Radio, Amateurishly

  A meme that first popped up a couple years ago has seen a minor resurgence in the amateur radio community over the last week or so. The photo, which appears to have originated on AA4OO's Ham Radio - QRP blog, depicts a Ten-Tec Century 21 rig with an assortment of straight keys. A hand rests confidently on the navy-style nob of the rightmost key. In the meme, the photo has been captioned "CW - It's like FT8, but for men" [punctuation, not in the original, added for clarity]. While it's unclear who authored the caption, an educated guess would be that it wasn't the original photographer, who may or may not even be aware of how his image is being used. Like all Internet memes 1 , it would be easy—perhaps even desirable—to simply dismiss this one. Somebody finds a photo on the Internet and comes up with a caption designed to be just the right combination of clever and infuriating as to facilitate its spread. It's intended to push people's buttons; if yo

  Author's note: This article was written primarily with a US audience in mind. I'm not familiar enough with how amateur radio privileges are distributed among the various license classes in other countries to write about opportunities for newly licensed amateurs outside the US. If you're a radio amateur from outside the United States, I at least hope you find this to be interesting reading. You passed your Technician exam and received your call sign from the FCC. Congratulations! What you've done is well worth celebrating. You dusted off what you learned about Ohm's Law back in high school physics, learned how radio waves get from one antenna to another, familiarized yourself with how the amateur portions of the radio spectrum are organized, and joined the quarter of a percent of the US population who have demonstrated their qualifications to use those portions of the radio spectrum. Now what? Like any red-blooded new Technician, you probably went to Ham Radio Outl