- by:Dan Maloney
Newly minted hams like me generally find themselves asking, “What now?” after getting their tickets. Amateur radio has a lot of different sub-disciplines, ranging from volunteering for public service gigs to contesting, the closest thing the hobby has to a full-contact sport. But as I explore my options in the world of ham radio, I keep coming back to the one discipline that seems like the purest technical expression of the art and science of radio communication – low-power operation, or what’s known to hams as QRP. With QRP you can literally talk with someone across the planet on less power than it takes to run a night-light using a radio you built in an Altoids tin. Now that’s a challenge I can sink my teeth into.
Why QRP?
QRP takes its name from the Q-codes developed as shorthand by early Morse operators. QRP mean “Reduce power” or when posed as a question, “Shall I reduce power?” It has gradually morphed into a catch-all term that describes the whole field of low-power operation. Not surprisingly, there’s no hard and fast rule as to what constitutes QRP, but like a lot of things in life, you know it when you see it. Generally, any radio capable of transmitting at 5 watts or less would be considered a QRP rig, although some argue for anything below 10 watts. In the end these limits are academic, because most QRP aficionados like to work with much lower power, typically only a watt or two. Extreme QRP, called QRPp, lives below a watt and sometimes is best measured in milliwatts; for some serious over-achievers, it’s even measured in microwatts….READ MORE
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