The Ham Radio Playground

As licensed ham radio operators in the United States, we have a vast playground in which to operate. Let's start with some basic definitions. You may have noticed some acronyms in the text under my picture. We'll begin defining some of them now.

• HF - High Frequency. This term covers the 160, 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, and 10 meter bands. These bands cover frequencies between 1.8 and 30 Megahertz (MHz)


• VHF - Very High Frequency. This term covers the 6, 2, and 1.25 meter bands. These bands cover frequencies between 50 and 225 MHz.


• UHF - Ultra High Frequency. This term covers the 70, 33, and 23 centimeter bands. These bands cover frequencies between 420 and 1300 MHz


• In addition, there are 12 additional unnamed bands in what might be called the UUHF - Ultra Ultra High Frequency. These bands cover frequencies between 2300 MHz and over 275 Gigahertz (GHz) and tend to be used by experimenters and not by the average ham radio operator.


• You can download a really nice chart from the ARRL Here.

At one time there were six different license classes: Novice, Technician, Technician Plus, General, Advanced, and Extra Class. Today there are only three: Technician, General, and Extra Class. You may hear of people who still hold one of those other licenses, but they are no longer being issued by the FCC. Now the entry level license is the Technician, so let's look at what bands and transmission types (modes) the Technician licensee can use.

Traditionally the ham radio operator with a Technician class license could operate on any band higher than 50 MHz using up to 1500 watts. That means all VHF and UHF bands and above. Now with the FCC having combined the Novice and Technician classes, the current Technician also has access to some HF bands using up to 200 watts. Specifically they may use CW (code) on parts of 15, 40, and 80 meters. In addition they may use Voice (Single Sideband Phone-SSB), RTTY, CW, and Data on designated portions of the 10 meter band.

While the pastime of many Technician operators is using hand held or mobile radios to talk on the VHF and UHF bands, often using the many ham radio repeater systems available, the latest changes will bring real DX to Technician licensees. We'll talk about this more next time.

Until next time...

'73 OM
DE WA2KKG
K