Show Originally Aired: 6/12/2003 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
Tuning in to the World
An early homemade radio transmitter and microphone Email to friend
View QSL cards from around the world. Images from "Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio"
Long before you could boot up, log on and point and click your way around the globe, there was ham radio. Churning out an audio cocktail of beeps and whirs, chirps and static, the ham radio was a passport, of sorts, for a particular kind of technology-loving, wander-lusting, basement-dwelling Good Samaritan. Someone who knew and relished the difference between a picofarad and a millihenry. Someone who appreciated the random fortune of a favorable ionosphere and a continent-hopping connection.
But there's no need to talk about ham radio in the past tense, because some two-and-a-half million hams world wide still consider 20 megahertz the preferred way to fly. You can keep your broadband. Ham radio. On a wing, and a bandwidth.
Bob Hopkins, Director of the Computer Center at Cooper Union, and "Elmer" for the book, "Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio," by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre
