Hey, folks, liba here. This is part two of our interview with Claude Ray, all about ham radio. So if you missed part one, be sure to listen to that first and then come back to part two. We're so happy to have had Claude on with us on then again, and we encourage, urge you to check out the Athens Ham radio club and the other links that we have for additional resources. Thanks so much. Enjoy this episode.

How does the setting look like you're out in the park? How many people usually go out to these events?

Sometimes multiples. We had a nice get together at Don Carter State park back in the fall where we had about 20 people out there, but it's sort of a party sort of get together. We had the radios going. Several people would grab microphone or use CW Morse code, but that was kind of neat. But for me, often it's just me in my car, truck, whatever, go out there. I took a personal challenge to get all the different parks on air sites in Georgia. Wow. Parks on air started out back in 2016 when the national park surface had their 100th anniversary, which is kind of a neat thing. So radio community took on the challenge to send somebody out or get somebody to go out, encourage them to go to every national park in the United States. And they did, and it was really accepted strongly. So somebody else said, well, we can make this continue. We'd like to keep doing this. And the group that did it said, we only did it for a year, so it's up to you. So they took on the state parks, state wildlife, mandarin area, historic sites, all the national parks, and every state, every country has a different group of them. But in Georgia, we've got 50 state parks, but altogether we've got 203 different sites at camp parks on air. I can be proud enough to say I'm the only person who's been to everyone in Georgia, but that was quite a job. Took a couple of years to get all over the state.

How long did it take?

I started the parks on there in June of 2020, and I got my last park in January of this year, 23. So about two and a half years. Some of those parks are just like a field where people go hunting or fishing at lakes, but some of them are fancied up parks that have all the facilities. And then there's a few off the coast that are islands that you have to catch a boat to get out to.

Did you encounter any challenges along the way?

Nothing too much. I mean, I made some mistakes along the way, learned a lot of things. Spam, parts of Georgia. I hadn't seen, but after about the first 20 or 30, had a pretty good rhythm of what I was and planned to take. So if I were going on a longer trip, I'd make sure to take lots and lots of backup stuff rather than just one kit like I have right now.

Was there one spot that stood out to you in particular that you might want to name as your favorite?

That is really hard. People do ask which one's the prettiest one. Which one's the nicest one? The prettiest one to me is Chickamauga, Chattanooga battlefield up in northwest Georgia, up close to the Tennessee line. It's a big national historical park and a pretty place. Of course, it also helped because I had real good radio propagation going that day, too, but it was all good. But the islands, there's several really pretty ones down there. The last one I went to was called Wasall island. It's close to Savannah. Three of us went out there together, and that was my final one, so they got to be there with me, which was nice, too. There's a lot of pretty places in Georgia.

As an amateur ham radio operator, is there any advice that you can give to someone who's probably considering getting involved in this hobby?

Yes, if they're interested at all. Go ahead and get your license. It's not that difficult. The resources are there. They were when I got my license 30 years ago. Books were available. You could order them online or order them by mail or whatever was available at that point. Go to the library and pick them up. Now we've got even more resources for the study, and the places to get the license are even more plentiful than they were. Now you can go to a local club, you can go online. There's resources there for people. Do that. But get the license. Go ahead and start. And even if you don't get very active right away, don't worry about it. Go jump in it. I wish I'd done it 20 years earlier. There are several programs where you can get inexpensive radios. The entry level for their equipment is only like $25 to start, one there where it once was, $200 to get going, really. But the other part is find a club. Find another ham radio operator that you can talk with that can give you some guidance. Because it's such a broad hobby, it's easy to get confused. Do you want to do moon bounce to begin with? That's pretty hard to do. Even to talk to satellites is hard to do in a way, until you get familiar with it. But there's a whole thing. You need to focus a little bit, but see it all too, and figure out where you want to get your interest going. And don't get overwhelmed with too much advice. Just forget about it sometimes too.

What does the community look like? What is the age group? What kind of people will you meet? What are their backgrounds? How would you explain that to someone?

It's such a small number. There's 750,000 hams in the United States. And so with that being said, we got what, almost 300 million in the whole us. So we're only about. Was that two and a half percent of the whole population? So even though, like I said earlier, I'm probably median age, there's also a lot of young people that get in too. And it's hard to say any one view of it. It's like a really small subset of the society that we meet all the time. I'm always surprised that when I meet somebody else that is a ham radio operator, it's gotten to be that way. But you can meet almost anybody, and because you can communicate over different methods and different distances, you can meet people that have more of your specific interest too. So I wouldn't hesitate to get in it because everybody's the same age as Claude, because they're not. But some people that are my age are more willing to share and listen and learn. Some are not. That's okay. That's the way it is. When you go in McDonald's and find somebody there, what are you going to find? You never know. You sometimes surprise. So if I were to do anything with anybody, said, go for it, take it and try it. If you don't like it, there's no requirement that you continue to use your license. But until you get it, it's not like driving a car. You don't have to learn to operate a car, I mean a radio, before you get your license. It's kind of flip flop. When you get ham radio license, then you can't operate the radio. And so then you got to figure out which parts your favorite.

And what do you think the future looks like for this particular hobby?

I hear that discussed a lot. And for me, I think because it's still always people that want to experiment with equipment and communicate differently and explore limits. But no matter what you do, you always want to have some connection to the basic concepts. I think you were surprised when I talked about how small the station is. I have, and it's not even the smallest version, but to know that you can. Some people hike to mountaintops, they'll take a radio not much bigger than your cell phone, really small. They carry it all with them, and they set up on a summit, they call it. And I've done that a couple of times, too. I hadn't hiked that much. But it's nice to be able to know with the basic equipment, you can do anything you want to. So even if it changes, so that there's more and more digital means it's almost always going to be a face to face communication and be some interest in learning. What did Claude do when he first got in? What was that Morse Cody keeps talking about? How hard is it? I bet I can do that, because he's just a human like I am. So I don't think it's going to go away. I'm sure it'll change. It has in my time being in the hobby, licenses have changed, methods of communications have broadened, but it hadn't lost any luster for most people.

So I'm just curious if you've ever been stuck in a rut where you have your equipment set up and you're able to reach out for help, or if it's know, vice versa, someone else reaching out and you've been able to help.

No, I hadn't really had that opportunity, but no. Fella down in Warner Robbins, Georgia, and he was doing a parts on the air activation, and he had a fellow call him from the mountains up in North Carolina. He didn't really expedite the process so much, but the situation was that the person he talked to on the radio said, can you call the hospital and let him know that my budy is bringing his son into the hospital? We don't have cell phone coverage up here. He had access to walk back down the trail. His son was sick, injured, something like that. And so Chris is the fellow's name. He actually relayed the traffic, the communication from the man still on the mountain who was by radio to him in Warner Robbins. He calls the hospital in North Carolina where he's coming. So it's pretty neat. It wasn't really like the rescue thing, you see with a lot of things, but it made him feel good. It made me feel good that he was able to do it, too.

Yeah. Especially to have someone that you're able to communicate with immediately. So are there any specific regulations or guidelines that you must follow while operating your ham radio? Could you name some of.

Oh, you have a limit on where you can transmit. That's probably the biggest one. You can't transmit on the top of the Georgia State patrol's frequency navy or on the broadcast radio or television frequencies unless it's an absolute emergency. You have these ranges that you can operate in. But I'd refer it back in that regard to the Citizen band radio. Everybody has heard of CB. You got 40 channels you can tune. Well, they have a narrow slice of what we call radio spectrum. It's just one little bit ham radio operators. That spectrum is maybe 1000 fold, but in that thousand fold you still have areas that you can or cannot operate on. And that's one of the regulations. Others, believe it or not, you can't play music over ham radio. That's because way back when, the competition between amateur operators and commercial radio stations, it's not quite as big a deal these days. But that's the way it goes. But that and let's see. Well, emissions, the radios should be not overwhelmingly loud. Or actually power levels is another thing we're limited on how much power we can operate with. My little radio puts out ten watts. That's what they measure the radio power in. But most frequency ranges, we're allowed up to 1500 watts, which sounds like a lot when you compare those two. But then you realize that the FM broadcast station is listed around 100,000 watts. So those are the kind of things we restricted.

How do you ensure compliance in maintaining safe and efficient radio environments?

They have a thing called radiation exposure calculations that you can do to make sure you don't have too much signal of the wrong frequency being directed against a person. But it's pretty easy to go through the worksheet. And the only way that you could really violate that is somebody walked up and stood in front of the 1500 watt radio stations antennas, which are generally a lot higher in demand, but they are requirements to maintain safety and hardly any dangerous voltages. Normally around a radio station on my little 66 foot wire, when I'm putting out ten watts, if you were at the tip end of the antenna where the voltage is highest, you might feel a trickle about like a nine volt battery. So it's not a lot of worry there.

I would just like to ask if you can offer any resources or recommend any helpful resources.

You know, I did think about that. I mentioned the QRz. Qrz.com is their website. It's a good one. There's an organization, each country has a group of. It's like a national organization. In our case, it's ARRL. It's amateur radio relay league. And they consolidate a lot of the information and they're the ones that put on the initial parts on the air program, but they do a lot more than that, too. And they have a website, arrl.com. And believe it or not, Facebook has become quite a. It covers a broad enough age range. I know a lot of people don't think it's the best method of communication, but it's such a melting pot of ideas. If you search for ham radio there, you'll find something probably pretty local to you. Of course, you'll find a lot of things that aren't as important to you, but it's always fun. And actually run a group there called Georgia Ham radio portable. That's because I do so much. And I've noticed we've got 450 members in that group now. So it's called on.

When did that start?

Not even two years ago. Yeah. So it's, you know, in the big scheme of things, 450 is not big, but it's mostly people that are in toward Georgia. And, yeah, it's a good way to communicate things that we've got going on. Like, we'll have, like the part get together we had at Don Carter. Some of that was announced there. Everybody has their favorite method of communication. Sometimes it's text, sometimes email. Sometimes it's discord. Sometimes it's any other Instagram, Scott. But they come and go. So when I've communicated with people, I realize you can't just tell them one way. You got to go multiple methods to do it if you really want to get in touch with everybody and not cut somebody out of the process. I sent a note out on Facebook about another event, and I mentioned in an email later to a group and said, it's only going out by Facebook. And I said, well, okay, I better make sure I'm redundant. I send out multiple methods to. I got called on them. That's okay.

It happens definitely, with what we have available now in technology.

Yeah. It's not any cross platform connectivity. If you don't look at all of it, you're going to miss something.

So last and final question. Is there anything you wish that I had asked you that I did not ask or any information that you would like to share that you have? Not yet.

Oh, no. Yeah. You didn't ask me how you get your license specifically.

Yes. Let's jump into that.

And since you live in this area, I would say go to the Lanierland Amateur radio club that's based here in Gainesville and tell them, hey, I want to see about getting a license. What do I do? And they would probably say, well, we've got a club test session coming up. You can go these places, get the resources to study. And what do you specifically interested? We may find somebody that wants to help you do that. And there's a process called elmering. That's another good one. So you can think of old Uncle Elmer being the ham radio operator. Well, an elmer is a term for a helper, an experienced radio operator that's willing to take somebody under their wing and show them the things they can do. That's what an elmer is.

So you mentioned what people can specifically get into. What are those?

I mean, it's the handheld radio, like you see the policeman carrying around. And if you just use that radio, you can talk to somebody a couple of blocks, maybe a couple miles away directly. But they also all, most always use that repeater. You can, they've got one on a mountain close here, one of the small mountains near Gainesville, that I can use my little handheld radio from Athens to talk. And so that's pretty neat. And that's one of the initial steps to be able to get a handheld radio. That's one that cost you about $25 or more, whatever you want to put into it. And you can copy talk with the people around your local area. But then beyond that, they've got a thing called digital DMR, digital mobile radio, where you can have the hotspot that connects to the Internet, and you can talk to people all over the world or just by digital means, and it changes it and then the satellite. A lot of people get the kick out of saying, I'm going to talk to the space station, but there's a lot of satellites that AM radio operators have in the sky now, too. With initial entry license, you have the legal ability to get in touch with, and it takes a little difference with the radio and a little more finesse knowing where to tune, but it's not that hard, and it doesn't take a lot of extra equipment. Beyond that, if you want to speak further with the radio, I've got, they call it HF radio, which is a different frequency range. And like I say, I'll leave here and I'll go to the park somewhere and I'll set up and talk to 50 to 60 people pretty fast and make my camp. And you can do that. You can do it when you get your initial license, but you're limited somewhat in the range, like I was when I first got my license. So you go study a little bit more, take another test, and there you are. You've got the extra privileges available to do that and you have the extra opportunity to buy equipment, too. But you can get on the HF radio spectrum with $500. And you'd have a really functional, really good. You could probably get by for $200. But you're going to be challenged to do the things you really want to do until you get happy with it. And then when you get where you'd like to climb that mountain, you take that little radio, then you're okay. But you don't want to make that your first way out. Because you're going to be disappointed that everything that can go the way you.

Wanted it to do. You have to upgrade your equipment consistently or does it?

It stays pretty much in shape. The wire antennas, just from the wear and tear being deployed, they'll break. And I have to resolder joints and stuff like that, too. But that's not too hard. And the actual hardware of the radio itself, they last for a long time, like those I had for 20 years and didn't use. They started to show their age, but then again, they were 30 year old radios by that point. So electronics has changed a lot. But there's not a lot that you have to do except to keep watching on what's going on. I mean, if something starts to happen, you got meters on the radio or you get signal reports from Clifton and it's a. Claude, I can't hardly hear you today. And you know something's going wrong. So that's the kind of indicator you get.

So you are able to fix your own antennas?

Yeah, I bought some commercially available antennas to begin with. Because I really didn't know. I mean, I had an idea of antenna theory and how things work. But I realized one day, I can make this. So I got a good story about what I used. So you ever seen these plastic storage containers? So I said, you know, that's a good looking plastic material right there. So I made my antenna insulators out of plastic pieces that I cut out with scissors.

Wow.

I did buy some wire. Well, I had some surplus wire, leftover wire. That was the right size. That's what I used initially. And then it worked great. But I keep tinkering, making little changes. But it's pretty much the same design. Sometimes I get echoed by people say, well, you made that? Yeah, it works, doesn't it? We talked.

Is that common? Or is it just certain people have that niche?

No, I think it's pretty common when somebody has done it for some period of time. I mean, I wouldn't tell somebody to go do this and this and this. You might want to have the experience of what goes wrong. And we do have different pieces of equipment to analyze that sounds like your.

Equipment is very personalized to your needs to accommodate.

It's learning how to use what you got. That's one thing that's changed. There's a little device that you can check the antenna performance with that is cheap, $50. It's pretty cheap. When they get really specialized, they get $300 expensive. And I never bought one because you borrow one rather than having your own. But when I could buy this for $50, I said, that's going to do all the stuff I need and it fits in my pocket. I think that's what I need now. I bought one that's fancier since then because it's a little hard for me to squint and read that little device. But it works. But you do have to like anything you do. If you don't operate in an arena frequently, you're going to lose some of the details, like riding a bike. You do kind of remember, but you don't do it very well. And so me going out every few days keeps me pretty current on this bit. But I do worry sometimes that maybe I'm missing something because I don't doctor satellites, I don't do Morse code. And I know that's available to me, but I'm having fun while I'm doing right now, too.

That's wonderful to hear. I think that summarizes my last question. Is there anything you can think of that I might not have asked?

Really? I think we got a pretty good coverage on it, too. Oh, if you want to get in touch with me, and I'm sure we can cover that too, or any ham radio operator. The catchphrase is, you can find me on QRZ. They look up my call sign on qRz.com. Most of the time. Most amateur radio operators, ham radio operators have their email address available there. I mean, it's not secret where we are because we had to register. We're licensed with the Federal Communications Commission. They already got our, like everything else, they got all your data somewhere. It's not like you're going to find any secrets out. In fact, most hand radio operators like to be contacted with questions about how do you do things or what helps. So, yeah, I think you'll find most of them pretty helpful.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Then again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by Andrews Gilles. Our digital and on site programs are made possible by the ADA may ioster Education center. Please join us next week for another episode of then again.