be used to.
  
• What do you say when making a call to a specific contact? Do you tune to a certain frequency? Generally, how does that process work?
  
  The same way a CB transceiver does: if your friend usually monitors channel 3, then you would turn your CB set to channel three and call him. If Peter is trying to reach another ham, he would probably know if his buddy monitors a directed net such as ECARS, and Peter would tune to the ECARS frequency (7255 KHz), and ask the "Net Control" station for permission to call his friend, or if his buddy is likely to be in a "roundtable" with other hams on 7290 Kilohertz, then Peter would simply tune his ham radio equipment 7290 KHz, and reach his friend there.
  
• I have a scene in which a stranger makes a general broadcast to warn listeners of what's happening in his rural area. How would the stranger start off his call? He wouldn't say “Calling CQ” for such a thing, would he?
  
  Strictly speaking, he wouldn't, since (as others pointed out), broadcasting isn't allowed on ham radio. However, Peter might be part of a disaster-response network being run by the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES), the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES), or the Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS), and he would be expected to deliver situation reports to others on those networks. Even if he wasn't, he would be able to listen to ARES nets (or to RACES nets, if the President had invoked the War Powers Act), on various ham bands, and MARS nets, which are usually on frequencies very close to the ham bands.
  
  Peter could also send a formal message to anyone he chose, with the details he was trying to get out, and everyone whom was part of the "Traffic" net that Peter used to send the message would hear its content.
  
• Cursing is a big no-no, right? Is there any FCC regulations on cursing – fines if you go beyond the "crap" level maybe?
  
  Yes, in theory, but the rule is more honored in the breech than the observance. I've heard every one of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" on ham radio, thankfully at intervals of several years between each one. In any case, if there's an actual emergency going on, I doubt the FCC would bother to chase him. Peter might do it, in a moment of exasperation, but he would apologize later.
  
• What do you say to make an emergency call?
  
  As I noted above, it would depend on the band, and if Peter was trying to join a directed net to pass formal traffic. Most directed nets will have a separate "call up" for stations with emergency traffic, and then will accept "check ins" from stations with ordinary or no traffic.
  
• How do you know when the other person has stopped talking? You don't say "over" and things like that, right?
  
  Here's another judgement call for you as an author. Although many hams still say "over" (or "out" at the end of a QSO, although "over and out" is a major gaffe), the current practice in the Incident Management System is to use "plain language" for all radio transmissions. This will bite you no matter what you choose: a ham would know that "over" would be expected on the "low bands" (160 - 10 meters), since voice transmissions use Single-Sideband (SSB) on those frequencies, and there's no easy way to tell if someone has stopped speaking on SSB, unless he says "over". However, it's not needed on VHF or UHF, since the "squelch tail" that listeners hear when a transmission stops is adequate for signalling that the transmission is over when using the "FM" mode on VHF/UHF channels - which is probably why those procedural signals aren't used in Incident Response systems, which almost always use VHF/UHF frequencies. In some specialized cases, such as space-to-earth communications, the transmitters are set to send a "roger beep" at the time a user releases the push-to-talk button, but that's considered gauche on ham radio, since many CB stations employ them.
  
  Can more than one person speak at a time, like a conference call on a phone?
  
  Usually, no, since almost all Amateur radio conversations are done in "half duplex" mode, where the station that is speaking (transmitting) can't hear any other station until the operator goes back to "receive" mode. This is done to reduce the costs of the equipment - most transceivers share circuits between transmit and receive modes - and to make it easier to change frequencies quickly.
  
  However, it is possible with special equipment: since Peter is on a boat, he's likely to know how to use his shipboard radio to make phone calls via the Marine Operator while at sea, and if his shipboard transceiver has the extra equipment needed, he'd be able to carry on a "full duplex" conversation, where each party could interrupt the other at any time, just like the full-duplex modes cell phones use.
  
  Now, some verisimilitude if you need it: FCC rules require that an Amateur station onboard ship must use equipment separate from the Marine-band radios used for distress calls or other ship's business, but frankly, many boat owners wink at the restriction, and use high-end Maritime radios for ham radio: the Icom M802 Maritime transceiver specification sheet even lists "Ham band TX and RX" as a feature.

Glad to help.

William Warren

 

Dang William ... that was an awesome post. I learned something reading it.

 

Glad to hear it!

I've reached the age when I'm starting to realize that I really do know a lot about some things, and ham radio is one of them: I've always been the "Engineer" in that joke about the golf course, and I like to think of other ways to get-it-done, even if the OP is writing fiction.

William Warren

 

It just occurred to me that you might benefit from seeing hams operate during the annual Amateur Radio disaster-preparedness exercise, known as "Field Day". There's lots of information at the link, and if you talk to the officers of a club which is planning for Field Day, they'll probably let you "imbed" with the team, so that you can observe first hand the mistakes, missteps, unexpected events, failed equipment, defective power cords, food-borne illnesses, bent antennas, collapsed towers, huge egos, and tiny power levels that always happen when a group of guys try to get away from their wives so they can play with radios and drink lots of beer.

William Warren

 

as a not-yet-experienced ham, and a fan of fiction, I was thinking "wire antenna" myself at the start of this thread. Not something you'd recognize as an antenna, it would appear as just more of the existing rigging running from various elevations on the mast, down to the deck at front, back and sides.
If your scenario has him able to utilize nearby land-based equipment to connect through the internet or phone system, you'd use short-range VHF or UHF which would go through a smallish antenna mounted high on the mast. A whip, for example.
To go direct to his friend, would be HF (high frequency), known to non-hams as shortwave. Both names refer to the same portion of the radio spectrum from around 500kHz to 50MHz.
That's a lot of bandwidth. Which band you'd choose depends on a lot of things, but certainly somewhere between 80m and 10m would get the job done. The optimum wire antenna for a given band will be half the wavelength, so for 80 meters, you'd use a 40 meter long antenna if that was your only band. Of course in a car or on a boat, you are limited by the size of the vehicle, so you have to use shorter wire and a tuner to allow it to be used on frequencies for which it is not 'resonant'. I would think any of these bands should be available in this way, just like in a car with a CB whip. Not ideal, but workable. During times of many sunspots, the shorter bands go farther.

Let's see if this works:


There, that may not update but it's a banner that shows current solar activity, and the band conditions that result. Got it from HF Propagation and Solar-Terrestrial Data Website

 

That was a really great post. I too learned something. Thanks william