The Flight of the Bumblebee

 A popular story goes something like this. The bumblebee, according to the laws of aerodynamics, is incapable of flight. The bumblebee is too dumb to know anything about the laws of aerodynamics. She doesn't know she can't fly, so she flies. The story has been debunked, owing to a misunderstanding of how insect wings generate lift, but it still is a fun and sometimes illustrative story.

My amateur radio experience, now well into its sixth year, sometimes resembles the story of the bumblebee's flight. I'm not exactly a rookie—I've been a shortwave listener since the late '70s—but I have considerably less experience than a lot of my fellow hams in the art of sending and receiving signals over the air, and doing so efficiently. I'm doing almost everything incorrectly, and yet somehow I manage to make QSOs. I have QSLs from 102 DXCC countries1. I've worked my QTH's antipode. I've talked to the International Space Station. Against all odds, I'm somehow making it work. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I'm doing wrong.


Straight Key

One bit of advice that I read when I first started operating CW is that a beginner should use a straight key, and then graduate to paddles. Five years later, I never graduated. I like my trusty J-38 key. I like the tactile experience of shaping the dits and dahs with my wrist muscles, much like how back in college I shaped sounds through my sax or clarinet with my breath and my fingers. Paddles can send faster; software and peripheral keyers can send even faster still. If I were to take a stint on a big gun contest station I might have to change my tune, but in my experience the speed of sending is rarely the bottleneck, so even on contest weekends I keep pounding away on my straight key.


Compromised Antenna

I have literally never transmitted below two meters with a dipole. Spend four times as much money on one's antenna as on one's radio? The reciprocal of that would be a little closer. For POTA and other field ops, I have an end-fed random wire. When crowds and environmental sensitivity preclude hucking a wire over a tree limb (which is just about always in Southern California), I screw a ham stick into a mag mount on top of the car, or into a tripod on the ground with three ten-meter radials. At home it's even worse. The combination of my condo's small size and my homeowner's association (HOA) means a large, permanent, exterior antenna isn't going to happen. That same ham stick and mag mount wind up on the balcony rail.


Not a Maker

I don't even own a soldering iron. I wouldn't trust myself with gear that I spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on if I did. The most complex piece of hardware I ever built was the time I wrapped a USB cable around a ferrite toroid to keep common mode out of my MacBook. I did make one thing of significance for my station. I'm a software engineer by trade. When I first became licensed for amateur radio, I knew I'd want some means of organizing my contact logs. I looked at some of the commercially available logbook software and didn't exactly fall in love, so I wrote my own.


Grounding

Speaking of aerodynamics, I've heard a lot of viewpoints about grounding and the only conclusion I can reach is that it's like viewpoints on how airfoils generate lift: everyone can more or less agree on the basics of how it works but will fight like cats and dogs over the details. Even if I didn't so easily get lost in the details, it's not like my HOA is going to be overjoyed about me hammering a spike into the dirt outside my building. I bond my components, let the balcony rail take care of the half of each cycle that the ham stick isn't taking care of, and leave it at that. If I had a permanent antenna in a part of the world that experienced frequent electrical storms, I might be a tad less cavalier. 


Conclusion

The premise that I'm doing it all wrong is, naturally, tongue-in-cheek. Within reason, there is no wrong way to do amateur radio. Adherence to Part 97, or the equivalent regulations in your country, is mandatory. Behavioral standards, expressed in things like The Radio Amateur's Code and the DX Code of Conduct, are aspirational. Beyond that, there aren't many rules. As we say in software engineering, that's a feature and not a bug. We amateurs enjoy a high degree of flexibility to find our own way, and to find where our interests lie. I've found mine, or more to the point, I'm in a never-ending process of finding mine. What's yours?





1. As of this writing, I still need to reach out to my local card checker before applying for the DXCC award.

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