Northern Alberta Radio Club offers community service through their hobby

Posted date: March 19, 2015in: NewsNo Comments

“

It’s touched down as far away as Japan, Australia and Romania.

He is among the 120-odd ham radio hobbyists, the president, actually, that make up the Northern Alberta Radio Club, which opened its doors in 1922.

Ham radio enthusiasts, in short, use their personal equipment to contact their fellow hobbyists across distances, both long and short.

“Sometimes I’m talking to someone in Florida when I’m driving to work,” said Patrick Piedmont, the club’s public service director.

“Sometimes, I’m just talking to a couple of my friends here.”

There are numerous clubs and users located across the globe.

For connections closer to home, users set their frequencies higher, while making contact across longer distances (in other countries, for example) requires longer wave-lengths that can range in metres.

This latter goal also requires that ham radio users bounce their signals off objects (including clouds, the ground and, in some cases, Earth’s Moon) to achieve an angle for the signal to touch down in the desired region, Piedmont said.

Cherneske compares this process to combining a game of chess with a game of pool.”

Read Full Article: