845 Life: Newburgh teen is a real pro with amateur radio
Natural disasters such as hurricanes and storms can cause flooding and disable systems: But they don’t affect amateur radio. “After Hurricane Sandy, our system was activated to help communicate emergencies throughout the region,” says Sean Flynn, 17, of the Town of Newburgh. “We were relaying messages between organizations or taking information from the field and passing it along to emergency services.” “Even cellphone systems rely on towers, switchboards and relays to work,” says Sean. “When those go down, cellphones stop working.”
Ham radio integral part of NCIS episode
When McGee and Torres check out Miller’s apartment, they discover an elaborate ham radio set-up. This delights McGee because he was a total ham radio head as a kid. “When I was a kid, my dad used to sneak me into the cockfights,” Torres offers.
Stephen Trimble says
Amateur Radio will never die. Somebody will always be looking at it. Myself for example, I had a neighbor in Tucson who was an amateur. He started showing me around. Then we moved to Kansas City. I had a high school buddy who was an amateur. Worked with him until I got my Draft Notice. Well, when I got out of the service, I moved to Texas. Got back into it got my Novice ticket. Well I quite again, work and all. Last year I got back in received my Tech. &Gen. ticket. in Dec. I will test for my Extra Class ticket. This has been a 51 yr. journey. I don’t regret one minute of it. I’m sure that there are others like me.
Dave New, N8SBE says
The ARRL sent out a missive to watch NCIS for the amateur radio content, so I sat down with the XYL to see how they did. Score: C-.
On the plus side, they seemed to have visited a local hamfest flea market and came back with some interesting late-model rigs, and some boat-anchors. A nice mix. Then, they covered up the rig names with black tape and in some cases made up ‘interesting’ names.
They actually had some of the radios turned on, but in all cases where it looked like they were transmitting, the radio was clearly out of band for the mode (voice) they were using. I think in one case, they were in the bottom of the 30 meter band (which is CW, RTTY, and data only), supposedly using voice.
And yes, as it was pointed out in the Entertainment link above by a ham commentor, they did talk into the back of a microphone at one point.
The log was full of made-up callsigns, but as it was pointed out, none of them were likely realistic, since they mostly contained double-digit numbers (although there are some of those in the world, none of the ones in the log matched those locations).
At one point, it was explained that the antenna they were using was ‘good for 80 miles’, (a pet peeve of mine — antennas don’t have any range associated with them, the SYSTEM does, which includes the antenna, feed-line, and radio, including transmit power and receive sensitivity, much less the band in use and time of day/date/season/sunspot cycle, etc. etc.) so when they searched the FCC database for ham operators, they were able to put together a Google map mashup with markers for just over 200 hundred hams in that 80 mile circle.
The thing that really got my goat was the use of CB-like handles, like Ricochet, Jaybird, etc. This might be excusable (especially if there was no ham involved in the scripting), because hams tend to ask hams on the air, “What’s your handle”, when hams know what they really mean is “What’s your name?”. The usage of handle has fallen out of favor on the local repeaters in my area, I think mainly due to the influx of new Technician class hams that haven’t picked up the “old geezers” lingo from the HF phone bands. Of course, it was never popular on CW, if for no other reason than “name” is shorter to send than “handle”.
And yes, they did portray hams as maladjusted, anti-social, loner wierdos. I think we deserve better.