How to Rig a Ham Radio

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm Kurt N7QJM. Well, congratulations are in order; you've passed your test. Now it's time to buy your first "rig," your first ham radio. And I'm holding in my hand a little ham radio, it's a handheld rig. So, congratulations, let's move forward on what to purchase in terms of these little guys. They're the handhelds. Well, most amateurs end up purchasing either a dual-bander--which is what this one is, it has a little dial thing right in this area here. And of course your antenna is detachable right up here, you just turn it and you can detach it--on this dual band rig--and that's all the antenna is on this. But the nice thing about this is you can hold them and operate these dual band rigs or I'll grab this single band guy over here--and this is a single-band rig. And you can see that the antenna is actually a little bit longer than this one, and these are all battery operated so you can use them very easily while you are driving, at home, or handheld--you can also, like I say, detach the antenna here, and hook it up to a larger antenna outside or in a variety of different other locations and get extended range. These are the smallest, most cost effective, and the easiest to operate. They are voice-operated and they work really well and they last a long time. I bought this one in the early 90s, and you can see for the price point between two and five hundred dollars. It's a great buy. You can operate on two different bands on voice. It's great. This one over here again, this one is a single-band operation, and it all operates on one band called the VHF frequency band. This one operates on both the VHF and the UHF band. Now there's one other piece here before we go to the next section, and that is there's a mobile unit that are actually kind of akin to the stereo systems that are in cars. They operate with bigger antennas, and they are larger--which means more power, and their sound quality is better. You can also purchase one of those and have those installed into your car. So they have really great advantages and they operate really well for a long period of time. They are all DC operated and you can plug them into chargers, so it works great in that environment as well. Anyway, that is your first rig, lets' go on to talking about the bigger rigs over in the corner, and we'll kind of give you a piece by piece breakdown on that next time. At Expert Village, I'm Kurt N7QJM. 73s."