How to get licensed, pick a first radio, make a first contact, and find your way around the bands. Written by someone who was licensed in middle school in the early 1990s and is learning it all again.
Band conditions
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Ham radio / start here
Five steps, in the order most people take them in the US. You can be through the first three in a month.
Technician is the entry license. The exam is 35 multiple-choice questions drawn from a public question pool, and 26 correct is a pass. There is no Morse code test.
Start with a dual-band handheld for 2 meters and 70 centimeters. It costs little, and it reaches the local repeaters where new operators are welcome.
A good one to start with is the AnyTone AT-D168UV. It covers both bands and handles regular FM plus DMR digital voice, so it has room to grow with you.
Your callsign appears in the FCC database a few days after the exam, and you can transmit from that moment. Listen to a repeater for a while to hear how people talk, then key up.
You: This is [your call], monitoring.
Them: [your call], this is [their call]. Good evening.
You: Good evening. I'm newly licensed and this is my first contact.
VHF is local. The shortwave (HF) bands are where signals bounce off the ionosphere and cross oceans. Technicians get a taste on 10 meters. The General license, another 35 questions, opens most of the rest.
Ham radio is many hobbies sharing one license. Try a few and see what holds your attention.
Ham radio / decoder
Hams use shorthand left over from the telegraph era. These are the terms you'll hear in your first week.
Ham radio / articles
What changed while I was away, and what didn't.
I was licensed in middle school in the early 1990s. Then life happened, the way it does, and the radio went quiet for about three decades. Coming back now feels like visiting a town I grew up in. The streets are where I left them, but most of the storefronts are new.
The Morse code test is gone. When I was first licensed, code was the gate to the shortwave bands. The FCC dropped the requirement entirely in 2007. The license ladder got shorter too: Novice and Advanced stopped being issued in 2000, leaving Technician, General, and Extra.
The radios turned into computers. Many current transceivers are software-defined, with a scrolling waterfall display that shows a whole band at once. You see signals before you hear them. And a large share of activity is now digital modes like FT8, where the software does the listening and makes contacts far below what an ear can pull out of the noise.
The price of entry dropped. A capable handheld costs less than dinner out. The exam question pools are public, and there are free apps to drill them.
The ionosphere still does what it wants. A dipole is still two pieces of wire cut to the right length. Ohm's law still holds. The 11-year solar cycle still decides whether 10 meters is wide open or dead. And there is still nothing quite like calling CQ into static and hearing a stranger answer.
That last part is what brought me back.
Flux, sunspots, K and A: what each one tells you.
Every band conditions report throws four numbers at you, and nobody explains them. Here is the short version. Two of them describe how much the sun is helping. The other two describe how much it is hurting.
The sun's ultraviolet light charges the upper atmosphere, and that charged layer is what bends shortwave signals back to earth. More charge means higher frequencies get bent back, which is what opens 15, 12, and 10 meters.
Solar flux (SFI) is the usual measure. It is radio noise from the sun at 10.7 centimeters, taken daily, and it tracks that ultraviolet output well. It runs from the mid 60s at the bottom of the solar cycle to 200 or more at the peak. The sunspot number is the older measure of the same thing, and the two rise and fall together.
Higher is better. Both change slowly, over days and weeks.
The sun also throws off bursts of charged particles. When they hit the earth's magnetic field they stir up the ionosphere, and signals get weak, fluttery, or vanish, most of all on paths near the poles.
The K index measures that disturbance over the last three hours, on a scale from 0 to 9. The A index is the same information averaged over a day, on a scale that runs from 0 to 400.
Lower is better. K changes fast, within hours.
Think of flux as the climate and K as the weather. Flux says which bands could be open this week. K says whether today is a good day to use them.
The best days have high flux and low K. And the numbers are only a forecast. The real test is to turn the radio on and listen.
The numbers in the box at the top of this page come from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, which also posts forecasts and storm alerts.
Hunting from home and activating from a picnic table.
Parks on the Air, POTA for short, is the thing that made getting back into radio stick for me. The idea is simple. Activators take a station to a park and get on the air. Hunters, wherever they are, try to contact them. It grew out of the ARRL's National Parks on the Air event in 2016 and has been running as its own program since 2017.
Hunting is the easy way in. The spotting page at pota.app shows who is on from which park, on what frequency and mode, right now. You tune there, listen, and call. Exchanges are short: callsigns, a signal report, often a state. Hunters don't submit logs. The activator uploads theirs, and the contact shows up in your account.
It gives a purpose to turning the radio on for twenty minutes. There's always someone out there, and each park has a reference number, like US-0001, so the list of places you've reached keeps growing.
Activating is the other side of the pileup. You need ten contacts from inside the park within one UTC day for it to count. That means carrying a radio, a battery, and an antenna you can put up without a tower, then finding out whether your setup works.
This is where the basics pay off. Antenna choice, feed line, battery capacity, and band conditions all matter, and you find out fast when one of them is wrong. Once you spot yourself, hunters come looking for you, which is a pleasant change from calling CQ into silence. A contact with another activator counts as park-to-park, and those are the ones I listen hardest for.
It gets the radio out of the house and gives every outing a clear goal. Ten contacts. Some days that takes fifteen minutes and some days it takes all afternoon, and both are a good day in a park.
Ham radio runs on a handful of first-semester ideas.
One thing I like about this hobby is how far the basics take you. You don't need much more than what's in the first few chapters of an electronics textbook, and you get to see it work in your own backyard.
V = I × R P = V × I
A typical transmitter puts 100 watts into a 50 ohm antenna system. Work it through and that is about 71 volts and 1.4 amps of radio-frequency current on the coax. Those two numbers tell you what your wire, connectors, and fingers have to tolerate.
wavelength (m) = 300 ÷ frequency (MHz)
This is why bands are named the way they are. 14.2 MHz comes out near 21 meters, so it's the 20 meter band. It also sets the size of everything: a half-wave antenna for 40 meters is about 66 feet of wire, and for 2 meters it's about 3 feet.
f = 1 ÷ (2π √(L × C))
An inductor and a capacitor together pick out one frequency. That single idea is the tuning dial, the filter that separates one station from its neighbor, and the antenna itself, which is a tuned circuit stretched out into a line.
Power moves best when the antenna looks like the 50 ohms the radio expects. SWR measures the mismatch. At 2:1, about 11 percent of the power reflects back down the line. Most of the fiddling hams do with antennas is an attempt to get that number closer to 1:1.
That's most of it. Four ideas, and you can understand nearly everything on the bench.
Why an old hobby feels good right now.
Most of the technology I use every day is opaque. It lives in a data center somewhere, it changes without telling me, and I couldn't explain how it works beyond a hand wave. More and more of it is AI, which is impressive and even further from anything I can take apart.
Radio is the opposite. A transmitter, a length of wire, and a power source make a complete system. There is no account to sign into and no service that can be discontinued. Every part of the path between my antenna and someone else's is physics I can reason about: current in a wire, a wave leaving it, a layer of charged gas sixty-odd miles up bending it back to the ground.
When something doesn't work, I can find out why with a meter. When it does work, I know what I did.
I'm not against the new stuff. Modern radios are full of software, and digital modes are some of the most interesting things on the bands. But the foundation underneath is the same one I learned as a kid, and it's small enough to hold in your head. That's rare now, and I've missed it.
Ham radio / field guide
The amateur bands run from below the AM broadcast dial's upper neighbor up into microwaves, and each one behaves differently. Pick a band, in order of frequency. Edges shown are the US allocations, and each band lists what Technician, General, and Extra licensees can use there. For the common operating frequencies within each band, see the ARRL band plan.
Who can transmit here
Frequencies in MHz. Phone means voice. Data includes FT8 and other digital modes. US rules, from FCC Part 97.
Ham radio / notes
Getting licensed
In the US you get on the air by passing a multiple-choice exam given by volunteer examiners. There are three license classes, and each one opens more spectrum. The Morse code requirement was dropped in 2007.
Digital modes
FT8 trades conversation for reach. Stations take turns in fixed 15-second slots, sending a short structured message on eight tones in about 50 Hz of bandwidth. Software can decode signals well below what your ear can hear, so a modest station with a wire antenna works the world.
The display in the header imitates what an FT8 segment looks like on a waterfall: narrow traces switching on and off every slot.
Antennas
A 100-watt transceiver into a poor antenna loses to 10 watts into a good one. The half-wave dipole is the usual first build: two equal wires fed in the middle with coax, hung as high and as clear as you can manage.
Height counts. Below about a quarter wavelength, a horizontal dipole sends most of its signal straight up, which is good for regional contacts and poor for distance.
Ham radio / tool
So you bought your first 10 or 20 meter radio. You don't need a tower or an expensive antenna to use it. You need some wire and a length of coax.
I made my first SSB contact on 10 meters, from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, about 2,300 miles, on a $20 antenna I built from random parts and hung in the trees.
In the shack
The radios and software behind N4EED, at home and out in the field.
Radios
Home radio
The base station. One radio covers HF through 70 centimeters in every mode, with a built-in antenna tuner, so it handles everything from FT8 on 20 meters to the local repeaters.
POTA and portable
The radio that goes to the parks. HF through 70 centimeters in a body small enough for a backpack, with its own battery, a color touchscreen with a band scope, and USB-C for running FT8 straight from a laptop.
Software
Digital modes
Free, open-source software from Joe Taylor, K1JT, and the WSJT team for sending and decoding very weak signals. This is where FT8 happens, and it's what sends the reception reports you see on the FT8 map.
Logbook
Logging and radio control for the Mac. It filters DX cluster spots, works with over a hundred radios, and keeps the log in sync with LoTW, QRZ, Club Log and eQSL. Connected to WSJT-X, every station the radio decodes shows up as a spot on its map, marked by whether I've worked it, and finished contacts go straight into the log.