Amateur Radio Meets Hi-Tech

Amateur radio, also known as 'Ham Radio,' is still around and going strong even though it has taken a hit to its numbers in recent years from modern technologies like cellular phones and the Internet.

The latest number from 2005 showed the total number of people in the U.S.A. holding an amateur radio license was at 664,040. When compared to the 2000 number of 674,792 it shows a loss of a little over 10,000 licensed amateur operators in the last five
years.

While that number is significant that still leaves well over one half million licensed operators still around today in the United States with many more in other countries around the world.

The radio hobby is also growing in some new high tech directions of it's own in an attempt to attract back some of those people that it's lost over the last few years.

While there have been digital modes around for many years recently they have become both easier and more reliable to use.

There are several ham radio operating modes used where you can use your computer hooked up to your radio. These digital modes use a computer hooked up to a ham radio usually through an interface device called a TNC.

The letters TNC stands for Terminal Node Controller. It's just a fancier way of saying radio to computer interface.

One of the faster growing digital modes is called EchoLink. Basically it uses the Internet to connect radios together from all around the world.

You load the EchoLink software onto your computer and hook your radio up to the computer through an interface device like I mentioned earlier and you're a EchoLink station.

Then people can go to the EchoLink website and find your station's node number and can connect to you, it's that simple.

What's also nice about EchoLink is that if you just want to talk with other hams you don't even need a radio. If you have the software loaded on to your computer and have a working computer microphone and speakers that's all you need to use EchoLink.

You just start up the EchoLink program on your computer and find the person or area of the world that you're interested in talking to and connect up to them with your computer through your Internet connection.

You must hold a valid amateur radio license to use the EchoLink system though. Before you can use the system you must send your license information to the owner of EchoLink and they must activate your license call sign into the EchoLink system before you can talk with others.

This is just one of the newer ham radio digital modes out there. There are also many other modes that are called exotic.

One of them is EME(Earth-Moon-Earth), with this mode you use the moon to bounce your radio signals off of it to talk with other hams from around the world.

There are also many ham radio satellites floating around in space that you can use to communicate with other hams.

Depending on what astronauts are on the space station you can even talk to them through ham radio. Lately at least one of the astronauts on the space station have been a licensed ham operator.

There are too many other modes of operation to go into all of them here but you can see that ham radio today is a lot more then just radio-to-radio type communication.