snowleopard
Well-Known Member
You really have to be very thick or asleep not to get the certificate at the end of a pretty slow 4 days.
You really have to be very thick or asleep not to get the certificate at the end of a pretty slow 4 days.
ffiill
Well-Known Member
A full Ham licence holder can use a marine hf tranceiver with the permission of the ships captain/ships licence holder.So if you are the captain and have a full Ham licence you can use a marine HF tranceiver.
As to legality I cannot find anywhere in the ofcom ships licence application form where it asks for receiver details.
There is an argument that goes that a ships radio operator could tell whether he was receiving a signal from a Ham tranceiver because it might not be frequency spot on but given that transmissions drift and the radio operators may well "not give a..." do not think that this would be spotted. Gone are the days when the radio and radio operator were leased out by Marconi.
Here is where I get totally confused because as I understand it a fully licenced marine radio operator using his ships call sign can communicate with ham operators on the ham channels? or have I got it wrong.
If you have done o level physics/are interested in radios/electronics at a basic level than both foundation and intermediate licence are very easy.The full licence however does look quite hard.
Anyone wanting to know what they entail check out the RSGB books-Foundation licence Now;Intermediate licence now etc.
a few pounds either on Amazon or from
www.rsgb.org
syfuga
Well-Known Member
ICOM 802
The Icom 802 SSB set supports LSB as well as USB, amongst several other modes. It can also be 'opened' to operate on any frequency band.
It is not however approved for use in the EU although was widely available.
The Icom 802 SSB set supports LSB as well as USB, amongst several other modes. It can also be 'opened' to operate on any frequency band.
It is not however approved for use in the EU although was widely available.
jdc
Well-Known Member
Marine sets can do LSB
Obviously other models and brands exist, but my Icom 801E can certainly transmit at any frequency from 500kHz to 30MHz, and receive down to include the LW bands at ~150kHz. It can also cover all modulation methods on any frequency: LSB, USB, AM, CW and FSK (except they have weird labels like J3E which you have to learn or look up). However by default it comes with only marine frequencies allowed and you have to unlock it for all frequencies by a curious operation involving holding down button "2" and TX while turning on the set - or some scuh palaver: I forget exactly what but it's on the web.
I did put in the time and money on the courses, and now have an RSGB call sign plus the LRC, which I use with the boat's call sign. You have to work out which frequency or pair of frequencies you are using and use the appropriate call sign.
However I think both training courses are slooowwwww, and are designed by fuddy-duddies to make fuddy-duddies feel still useful by asking lots of questions about techniques which went obsolete years ago, and lots of equally obsolete acronyms - and in the case of amateur radio some, especially those relating to antennas, are actually wrong or misleading.
Both courses should be combined I think into one licence for use, then if RSGB want an extra licence to experiment and/or build kit then an extra qualification should be required. The split between Foundation, Intermediate and Full is really quite arbitrary, and mostly involves showing you can wire up a 13A plug (no, I'm not kidding).
Since I'm on the subject of what's wrong with radio licensing, I also object to it being illegal for marine licence holders to communicate with stations ahore other than the 'coast radio stations'. This prohibition was only ever there to protect a commercial monopoly, but the commercial operators gave up 20 odd years ago; there are none in the UK any more. Imho it's time to relax that rule. I tried to get an Ofcom licence for a ship's shore station, but it seems that's no longer even possible, so we are now protecting companies which don't exist and could never be recreated and barring use of spectrum which will never be redeployed - only the UK government could do something as daft.
Obviously other models and brands exist, but my Icom 801E can certainly transmit at any frequency from 500kHz to 30MHz, and receive down to include the LW bands at ~150kHz. It can also cover all modulation methods on any frequency: LSB, USB, AM, CW and FSK (except they have weird labels like J3E which you have to learn or look up). However by default it comes with only marine frequencies allowed and you have to unlock it for all frequencies by a curious operation involving holding down button "2" and TX while turning on the set - or some scuh palaver: I forget exactly what but it's on the web.
I did put in the time and money on the courses, and now have an RSGB call sign plus the LRC, which I use with the boat's call sign. You have to work out which frequency or pair of frequencies you are using and use the appropriate call sign.
However I think both training courses are slooowwwww, and are designed by fuddy-duddies to make fuddy-duddies feel still useful by asking lots of questions about techniques which went obsolete years ago, and lots of equally obsolete acronyms - and in the case of amateur radio some, especially those relating to antennas, are actually wrong or misleading.
Both courses should be combined I think into one licence for use, then if RSGB want an extra licence to experiment and/or build kit then an extra qualification should be required. The split between Foundation, Intermediate and Full is really quite arbitrary, and mostly involves showing you can wire up a 13A plug (no, I'm not kidding).
Since I'm on the subject of what's wrong with radio licensing, I also object to it being illegal for marine licence holders to communicate with stations ahore other than the 'coast radio stations'. This prohibition was only ever there to protect a commercial monopoly, but the commercial operators gave up 20 odd years ago; there are none in the UK any more. Imho it's time to relax that rule. I tried to get an Ofcom licence for a ship's shore station, but it seems that's no longer even possible, so we are now protecting companies which don't exist and could never be recreated and barring use of spectrum which will never be redeployed - only the UK government could do something as daft.
tawhiri
Well-Known Member
SSB HAM
I purchased the ICOM 500kHz to 30MHz set shown by Snow Leopard, before getting the licence, (I did have at the time the RYA VHF certificate). As I understand there is no problem listening if you do not have the licence.
Last year I took the exam and had a lot of support from the HAM community. I also needed an automatic antena tuner and a long peice of wire. This set opens up the door to sending email from the middle of the Atlantic as well as many other things The main difference to normal VHF is the power anf the frequency.
I purchased the ICOM 500kHz to 30MHz set shown by Snow Leopard, before getting the licence, (I did have at the time the RYA VHF certificate). As I understand there is no problem listening if you do not have the licence.
Last year I took the exam and had a lot of support from the HAM community. I also needed an automatic antena tuner and a long peice of wire. This set opens up the door to sending email from the middle of the Atlantic as well as many other things The main difference to normal VHF is the power anf the frequency.
prv
Well-Known Member
ytd
Well-Known Member
The whole HAM thing is a bit of an anachronism now. Maritime mobile HAM stations probably outnumber the rest. But to rationalise would probably mean governments pinching some of the HAM frequencies so no one is lobbying for that. I held a restricted HAM licence in the 70's and tried to fit a HAM set to my boat because they were then much cheaper than marine sets. No go because it didn't have the right type approval number for the safety inspection. It was explained to me that the HAM set could not be approved because they didn't pass frequency drift standards for marine sets. I ran both the marine and HAM sets in the boat for a while using 2 different callsigns. The marine set was much better on freqs like 2182 and 2201 but the performance difference faded by 8Mhz. Even though it was only 100WPEP and the HAM set was 160WPEP the marine set was always a better performer in difficult locations.
prv
Well-Known Member
Dunno about that. Inspired by these recent threads, I was listening (via the Internet) to the 14.300 Maritime Mobile ham net last night. They talk to boats first, then "if there's time" they open it up to shorebased hams who just want to say hello.
They had very few boats call in, the majority seemed to be landlocked operators dotted around the US.
Pete
maby
Well-Known Member
It's amazing how much difference the /MM suffix can make! Last autumn I had been driving down to the boat calling "CQ de G3XYZ/M" for ages and getting no response. I stopped in the marina car park and put out one last call - still no response. I walked down the pontoon, got into the boat, switched on the rig and called "CQ from G3XYZ/MM" and got buried under a pileup!
P.S. Not my real callsign!
prv
Well-Known Member
Certainly - on that net they were certainly very keen to talk to boats when they could. Just not very many of them, so from that sample the idea that "Maritime mobile HAM stations probably outnumber the rest" definitely didn't hold.
At one point some idiot appeared shouting almost randomly into the channel; to begin with they thought it may have been someone having an emergency and unfamiliar with radio, and the eagerness to help with a real emergency was palpable.
Pete
maby
Well-Known Member
Shades of Tony