A long time ago – actually about 25 years ago when I was very young – I was a very active radio amateur. I still have my licence, but am pretty much non-practising. Please understand this was not Citizen’s Band or CB, this was access to the amateur radio-allocated frequencies for “the self-training of the radio amateur” in the old-fashioned language used by the Government. Latterly, my call sign was (and is still) G4MCU.
At this juncture I would ask you to bear with me as it will take a little while to get to the point.
My interest was not so much in the electronics, but in radio propagation; that is, how the radio waves are carried over both short and long distances. Of course study of both the electronics and the propagation was necessary because we had a three hour exam to pass before we were let loose on the airwaves. It was not then multiple choice. We actually had to write something and draw diagrams using our initiative. Later I passed a Morse exam, proving I was able to send and receive at twelve words a minute.
Anyway, within the amateur radio fraternity we all had our particular interests. Mine was principally in understanding how radio waves could travel long distances at VHF frequencies and higher. Although I dabbled at 70 MHz my particular enthusiasm was at 144 MHz (2 metres), 432 MHz (70 cms) and 1296 MHz (23 cms). At 144 Mhz I was interested in radio propagation (getting and receiving signals) via tropspheric lower atmosphere means, via the Aurora Borealis, via sporadic ionisation of the “E” layer and via meteor scatter, using the ionised trails of meteors to reflect signals.
Anyway, I will not go into the means of doing this as this is not meant to be a technical article. What happened was that I got into a race to gain the most contacts with stations on 144Mhz over as wide an area and as long a distance as possible. My longest distance contact was over 2000km into the Ukraine, which was and still would be pretty fantastic via terrestrial means; that is without using the Moon to bounce signals off, and without using the artificial amateur radio satellites.
I climbed up the leagues of numbers of stations contacted over wide areas, and was in the top ten in the UK (no. 8 was my highest) and was in the top 100 in the all-Europe German run table.
However, despite the numbers, my true interest was in reading, understanding, and especially discussing with my fellow radio amateurs the science behind what we did, and how our results were achieved. There was and still is a lot which was not properly understood about these things and we felt needed in that Universities collated our information to look for patterns and explanations. In the meantime, we discussed our radio passions: how the weather made the lower atmosphere suitable for long distance communication, the way the Sun caused the auroras and the Sporadic E propagation (and solar activity in general), and the way the meteors reflected the signals, their relationship in some cases to comets and of course their timing. We made great friends and learned from our peers, but actually the numbers of stations we contacted were not really important. Often we did not know the names of those contacted in the numbers game. Certainly they never meant much to us unless they were famous in the radio world for their achievements.
What it boiled down to was that the numbers could just consume one. It was like a gambling addiction in that we just wanted more and could forget what was important, including our family and friends. The numbers became a distraction from the people one could value who were hidden behind the numbers, and in many ways those whom we really knew could be forgotten in the pointless pursuit of contacting ever more people and stations we would never cross paths with again.
Anyway, I thought of this upon landing on a business networking site home page and noticing that my “ranking” has slid down due to my failure to play the numbers game, because I do not know well enough (though I am working on it) the people in my network whom I truly value, and because I like to connect with people who want to connect with me, the individual, and not just as another number. There is no substitute for relationships, and for sharing our experiences and knowledge, is there?
© Jon Stow 2007
