Hi Rick:?
Well, I became a ham last November, to go fly a high-altitude balloon for my daughter's high-school science fair (she took first in state in the Earth and Planetary Science category, and even got on TV).? BTW, I am also in the Phoenix area, and have been out with Jack's folks on one of their launches -- so you are with a school flying experiments on ansr periodically?? Which school?
I have also been around hams for years, but the code requirement kept me from getting motivated years back, and then life just got busy.? But I now plan to learn more and maybe try some HF stuff.? I am also helping my 14yo son to get his license this summer.
I have also collected teletype machines for years (M14/15/28/31/33/35...) and am moderator of a tty email list called greenkeys.? I have a horribly-ancient and incomplete site at , which desperately needs a wordpress makeover (on my to-do list).
Also, I would also like to try some rtty with a real tty machine and a couple of other tty guys around here.? I have an old HF transceiver and a dovetron TU (that needs to be fixed first, or I need to build a modern version).? Would also be interesting to try rtty on a 2m freq that allow data.
Anyway, that is my ham story so far.
BTW, your comment about CW having a theoretical bandwidth of zero is not correct.? True, a constant carrier has zero bandwidth, but once you key it on and off is is a form of AM.? If you watched on a spectrum analyzer you would not simply see the carrier line going up and down.? You would see sidebands splattering on both sides as you key, you would see the carrier-only line as you held it down, and sidebands briefly again as you release.? If you are keying at a fixed frequency, say 20 Hz, you have sidebands at carrier +/- 20 Hz (AM mod is just a mixer).? Since you are keying with varying pulse widths, your sidebands will have a range of components up to the highest freq.? You can suppress the carrier, since the information is in the sidebands, and since the upper and lower sb have the same data, you can filter one of those out as well (SSB suppressed carrier) -- this can reduce cw bw to a pretty low slice, but never down to zero.? Also, the keying waveform is usually configured in a real cw tx to shape the keying edges with an S-shaped transition and not a hard edge -- this produces more-pleasant receive cw I am told, but that keying transition further complicates the freq content of the sidebands.? That is how I understand it at least -- if anyone has corrections, please let me know.
gil, af7ez
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>I have been around hams all of my life. Growing up, two houses down was a
>ham. My brother-in-law has been a ham since he was in high school so my wife
>actually picked up a lot of information from him. I studied analog circuit
>design and RF in college. So I understand some of the technical aspects of
>being a ham.
>...
>My immediate motivation is because some of my students are required to get
>their license in order to operate APRS during weather balloon flights
>(/ ). It was getting embarrassing to tell them that I
>didn't have my license.
>
>So what makes you guys "tick"? ? What got you interested in being a ham?
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