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How does a ham radio work?
Home » Gadgets » Ham Radios » How does a ham radio work?To completely understand how a ham radio works, you need to understand how a regular radio works, radio waves and all. For both types of radios, everything revolves around frequency.
Frequency refers to the rate of vibration of the radio wave; the slower the vibration, the lower the frequency. Beginner ham radio operators, however, start out with the VHF and UHF bands, high frequencies that produce great local communication. Many battery-operated handheld ham radios, for example, offer a VHF band, which transmits on one frequency and receiving on another. Like radio stations, both VHF and UHF operate on line of sight technology.
Lower frequencies are on the HF bands. The very low HF frequencies (1.6-7.3 MHz) work primarily at night while high HF frequencies (21.0-29.70 MHz) work during the day, and medium frequencies (14.0-18.168 MHz) offer worldwide communication during both the night and the day. These bands are also called shortwave bands, and unlike VHF and UHF, they do not operate using line of sight, so multiple people cannot be transmitting on the exact same frequency. Thus, you’ll need to adjust your frequency slightly to avoid interference.
Your ham radio works on these frequencies via its a transmitter and a receiver, usually housed together in a single unit called a transceiver. The transceiver will either be a handheld unit or a much larger desktop device, and you may or may not have an external antenna and a plethora of controls.
When you adjust the frequency on your transmitter and/or your receiver, you are altering the vibration of the radio wave you are sending/receiving. Although the higher-frequency VHF and UHF bands work best on local communication, you can bounce your signal off an FM repeater, which is a radio antenna on a mountain or a tall building. You transmit on one frequency and then piggyback off the antenna onto a new frequency to increase the distance of your transmission.
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- How does a ham radio work?