Preppers- HAM Radio:The MOST Important Thing To Know

We are finally getting down to the nuts and the bolts in our survival communications series.  If you missed the first three parts, the links are at the end of this article.

I sat down with a half a dozen other HAM’s today to discuss the subject of what to teach people interested in both amateur radio and preparedness.  I really wanted to get some other opinions on what was the most important topic with which to start teaching other preppers.  In regards to preppers and HAM radio the consensus was that most start off with a complete misunderstanding of how the radio spectrum works.  Seeing as how achieving your communications goals as a prepper rely on a basic understanding of this topic we came to the consensus this is where to start.  Sound like a heady subject?  You won’t in a minute.

Let me first preface what I am about to say with the fact that the answers to many of the test questions are contained in this article.  If you start comparing the study guide I suggested in the first article you might start noticing some correlations.  My initial hope was to teach you how to pass the test by teaching you the whole story, let’s see how it goes.

The radio spectrum is composed of electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths.  No matter where on the spectrum it is the same thing, photon wave particles.  Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second) in a vacuum and due to relativistic laws cannot travel any faster.  Because of this law, when more energy is added the result is the wavelength gets shorter and the frequency (times it oscillates per second) increases.  Think of it this way, say you were physically pushing a car and you could push that car up to the speed limit.  Once you hit the speed limit you could no longer make the car go any faster, the more energy you applied to the car at this point would only crush it.  In a very basic way, this is what happens to electromagnetic radiation.

As electromagnetic radiation changes in wavelength its characteristics change as well.  Radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays and gamma rays are all the same thing, electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths, frequencies., and energy (all of which are mathematically related).  A great example is visible light, if you change the wavelength of visible light from 400 nanometers to 700 nanometers the light changes from blue to red.  If you add a substantial amount of energy (decreasing the wavelength and increasing the frequency) to that same blue wave of light it would become deadly gamma radiation.  If you removed a substantial amount of energy (lengthening the wavelength and decreasing the frequency) it would become a radio wave.  You might notice that a solid wall will block visible light and that visible light might reflect off a pool or a mirror, this is a characteristic of electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of 400-700 nanometers (nano=one-billionth of a meter).  In fact, in a real stretch, you might say that your eyeballs are little radios “tuned” to those frequencies (430 to 750 trillion hertz).  The light waves hit the receptors in your eye and are turned into electric signals to be processed by your brain in the biological equivalent to the way a radio operates.

Much the same way that visible light has certain characteristics so do radio waves.  Compared to visible light, radio is again the same photon but of much lower energies and much longer wavelengths.

If you haven’t already noticed, wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional.  As a rule of thumb when talking about radio waves you can take the number 300 and divide it by the frequency in megahertz to get the wavelength in meters (144MHz is 300/144= 2.083 or roughly the “2 meter” band).

In regards to amateur radio we look at three different sections or bands of electromagnetic radiation, namely high frequency radio waves, very high frequency radio waves, and ultra-high frequency radio waves.  You may have noticed the abbreviations HF, VHF, and UHF.  Much like what the eye does with visible electromagnetic radiation, a characteristic of HF, VHF, and UHF is that when they hit a conductor of electricity (copper, aluminum, etc) some of the energy is converted into electricity that can be “read” by a receiver.  This conductor is called an antenna.  This is the basic reason we use energy from these spectrums in radio.  Much like light of different wavelengths has different characteristics (blue vs. red), HF, VHF, and UHF also have different characteristics and this is where it gets interesting to both HAM’s and Preppers alike.

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