G2: Operating Procedures

As a Technician your voice operating was mostly on local repeaters using FM. Down on the shortwave bands, the voice mode changes, and so do the customs. Let's start with the mode itself.

Single sideband: the voice mode of HF

The voice mode you will use almost everywhere on shortwave is single sideband, usually shortened to SSB. So the most common voice mode on the HF amateur bands is single sideband. To understand why, picture an old-fashioned AM (amplitude modulation) signal: it carries your voice twice over, in two mirror-image halves called sidebands (one above the center frequency, one below), plus a constant tone in the middle called the carrier that holds no voice information at all. That is wasteful. Single sideband fixes it: only one sideband is transmitted, and the other sideband and the carrier are suppressed (suppressed just means removed or shut off).

Why bother? Because cutting away the redundant parts gives you two real wins. SSB uses less bandwidth (it takes up a narrower slice of the band, so more people fit) and it has greater power efficiency (all your transmitter's effort goes into the one sideband that actually carries your voice, instead of being wasted on a dead carrier). That combination, less bandwidth and greater power efficiency, is the big advantage of SSB over other analog voice modes on HF.

Upper or lower? The sideband convention

Since SSB keeps only one sideband, you have to pick: the upper one (called USB) or the lower one (called LSB). The radio sounds garbled if you and the other operator are not on the same one, so hams long ago agreed on a fixed custom for each band. Memorize this little table, because the test asks it several different ways:

Where you are operating	Sideband to use
160, 75, and 40 meters (the lower-frequency HF bands)	Lower sideband (LSB)
20 meters and higher in frequency (14 MHz and up)	Upper sideband (USB)
17 and 12 meters	Upper sideband (USB)
VHF and UHF SSB	Upper sideband (USB)

Memory trick: the lowest bands use lower sideband (160/75/40 = LSB). Almost everything from 20 meters on up, including VHF and UHF, uses upper sideband. Note 60 meters and the WARC bands follow the "USB" pattern too. And here is the key point the test underlines: there is no scientific reason it must be this way. The reason most stations use LSB on 160, 75, and 40 is simply that it is commonly accepted amateur practice. It is a handshake agreement, nothing more.

Breaking into a contact

Suppose two operators are already talking (a conversation on the air is called a contact or a QSO) and you want to join. How do you politely jump in? The recommended way is simple: during a pause, say your call sign once. Not "break break break," not your whole life story, just your call sign one time, then wait to be acknowledged. One clean call sign signals "I'd like in" without trampling anyone.

Working DX: who answers "CQ DX"?

"CQ" is the universal call meaning "I am looking for a contact with anyone." When a station tacks on "DX", as in "CQ DX", they are specifically fishing for distant, foreign stations, not the folks down the street. So if a station in the lower 48 states (the "contiguous 48", meaning the connected mainland states) calls "CQ DX," who should answer? Any station outside the lower 48 states. If you are sitting in Indiana and you hear a mainland-U.S. station calling CQ DX, that call is not meant for you; leave it for the operators far away. (When you are the distant station, that is your cue to reply.)

VOX versus PTT

To talk on SSB you have to switch your radio from listening to transmitting. There are two ways:

• PTT means push-to-talk: you hold down a button (or foot switch) the whole time you speak, like an old walkie-talkie.
• VOX means voice-operated transmit: the radio listens for your voice and switches itself to transmit automatically when you start talking. The advantage of VOX over PTT is that it allows "hands free" operation, you just talk and the radio keys up on its own, no button to hold.

Setting up your transmitter: the ALC control

One setup detail the test wants: ALC, which stands for automatic level control. ALC is a built-in safety circuit that keeps you from overdriving (pushing too hard) and producing a distorted, splattering signal that smears across neighboring frequencies. To get the ALC sitting in its proper range, the control you typically adjust is the transmit audio level, also called the microphone gain, basically how loud your voice is fed into the transmitter. Turn the mic gain so the ALC reading stays in the manufacturer's recommended zone, and your signal will be clean.

This group is the "good neighbor" section: how to find a clear frequency, how much elbow room to leave, what to do when conditions change or an emergency erupts, and how nets and RACES drills work. Nearly all of it comes down to courtesy and common sense.

Nobody owns a frequency

First, a foundational idea. Does anyone have a permanent reservation on a particular frequency? No. Except during emergencies, no amateur station has priority access to any frequency. You cannot claim "this is my net frequency, go away." The bands are shared, first-come-first-served, and the only thing that ever trumps that is a genuine emergency. That principle drives most of the rest of this group.

A station in distress always wins

Here is the one situation that overrides everything. Suppose you are mid-conversation and a station breaks in calling for help, in distress. What do you do first? Acknowledge the station in distress and find out what assistance is needed. Do not finish your thought, do not ask them to wait. A call for help instantly becomes the most important thing on the band. Stop, answer them, and learn what they need.

When conditions change and someone else appears

Shortwave is fickle. The way radio waves travel (their propagation) shifts hour to hour, so a frequency that sounded empty can suddenly fill with a distant station you could not hear before. If that happens mid-contact and you start interfering with each other, the right move is to work it out cooperatively, in a mutually acceptable way. Talk to the other operators like reasonable people and sort out who moves or how to share. No one gets to bully; everyone gives a little.

Leaving room: minimum spacing

To avoid stepping on the station next door, you leave a buffer between your frequency and theirs. The recommended minimum spacing differs by mode because the modes take up different amounts of room:

Mode	Minimum separation from other stations
CW (Morse code, a very narrow signal)	150 Hz to 500 Hz
SSB (voice, a much wider signal)	2 kHz to 3 kHz

("Hz" is hertz, the basic unit of frequency; "kHz" is kilohertz, one thousand hertz.) The logic is intuitive: a fat voice signal needs a wider gap than a skinny Morse signal. Leave at least a couple of kHz around voice, a few hundred Hz around CW.

Is this frequency in use? Ask before you call CQ

Before you start calling CQ on a frequency that sounds empty, you should make sure it really is, because the station using it might be just out of your hearing range. The polite check:

• On CW: send "QRL?" followed by your call sign. "QRL?" is Morse shorthand asking "Is this frequency in use?"
• On phone: simply ask out loud whether the frequency is in use, then give your call sign.

If someone answers, move along. If you get silence, the frequency is likely yours to use.

Follow the voluntary band plan

Each band has a band plan, a voluntary, community-agreed map of which segment is customarily used for CW, which for digital, which for voice, and so on. ("Voluntary" means it is not law, but everyone benefits from following it.) When choosing a frequency to start a call, the right thing to do is follow the voluntary band plan, calling SSB in the SSB part, digital in the digital part, and so on, so you do not drop a wide voice signal into the middle of a delicate weak-signal zone.

One specific band-plan rule the test asks: in the 50.1 MHz to 50.125 MHz segment of 6 meters, the voluntary band plan says U.S. stations inside the 48 contiguous states should only make contacts with stations NOT within the 48 contiguous states. In other words, that little slice is set aside for DX work, not for chatting with the next state over.

Nets: have a backup plan

A net is an organized on-air gathering run by a "net control" operator, common for traffic-handling, emergencies, and clubs. A good practice for managing a net is to have a backup frequency ready in case interference or poor conditions ruin the main one. Since nobody owns a frequency, a smart net always plans where to regroup if its primary spot becomes unusable.

RACES: who runs it, and how often you can drill

RACES (the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) is the program where hams provide communications for government during a disaster. Two facts:

• Who may be control operator of a station transmitting in RACES during relief operations? Only a person holding an FCC-issued amateur operator license. You must be a licensed ham, plain and simple.
• How often may RACES training drills run without special authorization? No more than 1 hour per week. Routine practice is fine within that limit; anything beyond needs special approval.

Morse code, called CW (for "continuous wave"), is far from dead, it thrives on the shortwave bands because a narrow Morse signal punches through noise and weak conditions when voice cannot. CW operators developed a tidy shorthand so they can say a lot with a few characters. This group is mostly vocabulary: Q signals, prosigns, and a couple of customs.

Full break-in (QSK)

Normally a CW operator has to finish sending before they can hear a reply. Full break-in, labeled QSK, is a slicker setup where the transmitting station can hear between the individual code characters and elements, in the tiny gaps between dots and dashes. That means the other station can interrupt you instantly, even in mid-word, which is handy for fast exchanges and emergencies.

Q signals: three-letter shorthand

Q signals are standardized three-letter codes, each starting with Q, that pack a whole sentence into three letters. They began in Morse but get spoken on voice too. Add a question mark and many become a question. Memorize this batch:

Q signal	What it means
QRL?	"Are you busy?" / "Is this frequency in use?"
QRS	"Send more slowly." If a station sends "QRS?", you should send slower.
QSL	"I have received and understood." (Also why a confirmation card is called a "QSL card.")
QRN	"I am troubled by static." (Natural noise, like from lightning.)
QRV	"I am ready to receive."

Prosigns: procedural signals

A prosign (short for "procedural signal") is a special run-together character or letter pair that controls the flow of a contact rather than spelling a word. Two to know:

• KN sent at the end of a transmission means you are listening only for a specific station or stations, in other words, "go ahead, but only the station I'm working, everyone else please stand by."
• AR is the prosign sent to mark the end of a formal message.

The RST report and the "C" suffix

CW operators rate each other with the RST report, three numbers for Readability, Signal strength, and Tone. Sometimes a letter gets tacked on. When a "C" is added to an RST report, it means the signal is chirpy or unstable, the transmitter's tone wobbles or "chirps" each time it keys, a sign something needs fixing.

Two CW customs: speed and zero beat

• Answering speed: when you reply to someone's CQ in Morse, what speed should you send? The fastest speed you can comfortably copy, but no faster than the CQ. Two reasons: you should not send faster than you can reliably receive (or you will not understand the reply), and you should not out-run the station you are answering. Match or under-match, never overshoot.
• Zero beat: to "zero beat" means matching your transmit frequency to the frequency of the signal you received. When you tune so your tone exactly lines up with theirs, you are zero-beat, which keeps both stations on the same spot and easy to find.

This group is a grab-bag of useful HF operating knowledge: the volunteer self-policing program, the phonetic alphabet, how to call CQ on HF, antenna pointing for distant contacts, logging, contests, and a few other habits.

The Volunteer Monitor Program

Ham radio largely polices itself, and the formal way it does so is the Volunteer Monitor Program. It is a corps of amateur volunteers who are formally enlisted to monitor the airwaves for rules violations. They listen, document, and report problems to the FCC. Its main objective is to encourage amateurs to self-regulate and comply with the rules, the community keeping itself in line, with FCC backing, rather than relying on government agents to police every frequency.

One clever technique the test asks about: how do Volunteer Monitors track down a station whose continuous carrier is jamming a repeater open (a stuck or malicious signal holding the repeater on)? They compare beam headings on the repeater input from several monitors' home locations. Each volunteer points a directional antenna and notes the direction the offending signal comes from; where those directions cross is where the culprit is. (This is direction-finding, sometimes called "fox hunting.")

Azimuthal maps and long-path

An azimuthal projection map is a special map centered on one location that shows true bearings (compass directions) and distances from that specific spot. Hams center one on their own station so they can instantly see what direction to point an antenna to reach any place on Earth.

That connects to long-path operating. Radio can travel the short way around the globe to a station, or the long way around the other side. To work a station by long-path, you point your directional antenna 180 degrees away from its short-path heading, exactly the opposite direction. If the short way is northeast, the long path is southwest.

Calling CQ on HF

To announce you are looking for any contact on HF, the standard call is: repeat "CQ" a few times, say "this is," then your call sign a few times, then pause to listen, and repeat as needed. "CQ CQ CQ this is [your call] [your call], over." That rhythm of several CQs, your call, then listening is the accepted pattern.

The NATO phonetic alphabet

On a noisy band, spelling your call sign with plain letters fails, so hams use the NATO phonetic alphabet, a fixed clear word for each letter. Examples the test gives: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta (for A, B, C, D). Recognize that this is the standard set; made-up substitutes like "America, Boston, Canada" are not it.

Logging, contests, and signal reports

• Why keep a station log? A log is your record of contacts. Many amateurs keep one to help with a reply if the FCC ever requests information about your station. It is no longer legally required, but it is good protection and a nice record.
• Contests on HF: a contest is a timed competition to make as many contacts as possible. What identification rule applies during a contest? Exactly the normal one: identify your station according to normal FCC regulations (your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end). A contest does not exempt you from anything.
• QRP operation means low-power transmitting, the sport of making contacts using very little power (often 5 watts or less), seeing how far a tiny signal can go.
• Why exchange signal reports early? Operators trade reports near the start of a contact so each station can adjust to conditions, knowing how well you are being heard lets both of you decide whether to slow down, increase power, repeat, and so on.

Today a huge share of HF activity is digital, your computer generates and decodes coded tones, often pulling signals out of noise that a human ear could never hear. This group covers the popular digital modes, how to set up your radio for them, and where on the band they live.

How digital rides on an SSB radio: AFSK

Most digital modes are sent by feeding audio tones from a computer into an ordinary SSB transmitter. That method is called AFSK (audio frequency-shift keying), the tones shift back and forth to represent the data. Because the radio is in SSB, the sideband choice still matters:

• RTTY (radioteletype, an old but enduring text mode) sent via AFSK normally uses LSB.
• JT65, JT9, FT4, and FT8 (modern weak-signal modes) sent via AFSK use USB. That is the standard sideband for all of them.

One more RTTY number: the most common frequency shift for RTTY on the amateur HF bands is 170 Hz (the gap between its two tones).

FT8: the wildly popular weak-signal mode

FT8 sends short, fixed-format messages in precisely timed slots, which is how it digs out incredibly weak signals. Two requirements and a couple of customs:

• FT8 requires your computer's clock to be accurate to within about 1 second. The mode works in timed slots, so if your clock drifts, your transmissions land in the wrong window and nobody decodes you. Keep your computer time synced.
• When answering someone calling CQ on FT8, good practice is to find a clear frequency in the alternate (opposite) time slot from the calling station. FT8 alternates transmit slots, so you transmit while they listen.
• FT8 is commonly found around 14.074 MHz to 14.077 MHz on 20 meters (a frequent first stop for new digital operators).

Where digital lives on 20 meters

More broadly, most digital-mode operating on the 20-meter band is found between 14.070 MHz and 14.100 MHz. That is the customary digital neighborhood; calling CQ there with voice would be rude and confusing.

PACTOR and VARA: connected data modes

PACTOR and VARA are more advanced modes that set up a direct, error-corrected data link between two stations, often to move email-style messages. Facts to know:

• VARA is a digital protocol used with Winlink (more on Winlink below). A "protocol" is just an agreed set of rules for how the data is formatted and sent.
• If other signals interfere with a PACTOR or VARA transmission, the possible symptoms cover the whole list, so the answer is "all these choices are correct" (slowed transfer, lost data, dropped connection, and so on).
• Can you join an in-progress PACTOR contact like you would jump into a voice QSO? No. Joining is not possible; PACTOR connections are limited to two stations. It is a private point-to-point link, not an open conversation.

Winlink and gateways

Winlink is a worldwide system that lets hams send and receive email over radio, hugely valuable in emergencies when the internet is down. The exam's "what describes Winlink" answer is "all these choices are correct", it is that broad a system. The way you reach the network is through a gateway station:

• Another name for a Winlink Remote Message Server is a gateway.
• To establish contact with a digital messaging system gateway, you transmit a connect message on the station's published frequency. Each gateway advertises the frequency it listens on; you send a connect request there.

AREDN mesh networks

AREDN stands for the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. Its primary purpose is to provide high-speed data services during an emergency or community event, basically a ham-built wireless internet-style network that keeps working when commercial systems fail. ("Mesh" means many nodes interconnect so data can route around any single failure.)

Troubleshooting digital signals

Finally, two "what could be wrong" questions, and both have the same comforting answer: "all these choices are correct."

• If you cannot decode an RTTY or other FSK signal even though it seems perfectly tuned in, the cause could be any of several issues (wrong sideband, wrong shift, the signal is actually a different mode, and so on), so all choices are correct.
• Likewise, when listing the symptoms of interference to a PACTOR or VARA transmission (above), the answer is again all choices. When the digital-mode question offers an "all of these" option, it is very often the right one.