Getting Acquainted with the Amateur Service
By international treaty, amateur radio in every country is a licensed service — that is, a government agency has to grant a license for a ham to transmit. Although regulation may seem to be a little quaint, given all the communications gadgets for sale these days, licensing is necessary for a couple of reasons:
It allows amateurs to communicate internationally and directly without using any kind of intermediate system that limits their activities.
Because of amateur radio’s broad capabilities, hams need some technical and regulatory training. This allows hams to share the radio spectrum with other radio services, such as broadcasting.
Unlike some of the other types of radios available to the public, you can’t transmit using a ham radio without a license — why? Hams are allowed more flexibility than other services which are restricted to use low power on only a few frequency channels. Other services are limited to specific types of equipment that can’t be modified. Hams are encouraged to build our own equipment, operate on any of our many frequencies, and even invent new types of signals and ways of operating! This requires us to have a certain amount of know-how to operate legally and be good citizens on the air. Getting a license requires us to learn some of that know-how just as getting a driver’s license requires you to show that you understand the basic rules of the road.
FCC rules
By requiring licensees demonstrate some basic knowledge of radio and the FCC rules, licensing helps ensure that the amateur service makes the best use of its unique citizen access to the airwaves. Licensing sets ham radio apart from the unlicensed services and is recognized in the FCC rules, Part 97. Summarized below, the very first rule states the basis and purpose for ham radio as Rule 97.1:
Recognition of ham radio’s exceptional capability to provide emergency communications (Rule 97.1(a))
Promote the amateur’s proven ability to advance the state of the radio art (Rule 97.1(b))
Encourage amateurs to improve their technical and communications skills (Rule 97.1(c))
Expand the number of trained operators, technicians, and electronics experts (Rule 97.1(d))
Promote the amateur’s unique ability to enhance international goodwill (Rule 97.1(e))
Pretty heady stuff! Ham radio does all these good things in exchange for access to a lot of very useful radio spectrum. You can find all the pertinent rules at wireless at www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/technologies-systems-and-innovation-division/rules-regulations-title-47; click the Part 97 link for the amateur radio rules. (You can get to this page by searching for fcc rules, too.) Plain-English discussion of the rules is available in FCC Rules and Regulations for the Amateur Radio Service, published by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL; see Chapter 3). The ARRL website also includes an up-to-date copy of the Part 97 rules for amateur radio.
Ham radio frequency allocations
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), part of the United Nations, provides a forum for countries to create and administer rules for the radio spectrum. This helps keep order between all the services around the world.
The ITU divides the spectrum into small ranges in which specific types of uses occur (see Figure 4-1). These ranges are frequency allocations, which hams call bands.
The world is divided into three regions, as follows:
Region 1: Europe, Africa, and Russia and North Asia
Region 2: North and South America
Region 3: South Asia, Australia, and most of the Pacific
Within each region, each type of radio service — amateur, military, commercial, and government — is allocated a share of the available frequencies. Luckily for amateurs, most of their allocations are the same in all three regions, so they can talk to one another directly.
FIGURE 4-1: ITU region map showing the world’s three administrative regions for telecommunication.
Figure 4-2 shows the high-frequency (HF) range frequencies (from 3 MHz to 30 MHz). This allocation is very important, particularly on the long-distance bands, where radio signals might propagate all the way around the Earth. Talking to someone in a foreign country is pretty difficult if you can’t both use the same frequency.
FIGURE 4-2: Hams are allocated “bands” of frequencies across the radio spectrum, such as the HF bands shown here.
www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_2016_spectrum:wall_chart.pdf. (If you have a PDF reader, you can download and display the chart in full color.) The individual colors represent different types of radio services. Each service has a small slice of the spectrum, including amateurs. (Can you find the amateur service on the chart? Hint: It’s green.)
Amateurs have small allocations at numerous places in the radio spectrum, and access to those frequencies depends on the class of license you hold (see the next section). The higher your license class, the more frequencies you can use. The “ham bands” are shown in charts you can download at www.arrl.org/graphical-frequency-allocations. The US ham bands are also subdivided by types of signals; I discuss that later.
Learning about Types of Licenses
Three types of licenses are being granted today: Technician, General, and Amateur Extra.
By taking progressively more challenging exams, you gain access to more frequencies and operating privileges, as shown in Table 4-1. After you pass the test for one level of license, called an element, you have permanent credit for it as long as you keep your license renewed. This system allows you to progress at your own pace. Your license is good for ten years and you can renew it without taking an exam.
TABLE 4-1 Privileges by License Class
| License Class |
Privileges
|
|---|