As someone who collects old Amateur Radio publications and books, one of the neatest little books of the 1940-70s published by the ARRL were their numbered publications, including The Radio Amateur's Operating Manual, How to Become A Radio Amateur, and Operating an Amateur Radio Station.
While there are books that answer the same needs today, it appears from what I hear on the HF bands that many of our hobby's newcomers are not taking time to equip their ham shack libraries with reference materials.
For example, I listened to a fellow this evening on 75 meters asking the guys in a roundtable about an antenna. He is a freshly minted ham, with a very late-issue KI4 callsign.
He was ready to send some money to a guy he was talking to earlier who told him about this wonderous shortened antenna that would work multiple bands without an antenna tuner. What he described was a G5RV! He was willing to pay a hefty price for an antenna that would work, and apparently he assumed he couldn't make his own antenna.
The guys in the roundtable made suggestions for other antennas he could built — the simplest being a full-size 80-meter dipole fed with a balanced feedline. The new ham was willing to pay thru the nose for a G5RV, but when he balked at the notion of buying an antenna tuner. “My TS-940 has one built in! Why do I need another one?”
One ham suggested he simply Google the term “multi-band dipole,” which was a great idea. The League pubs are excellent, but I think perhaps there needs to be a very inexpensive version done on newsprint with a slick cover, kinda along the same line as the old series of small League pubs. Sell it for $4, and call it “Getting On The Air for Dummies.”
The Tech license isn't really a good entry-level ticket — at least from the standpoint of introducing new hams to HF operation. I had one of the state's ARES DECs tell me how useless HF was! This fellow is an enthusiastic but new ham whose never had an HF station.
Even some sort of free pamphlet, sent on request, could help a new-to-HF ham figure out what the heck they're doing. I've heard a few horror stories of new hams who get ripped off because they don't know better.
For a lot of these new hams, they're used to getting screwed because it happened when they were CB operators. The prices on crappy 11-meter rigs – particularly those that can be modified for 'uppers' and 'lowers' – amaze me. You can buy a gently used 100-watt HF rig for the price of some of these gray-market/illegal CB rigs.
Of course, the CB culture wasn't one of homebrewing anything. I remember when my friend and I were 13 and looking at the ARRL handbook and planning a 11-meter quad how incredulous some of the adult CB'ers were that we thought we could actually build an antenna! They couldn't believe that you could actually transmit on a square loop of copper wire. Unless it was manufactured by Avanti, Antenna Specialists, etc., it couldn't possible radiate an 11-meter signal, right?? LOL!
Perhaps VE teams could be equipped with a four page handout about getting cheaply on HF. It might help some of the newcomers who aren't in a club or have an Elmer.
That's it for tonighte … 73 de KY4Z … dit dit …