Amateur Radio, the original international wireless social media.
I suppose the first question is why is it called Ham Radio? I don’t know. I think the origin of that is really left in history. The story of ham radio is as old as radio itself. In the early 1900s, shortly after radio was ‘discovered’, experimenters all over the world started building receivers and transmitters.
Radio communications became important for many uses and the amateur radio operators were restricted to certain frequencies so they wouldn’t interfere with other commercial and emergency communications.
Within those sets of frequencies or bands, ham radio became a world-wide phenomena. Hams would make contact with each other across political and language boundaries. The use of codes allowed the exchange of names and locations and a few other limited pieces of information regardless of language barriers.
It isn’t surprising this hobby has kept pace with technology, many young hams went on to become engineers and scientists of our technology age. There are amateur radio satellites, ham radio on the International Space Station and hams operate many forms of digital communication ‘on the air’ and some use the internet to connect radio stations.
My ham radio journey started as a short wave listener at my grandparents house. They weren’t impressed by the squeals and squawks from the stations I found on that radio. It was quite a few years until I finally traveled to the FCC office and passed the test for my advanced class license. Many adventures on the air followed this.