Got my amateur radio license KK6NXK

When I was a young child, I remember listening to an old radio receiver with my grandfather, looking for morse transmission.

30 years later, I take the opportunity to get my radio amateur license in the US, it was not difficult (Technicial license is easy), especially cause US radio amateurs are using the metric system (almost all the time …), the only difficulties were to learn some terms and simple formulas from french to english and to know some parts of regulation by heart (I have never been able to learn by heart).

A lot of people keep asking me why are you doing this? Do you want to speak to a microphone to a stranger?

First why not, it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever done :)

Then they probably have forgotten that every single piece of technology today are using radio waves, from your 4G phone to wifi to Bluetooth, learning and understanding that is really useful.

For example Radio amateur bands overlap some of the “civil” bands, it gives some extended privileges to a radio amateur to experiment with long distance wifi transmissions.

So it’s not just about voice but data too.

Another aspect is electronic, a lot of radio amateur are sharing hardware and electronic circuits to build your own receiver/transceiver, before it was cool on the Internet.

Learning electronic to build something real is a lot more rewarding than it was at school…

Even without a license this is a brand new world to explore, [receiving satellite images of the Earth](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial- receiving-noaa-weather-satellite-images/) is one of the many possibilities you can get entering radio world.

This is the beginning of a new knowledge branch to conquer !

See my work on an APRS bluetooth Modem

73 de KK6NXK

By the way in french it’s radio amateur and not amateur radio :)