Subj : No license operators
To   : n2qfd
From : Ciderbat
Date : Sun Apr 07 2024 01:58 am

I just want to pop into this thread because I feel like this is exactly where I'll find the people who can guide me. I am one of those people who recently had my interest piqued by the inexpensive radios from China. I bought a Quansheng, modded it, slapped a Nagoya antenna on it, but I am *new* to this. I have taken the utmost care to not operate without a license. I keep Tx turned off on the channels I'm not supposed to broadcast on, and I wouldn't dare try to transmit on the CB range since the SDR chip in this doesn't filter it properly and I took the time to understand how it can interfere on harmonic freqs without that. So I mostly just listen. But sometimes I want to join. They do trivia on the local EchoLink sometimes, and even though I'm a lot younger than the people participating, I am old enough to get all the 80's questions haha! I guess where I'm going with this is: as someone who actually cares about the etiquite of HAM and see how interesting it can be to just have convo and events with people from all over via the waves, what advice might one give me? Like in the sense of resources or whatnot. I'm currently trying to either get a new job or get into a gov't college program after being laid off last summer, so I've got some time before getting a license. But I want to. I've noticed that the people on EchoLink (I'm listening on 444.800mhz from the CN Tower) are all really chill people. I see talk of gatekeeping in this thread, but if I do get on the transmit and encounter that, I'd like to know what I'm talking about. I guess some people get these things and mod them and act all willy nilly with them, but I kind of like having this little alternate window to the world that I can carry around and want to approach it with tact. 

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 * Origin: Dark Systems BBS -- Ontario CANADA -- bbs.dsbbs.ca:23 (21:1/148)

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