It is seven in the morning, and inside an Indica, A.P. Ravishankar and D. Selvaraj are fiddling around with wires. They connect the battery of the car to a device that looks like a World Space radio receiver. “This is a transceiver. It transmits and receives signals,” explains Selvaraj. A magnetic antenna is fixed on the roof of the car, and along with a mike it is connected to the transceiver. The Indica is now a ‘ham shack'. It holds amateur radio equipment that uses certain frequencies for private, wireless communication.
Ravishankar tunes the transceiver and we hear Prakasam from Muthumangalam (Erode) who describes the weather in his town. “Good morning ECY,” he addresses Ravi. “Bright, sunny morning. Comfortable here. Good day.” A few fiddles with the tuner and Krishnakumar from Coimbatore comes on air. He gives a brief about how the hamming community in the city works. “We are communicating via the repeater on the clock tower at President Hall,” he says. A repeater is a device that receives amateur-radio signals and retransmits them at a higher power. “We are on the VHF (Very High Frequency) band. This repeater has a footprint of about 25 km, which means the signals can be picked up by hams in Mettupalayam, Udumalpet, Palakkad and Perundurai too.”
Says Krishnakumar, or VU3NKK, his hamming name, “An amateur radio station can be set up in no time. For two people to communicate they need two ham radio sets separated by a distance.” There are about 200 licensed ham radio operators in Coimbatore and 50 of them are active hammers. Krishnakumar says how they played a significant role during the Noyyal Yatra organised by Siruthuli. “We had hammers stationed with their equipments at different checkpoints in the route of the Yatra. They conveyed information pertaining to traffic and other emergency situations that arose during the Yatra.”
Another ham operator, Ramesh from Saravanampatti explains how Ham radio operators have volunteered to communicate information in disaster-prone areas, where even mobile networks have been jammed.
Ernest Peter, a marine radio officer and another ham radio enthusiast declares that hamming is the queen of hobbies. Though he admits that people prefer the internet or the mobile for communication over amateur radios, he believes the joy of transmitting voice signals over the radio and communicating with fellow hams is pretty special too.
Some of these ham enthusiasts even build their own wireless transceivers. Selvaraj is one such. A radio enthusiast, Selvaraj assembled radios even while he was in the sixth class. “I always carried a radio in my school bag. I listened to BBC and Radio Ceylon. Sometimes, when I tuned into channels late in the night, I would hear conversations between hammers.” And that's when he decided to take up hamming as a hobby.
Senior hammers offer month-long classes to those who may want to take up the hobby. At the end of the month, aspiring hammers appear for an examination conducted by the Department of Telecommunication and Information Technology, Government of India. After clearing the exam, the would-be hammer goes through various stages of verification. Only after that is he or she granted the license to operate a wireless transmitter. “Once the license is procured, a person is an official ham radio operator. The process takes anywhere between six months and two years,” says Peter.
Extolling the virtues of hamming, Peter says, “It is an exciting way to make new friends and disseminate knowledge. The best part of this medium is that we don't have to pay money to anyone to have a conversation. We can also communicate with fellow hams from anywhere in the world. There is no question of network jamming.”
