What is Ham Radio?
Ham Radio, or Amateur Radio is a Federally Licensed Radio Service. Our purpose is to provide emergency communications when needed and until then we practice and talk all over the world to make sure our equipment is in tip top shape. And we practice in many different ways, on many different frequencies and have a blast doing it, It is not CB radio, most Hams take offense when we're referred to as CB 'ers. We do similar things, we just do them legally, The power limit on the Ham Bands is 1500 watts output on most frequencies and hams are encouraged to talk to or "work" stations many thousands of miles away, sometimes we even work stations "long path" in other words the signal favors the longer route around the globe. We will see long path to Australia and New Zealand whereas we normally point our beams southwest to "Down Under", during the long path openings we have to point our antennas towards Europe to the North East to hear them the long way around, contacts over 12,500 miles *distance to the other side of the glode* are commonplace., We have bands that we can talk long distance in the day and others that do well at night. We have bands for communicating thru any of the many Amateur Radio Satellites in orbit...We have many differnent mode, AM FM SSB, CW *morse code* and RTTY, SSTV *Slow Scan Television* and many other digital mode. We make friends all over the world. Some people say the Internet has made Ham Radio obsolete, not hardly, Hams have incorporated the Internet with Radio and made it better than ever. Look in our guest book and you will see the many places we have communicated with here in Richmond County on VHF with our Echolink node connected to the Internet via DSL. Look at the pictures our friends have sent us from all over the globe on the Echolink Page, All that is only one small part of a huge hobby that has and has had, some pretty famous fans. Joe Walsh, Walter Cronkite, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Ronnie Milsap, Chet Atkins, Patti Loveless, all hams. About all of the shuttle astronauts are hams, 6 of the last 7 to go up on the Shuttles' return to space were hams.
We hear the International Space Station every time it passes over our heads if we so desire....
What Ham Radio is all about is way too big a topic for us to cover here, So here are a few links that will better serve the purpose.

Amateur Radio Relay League

QRZ'ed.COM

E-Ham

Amsat

Giga Parts

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