Amateur Radio facts

While investigating facts about Amateur Radio, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Last year (2015), amateur British radio enthusiast, Adrian Lane, called International Space Station (ISS) when it was passing over his home about 200 miles up in the sky at 18,500 miles per hour & received answer from an US astronaut who "welcomed him aboard"

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After Ameila Earhart's plane was presumed lost, all subsequent distress calls were treated as hoaxes. Recent research concluded however that half of the calls, many of which were received by amateur radio operators, were credible, indicating that she may have survived for weeks after the crash.

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 19 of the best facts about Amateur Radio I managed to collect.

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1. An amateur radio enthusiast in the UK heard Titanic's SOS call using his homemade radio equipment. Titanic's radio company president was so impressed by his homemade radio that he offered the man a job, where he worked for the next 35 years.

2. It's possible for amateur radio operators to call the ISS and even get a response from an off duty astronaut

3. In 2006, amateur German radio operators managed to receive radio signals from the Voyager 1 space probe, which at the time was 14.7 billion km away.

4. As NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft swung past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, amateur radio operators around the world sent a Morse Code "HI" to the spacecraft, and Juno heard them!

5. OSCAR-7, an amateur radio satellite launched in 1974 and thought to have failed in 1981, allowed Polish anti-communist activists to safely and clandestinely communicate when martial law was imposed. The telephone network had been shuttered, and other communications methods too easily discovered.

6. Amateur radio operators contributed to the sinking of the Titanic by interfering with the ship's calls for help and spreading malicious messages about the doomed ship. Congress responded by regulating radio broadcasters with the Radio Act of 1912.

7. The first private satellite was launched in 1962 (about 4 years after the launch of Sputnik-1). It was built by an amateur radio club and orbited earth for 22 days transmitting the message "Hi" in morse code.

8. Amateur radio operators sometimes communicate by bouncing their signals off the surface of the Moon.

9. A five-year old recently passed the US amateur radio licensing test and has his own callsign

10. About the Judica-Cordiglia Brothers who are two Italian former amateur radio operators who made audio recordings that allegedly support the conspiracy theory that the Soviet space program covered up cosmonaut deaths in the 1960s.

What is true about amateur radio?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

Encrypting ham radio transmissions in the USA is illegal, and the National Association for Amateur Radio fights to keep it illegal.

SAREX is a Space Amateur Radio Experiment allowing amateur ham radio operators to speak directly with astronauts currently up in space. - source

An amateur radio satellite built by HAMs that launched in 1974 was off the air for 21 years until it 'came back' in 2002 and celebrated it's 40th year of operation in November of 2014. - source

An Australian amateur radio buff who has helped NASA for decades but turned down a contract with them

A Q meter is a piece of equipment used in the testing of radio frequency circuits. It has been largely replaced in professional laboratories by other types of impedance measuring device, though it is still in use among radio amateurs. - source

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HAM radio got its name from the first amateur station CALL from the Harvard radio club. Their names were ALBERT S. HYMAN, BOB ALMY and POOGIE MURRAY. Tapping out their names in code was too much so it became Hy-Al-Mu. This was eventually shortened to HAM.

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The soviets built top secret, massive, 10 MW "over the horizon" radar stations near Chernobyl to detect missile launches in the U.S.! They were 497 ft tall, 2,460 ft long, and the signal was so powerful it was easily detected by amateur radio operators in the U.S.!