Foundations of Amateur Radio

It's a curious thing, this hobby of ours, in that the more you want out of it, the more challenging it becomes.

For example, you might start your journey with a VHF or UHF handheld radio, sometimes referred to as a Walkie-Talkie or a Handy, and you start listening to the local repeater, or you try to make contact with a friend.

Then you discover that it doesn't always work, so you learn about interference, terrain and antenna gain. You start looking for higher elevation or a better antenna and you discover that now you hear more, but you still can't talk to your friends and before long you're building filters and testing other gear and the journey continues unabated.

This same incremental experience happens across every aspect of the hobby and it happens to all of us, perhaps unwitting participants on this amateur radio journey.

Sometimes this experience leads to becoming discombobulated, discontented, disinterested and ultimately leads to disengagement, which in my opinion, does not need to be the case.

Throughout our community we often talk about failure, as-in, a failed contact, a failed activation, a failed antenna or failed design, and on and on it goes.

It occurs to me that we're not the only people who have this experience.

"But the student will find that experience is the best teacher. The reason why I get along with comparative ease now is because I know from experience the enormous number of things that won't work. For instance, I start on a new invention to-morrow. From the great number of experiments I have made, and the vast amount of information I have stored up, I am saved a great deal of time and trouble in not having to travel over barren ground."

If that sounds somewhat familiar, and reminds you of a quote about light-bulbs and failure, you're in good company, since those words were written in 1882 by the very same inventor of the light-bulb, Thomas Edison.

In other words, the process of doing something doesn't end in failure, it's an experience, a point of learning, or if you want to be scientific about it, it's another data point.

Just because something didn't go as expected, doesn't mean that it failed, just that something unexpected happened.

I'm talking about this because we live in an increasingly complex world where our chosen hobby is made up from the very foundation on which we understand everything around us, the electromagnetic spectrum and all that it implies.

Our adventures, frustrating as we might find them, are built upon the shoulders of giants who became silent keys long before our parents walked this Earth.

Your participation, little by little, increases our global knowledge, experience and understanding and when something unexpected happens, it's time to celebrate, rather than give up in disgust.

I've only been playing with radios for a short time, especially when I compare it with my experience in other areas of technology, but I can say, that framing matters. "Failure" is, in my experience, regularly thought of in a negative light and all too often it leads people to stop playing, because who really derives joy from banging your head against a wall?

So, next time, when you're about to use that dreaded F-word, consider what might happen if you thought of it as a piece of experience earned instead?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB