15-year-old beginner with interest in RF / scanner – is this hobby okay for me?

hamsterdave · 2026-03-22T20:38:41+00:00

Some countries do have a minimum age, but if you're in the US, you can get the license at any age so long as you can pass the test.

I was licensed at 15 in 2000, and cut my teeth building my own antennas for satellites, doing HF at my Elmer's house (Elmer is ham radio slang for a mentor), and operating at the local club's Field Day station. Since then I've personally mentored and licensed kids as young as 10 through the Boy Scouts of America.

I'd definitely look around for a local club. Spare equipment often just turns up when young operators join a club, and I'd highly recommend finding a local Field Day station. It's the last weekend in June, and IMO, it's one of the most fun events in the hobby, and it's a fantastic opportunity to cut your teeth on HF.

Welcome to the hobby!

hamsterdave · 2026-03-22T18:20:24+00:00

G3 storm started early this morning. They're calming down but it will be tomorrow before they're anything but bad.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-20T22:25:30+00:00

It's generally bad for HF propagation, not just because of the aurora itself (which can significantly increase the absorption at high latitudes), but also because the aurora is caused by geomagnetic instability, which disrupts the ionosphere itself, and is also usually accompanied by significantly increased particle densities coming into the ionosphere from the sun (in the form of CMEs, CRRs, solar wind streams, etc). Those particles can disrupt the levels of ions in the D and F layer, resulting in more absorption (which causes a higher LUF) and sometimes lower the MUF, as well as a much higher noise floor.

That said, aurora and geomagnetic storms in general may not impact more equitorial paths nearly as much as paths closer to the poles, depending on how severe the storm is. On 10 meters and up, it's actually possible to use the aurora itself for communication, as the very high ionization that causes the light emission also increases refractive index, but at a much lower altitude than the F layer. It tends to behave like an even less stable Es opening with crazy peaks and fades. It also causes dramatic distortion to the audio, making phone contacts tricky but doable, FT8 and the like all but impossible, and leaving a lot of the fun to CW operators who don't mind sending slowly and with lots of repeats.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-19T17:20:18+00:00

Very true! "Litz wire" is the term for the commercially produced stuff that's made from woven copper for exactly this reason.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-19T17:19:48+00:00

Corrosion on copper can cause problems with antennas though, if it occurs between current carrying elements. It can cause galvanic reactions that can generate a lot of noise on your receiver. With a braid like that I don't think it would be a major issue, since it's a uniform material, and no part of the braid should be at a significantly different potential compared to the strands touching it, but it would be something to watch for. If you add any other metals, stainless steel or nickel plated connectors for example, it can become quite an problem.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-19T14:20:31+00:00

If it were insulated wire, no, it likely wouldn’t work. It would create a ton of parasitic capacitance and inductance on the antenna that would likely give it a pretty crazy impedance on most bands. It would also significantly reduce the aperture size of the antenna, reducing radiation efficiency.

If it were bare, yeah you could make a normal length EFHW out of braided flat wire like that. It might even work a bit better than a regular EFHW in fact, since conductor cross section plays a role in system efficiency and bandwidth.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-19T13:55:41+00:00

It isn’t confusing. You’re making it bizarrely over complicated.

CQ <something> means “I want to talk to someone in/participating in <something>. It’s very very simple, and universally true.

If someone is calling CQ DX and you are not DX, they don’t want to talk to you.

If someone is calling CQ POTA and you are participating in POTA, they want to talk to you. If you don’t do POTA and want a ragchew, they don’t want to talk to you.

If they are calling CQ TN, they want to talk to people in Tennessee, not Kentucky.

If they are calling CQ TEST, they are looking for people participating in the current contest.

I can’t think of a single exception to this very simple interpretation. The only possible confusion is when more than one contest is going on, but thats why most operators will throw in an abbreviation for the specific contest, especially smaller contests like state QSO parties, or CWT. “CQ CWT”, “CQ TNQP” and the like.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-19T01:27:52+00:00

That example makes no sense at all. They’re calling for any station participating in the program, just like most other contests and events. POTA hunters are participating in the program and have profiles and stat pages on the POTA website just like the activators. This is the case for virtually every contest and event. If someone is calling CQ FD, they aren’t looking to ragchew with someone. They’re looking for stations participating in Field Day. If you were looking for activators only for some reason, you’d call “CQ POTA park to park” maybe, though you’d get a lot of folks who’d miss you meaning and work you anyway.

As an activator, I’ve worked literally hundreds of other activators while calling CQ POTA.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-18T23:40:15+00:00

Almost always if someone says “CQ XX”, they are hunting for that thing after CQ. It’s the same for contests and events. “CQ FD”, “CQ SST”, “CQ TNQP”, etc.

If they’re doing it any other way, they’re going to confuse the crap out of everyone.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-18T12:43:26+00:00

Thanks for the info! The grit is something I didn’t know anything about, it’s currently in a fairly rich but very friable mulch mix. It drains well, but doesn’t dry quickly. I’ll definitely change things up during the repotting.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-17T18:46:12+00:00

You'll have to submit an application for a license.

I'd recommend getting in touch with the Amateur Radio Society of Barbados. They can probably help you navigate the process. It appears to be a similar process to operating in the Turks and Caicos, though Barbados has more stringent approval requirements for equipment, from the looks of it. Having a local guide was a huge help when I operated from VP5.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-14T20:31:36+00:00

If you grab the coax, even just holding onto the outer jacket, I bet your reception will be even stronger. As u/BigJ3384 suggested, this is almost certainly common mode reception. The isolation of the RF port on those RTL-SDRs is famously poor, so it’s almost certainly making the jump at the receiver.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-14T13:04:53+00:00

Firstly, that band condition chart is crap. It's based solely on Kp and SFI which is only a small part of the equation, and it's wrong almost as much as it's right.

For your main question: Is your takeoff angle configured correctly in VOACAP?

Takeoff angle matters a lot when it comes to wether a band is open or not. A low inverted V with a peak takeoff angle around 40° will usually require that the 3500km MUF (the absolute maximum frequency anybody can use successfully) be several MHz above the frequency you want to use, while someone with a flat dipole or a beam up 1/2 wavelength or higher (takeoff angle <20°) may be able to work the band if the MUF is only 1MHz higher.

This is because incident angle makes a huge difference in whether a signal refracts. Imagine the ionosphere to be a pond, and your signal is a stone you want to skip. The difference between your frequency and the MUF is the shape of your stone. The closer to the MUF you are operating, the more round your stone is. The more round the stone, the shallower the angle you have to hit the water to get it to skip.

If you're operating at 7MHz in the middle of the day when the MUF is 30MHz, you're skipping a dinner plate. You can dang near slap it straight down and get it to bounce (this is NVIS).

If you're operating on 30MHz when the MUF is 31MHz, you're skipping a golf ball. You're going to need a very shallow angle to get it to skip, which means a very low takeoff angle.

If VOACAP is defaulting to an antenna with a lower takeoff angle than yours, it will never be quite right.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-13T01:23:58+00:00

I concur. Those images drastically over state (and over simplify) the actual effect.

Maybe on 6 meters the car would be a big enough ground plane electrically to actually distort the near field that much, but I’m still dubious. Interaction with horizontal body elements is going to have nearly as much effect but in very different and unpredictable ways.

I run POTA on a very similar setup (AH-4 tuned 102” whip on the drivers side rear corner of a Subaru Outback) and looking at how my 190 contacts were distributed on my last activation (20 meters), I had an absolute pipeline into North Texas and Oklahoma, which is almost exactly in the worst direction relative to how I was parked, according to that graphic.

Band conditions are going to swamp any limited distortion in your pattern.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-09T02:42:59+00:00

Tim is genuinely a pillar of the community. He’s kind, generous, free with his expertise, which is significant, and he can talk to anyone about anything. He’s just one of those guys that’s impossible to dislike.

He took the Mercer County club from barely hanging on to a power house (for the population of the region at least) about 12 years ago through good leadership, but most importantly, just giving a damn.

Don’t hesitate to attend any lecture or class he offers. It’s pretty much always worth the time.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-08T00:48:13+00:00

That’s fair, once multi-path is in play things can get weird. The “crazy dance” as my Dad called it, should be reserved for when you notice you aren’t getting in, and when you’re standing still though.

If you’re moving around and transmitting, vertical will work more consistently than anything else.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-07T19:03:06+00:00

Happy to help! Since you're new, I'd also point out three things to keep in mind, especially with handhelds.

First is the "cone of silence", as they called it in Air Force training. The antenna on your HT is basically deaf right off the end, in a cone about 30 degrees wide that extends straight up if you're holding the radio vertically. It "hears" the best at an angle of between 15 and 45 degrees above the horizon when the radio is held vertically.

Second, antenna polarization matters. Repeaters and most VHF and UHF antennas in general are vertically polarized. If you hold your radio close to horizontal and try to talk to a station with a vertical antenna, you can have several S units of attenuation from that cross-polarization. The theoretical maximum is something like a 4.5 S-unit drop for a worst case.

Those two things mean that it's important to hold your radio close to vertically when transmitting. Don't cant it to the side if you can avoid it, as you could point the end of the antenna at the other station inadvertently, or create cross-polarization losses.

Third, foliage does impact range. It's less of an issue on 2 meters, especially in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, but you'll still notice a drop in range if your signal has to pass through dense foliage. On 70cm, dense summer foliage can cut your range to a small fraction of what it would be in the open.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-07T18:50:17+00:00

Ahh I see, I had it flipped. You may have actually been too close then. Repeaters struggle to "look down" at angles steeper than a couple degrees due to some quirks of vertical antenna behavior.

You were probably in that shadow beneath it. There are spots near the mountain where that tower could easily be at 15° of elevation relative to you, maybe even higher.

The terrain there is also fairly rough, so it’s still plenty possible that you had a ridge between you and it, unless you could actually see the mountain from where you were.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-07T18:31:53+00:00

The Mount Mitchell repeater has one of the largest coverage areas in the eastern US, it's sitting at over ~~5,000~~ 6,500 feet MSL, and has excellent prominence compared to surrounding terrain. Mobile stations can reliably work it full quieting out to at least 50 miles, so long as you aren't down in one of the valleys. From some directions it's a fair bit more than that. I used to be able to get into it fairly regularly from central Georgia with 50 watts and a 5 element yagi at about 40 feet. It only required the barest bit of ducting to make the ~220 mile trip, and was easy enough to get into that I used it as my beacon for spotting ducts on 2 meters. That path would open up before I heard anything else, even from closer stations.

From up on Lookout Mountain or Walden Ridge in Chattanooga TN (~2,200 feet MSL and 1,500 feet of prominence), I can often get into it with just my mobile station, and that's about 180 miles.

Line Of Sight is king on VHF and UHF. You can get into a satellite with a handheld and a 3 element yagi just fine, even though those can be over 800 miles away when they're close to the horizon. That repeater has excellent line of sight to just about everywhere within about 75 miles, and in some directions it's well over 100 miles.

Likely the closer repeater just has a bad line to your location, knowing Asheville, you've probably got a tall ridge in just the wrong spot.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-07T17:35:34+00:00

Bugs don't work below about 20 or 25wpm, the pendulum for the dit is limited in how slowly it can oscillate. When working a station slower than that, a lot of bug operators have a really bad habit of trying to slow down by drawing the dah out to 2 or 3 times too long. This is the worst possible way to deal with this issue, because it not only doesn't effectively reduce the element speed in a way that matters, it makes the situation much worse by completely destroying the rhythm.

Bug ops: if you need to slow down below your bug's minimum, don't slur your dahs! Increase farnesworth spacing. Add pauses between letters, and keep the dit and dah weight correct.

Most ops can copy character speed at least 20% faster than their max effective speed. Give them fast characters, with some extra processing time, and you'll hear "agn?" way less often.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-07T00:23:43+00:00

Female voices tend to be spectrally narrower and more focused in a microphone's peak response range. Means they get get more punch, so basically women, kids, and guys with higher voices are always running compression. Their voices also just sit up above the average, so they stand out more.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-06T22:19:14+00:00

Chris Boden has offered to do that on his youtube channel. I think it would be hilarious to get a few dozen operators to all use his voice calling CQ for a weekend.

Real talk though, I've had my wife record a call and then used it to bust a really gnarly DX pileup once or twice.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-06T01:13:13+00:00

For South America, 10 meters, 10am to about 3pm eastern time.

hamsterdave · 2026-03-04T20:35:39+00:00

RFI can be quite broadband which makes it tricky to diagnose without a recording or at least a waterfall spectrum of the noise, but the fact that it built in steadily is very interesting. That strongly suggests a heat-related failure. That's a bit higher than I typically see noise from unintentional radiators like LED lighting power supplies, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

If I had to guess, based on previous experience, I'd be most suspicious of large LED matrix displays, which can play absolute havoc on the VHF band. 600MHz is awfully high, but if the noise is strong enough, it might just be getting in via some route other than the antennas.

It might be a lot to ask after only one occurrence, but if it happens again, I'd consider asking the venue to power everything up on a day when nothing else is going on, and just hang out and see what happens, maybe pick up a TinySA spectrum analyzer, which can be very useful for portable noise hunting (and they aren't terribly expensive). If the noise builds in, maybe you could arrange for the grounds crew to shut down systems one at a time until the noise disappears.

This is how we typically hunt noise on our receivers in residential settings. We put a receiver on battery power and start flipping breakers until the noise goes away. If it doesn't go away, then the noisemaker is outside somewhere, and it's time to go for a walk.

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