Prejudice against the upper bands.

Hello again!  It's been a while.

I've been busy over the past week with a visit from overseas by my eldest daughter.  Messing about on boats and in the mountains was a much nicer proposition that playing radio!

Out under the Menai Suspension Bridge last week (I'm at the back, short hair!)

But wait!  Let's get back to normality.  Here comes the latest RadCom, the RSGB's rarely-interesting magazine.

A couple of interesting letters concerning the promotion of cheap, rather than massively expensive transceivers to youngsters and newcomers appear in the back page.  I was happy to see these, as I frequently decry the profiteering that takes place in ham radio whilst our numbers decline.

The response from the RSGB was typically bland, and went off message a little by promoting software defined receivers.  The letter was more about about transceivers.

What really irritated me was the RSGB's response concerning the 12 and 10m bands, which "counselled against" the use of CB-adapted transceivers for those bands in "this part of the sunspot cycle".

What?

Here's how my waterfall looks this morning at 12m:

I'm not sure why the RSGB thinks 12 and 10m are all but dead at solar minimum, because, rather self-evidently, they are not.  Less active, maybe, but dead, no.  I spend most of my time on 12m, and can definitively say that band is open just about every day during daylight, and still produces the occasional post-sunset activity.

Unfortunately, ham radio suffers from an awful lot of 'conventional thinking' that then evolves to become blindly-repeated prejudice.  Of all participants, I expect the RSGB to know what it's talking about, not get into line with all the other sheep who base their views on what they read in a book 30 years ago - a book that was probably repeating views from 30 years before that.

To anyone happening upon this blogpost by chance, I say this: if you have little or no money for ham radio, you CAN participate without being inferior in any way.  Spend some time online to see what's available, and ignore the expensive products within magazine pages.

Remember, also, this: the majority of operators are based in developed areas of the planet where high electrical noise levels and heavy, built-up environments mean they can hear much less with their £10,000 station than someone with a simple radio and wire vertical antenna in an RFI-free place.  The retired rich folk don't want to hear that, so it simply doesn't get discussed. They just continue spending ever more money.  Indeed, many won't even realise their noise problem, and many of those who do will refuse to accept someone with cheap equipment can do better than them.

Get out in the open air, and escape modern electronics-generated RFI. 

Focus also on a good environment.  That, also, gets very little discussion because the rich retired have invested all their money in a fixed, home-based station.  Get out to the fields, the beaches, the hills, the parks.  You get fresh air, and won't ever suffer the soul-destroying effects of your neighbour wiping out all the HF bands with an LED yard light, solar PV system or something equally RFI-generating.

Sure, get an SDR receiver if you only want to listen.  My £20 generic unit is almost as good as a £600 radio's receiver.  But also get trained up and get your licence.  Then you can get a CB-derived 12 and/or 10m transceiver for maybe £150 new, much less, second-hand.  There is PLENTY going on there throughout the solar cycle, and it will also teach you some patience and interest in how and why propagation changes.

Above all, don't listen to retired old men who profess to being knowledgeable when in fact they are simply blinded by their own, fixed and misguided beliefs.