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Scope of the term "Amateur"
On Tue, 28 Jun 2016, rickman wrote:
The term "amateur" is often applied to people who have obtained a license to use radio equipment for communications. Is this term inclusive of those who don't obtain a license but use receivers for various uses? I have been looking into design of receivers in the LF to ELF frequency ranges. Is this part of "amateur" radio? It's complicated. One reason amateur radio exists is because once Marconi spanned the Atlantic with radio, it was out of the lab and people played with it. There was a time when daily newspapers would have articles about it, so i gather. INitially, nobody had a use for radio, that came through use. So when the Titanic sunk in 1912, the rules were tightened and then later tightended more. Amateur radio was there from the start, the rules getting tighter as the years progressed. So you didn't need a license at first, and then later people started broadcasting because they were aware more people were playing with radio receivers than actually had transmitters. There probably was no distinction initially, but as time went on, yes "amateur radio" does mean a licensed ham radio operator. There are people who have similar interests, but not in transmitting (or they don't want to bother with the license), they are "amateurs" but not "amateur radio operators" or whatever you want to call them. SOme have mentioned shortwave listeners, and a subset of that is interested in building, but I think most SWLers are just interested in receiving, maybe building small projects to enhance reception. SOmeone brought up part 15. That may be a grey area. 100mW walkie talkies on the CB band were part 15, and in the sixties there were even projects (and commercial units) for improving performance, "you can DX so long as you keep within the rules", unlike CB that was only intended for local communication. So those would place the transmitter and integral antenna up a tower, and then use a decent shortwave receiver for reception. That gave you height, but the better receiver probably helped a lot, since those 100mW walkie talkies generally used superregenerative receivers. But that wouldn't have classified as "amateur radio". And in the sixties and seventies there were articles in the hobby magazines about that 160 to 190KHz band, promoting it as a hobby. Every few years there'd be an article, often a construction article, but then nothing. I think it was the late seventies when we'd start to hear about serious work on that band, though perhaps it just wasn't visible before. But as someone said, often by hams who were interested in using those low frequencies. But the users of that band would be called "radio hobbyists" even though the more serious users probably did have ham licenses. Michael |
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