Resources for new hams

If you just became a ham (or are considering getting your license) its often hard to get started with the dizzying amount of information available.

Here are some references that will hopefully get you started.

This list is applicable to almost any new ham, but parts of this list focus on resources near our Los Altos Hills area.

SPECS and the SPECS meetup group

The Southern Peninsula Emergency Communications System group is one of two groups in our county that maintain repeaters and run weekly nets.  (The other group covers the eastern county: SVECS).

The SPECS weekly nets runs on Monday night, with a 7:30pm 'check in' on the UHF repeater, and announcements and referral to city-centric check-ins at 8:00pm.  Details are available on the Monday Night Net page.

SPECS also has a meetup group which tries to collect together ham radio oriented events that happen in our area.  Many of those events are focused on information for new hams, or activities where folks can gain experience.

SPECS (and other clubs in the area) also participates in the Electronics Flea Market, a local institution that has been running for decades.  Each club runs the flea market for that month, and use the event as a fund raiser.  SPECS (and the other clubs) always need folks to help out at this event (it takes about a dozen volunteers to run the event).  Feel free to visit one of the flea markets to see a wide array of valuable antiques (and lots of junk...) for sale.

County ARES-RACES

The Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service are the formal emergency organizing groups used in our county.  The web site for our county is https://www.scc-ares-races.org/.

We are fortunate to have one of the most active ARES-RACES groups in the country.  They offer an extensive set of classes designed to both teach radio operation and theory as well as to have a common operating practice across the county.

In particular, they offer two classes directly focused on new hams:

• Introduction to emergency communications which covers VHF/UHF radio basics

• Fundamentals of emergency communications which covers the basics of the procedures we use

The above links have the slides used in the class.  The Training and Events page is where you can see the dates of upcoming classes and register for a class.

All the classes are free, and are very helpful to give 'the basics' for a new ham.

The county also has three drills a year to have city and county test communications, as well as one event for everyone in the county.

Equipment

What radio to get is an eternal question new hams face.  While there is no 'one right answer', a good recommendation is to get something inexpensive at first, so you can figure out what features are important to you.

A good starting set of things to get are:

• A UHF/VHF hand held radio (called an HT, which comes from the japanese phrase Handy-Talkie)

• A spare battery for the HT

• A headset or speaker-mic + earbud for the HT

• A better-than-stock antenna.

• A "mag-mount" antenna for use in a vehicle

Los Altos Hills CERT put together a page of specific radio recommendations in 2018; the list still looks reasonable today.

The county Field Operations - Type III Part B and Type II class covers emergency radio equipment in some detail.

Los Altos Hills CERT

The other organization new LAH hams should be aware of is the LAH Community Emergency Response Team.  Our CERT organization relies extensively on ham communications (and ham communicators!) for coordinating our response during an emergency.  The LAH-CERT program is generously supported by the LAH County Fire District (LAH-CFD), and the district maintains a calendar of events of interest to the CERT community.

Bay-Net presentations

Bay-net is a local repeater organization.  They call themselves an "un-club".  They run quite a few repeaters in the bay area, several of which are digital and many of which are linked.

But the reason I'm listing them here: they have a series of excellent presentations called Ham 101 and Ham 201.  If you are just starting and want coverage of radio basics: these are excellent resources.  Go to the resources page, and look for the Ham Radio 101 section.

Finding places to use your radio

As previously pointed out: the western part of the county runs the SPECS net every Monday night.  Its a great, low pressure way of getting on the air

There is an amazingly active net every weekday at 9am.  It has its own web page.  Many of the same folks meet every Wednesday for lunch; see the 9am page for details.

Programming your radio

Lets face it: programming dozens of repeaters correctly into your radio is hard.  Many radios have proprietary programming tools.   Struggling to be polite: those programs generally show they were written by radio people.

There is an open source program called Chirp that supports most radios that are out there.  I highly recommend it.  It is widely used, and there are lots of folks around who can assist with getting started.

Some people prefer RT Systems.  This is a commercial product, and costs about $50 per radio model.  But it has support if you hit a roadblock.

But ideally you should know how to manually program your radio, at least to do one channel.

Repeater and Frequency Lists

The county group maintains a list of frequencies we use during emergencies, organized by jurisdiction.  This list is actively managed, and coordinated to avoid interference between multiple users on nearby frequencies.

Los Altos Hills has our own list.  We ask people to program the first 20 memory locations using the standard assignment to ease sharing and using radios during an incident.