Amateur Radio Offers A Window To The World

For those with a sense of adventure and a desire to travel, there's the exciting and diverse hobby of amateur radio, an armchair approach to the world.

Sometimes referred to as ham-radio operators, amateur-radio operators are a diverse lot who are interested in "the way things work," interacting with other people and providing a community service. They are people in pursuit of a hobby as modern as it is old.

According to Bob Bastone, amateur-radio operator and past president of the Skyview Radio Society of Upper Burrell, amateur radio is a great marriage of radio and computer. Hams use computers for logging, radio control, digital-signal processing, interfacing with the Internet, digital communications and more. One of the digital-communication modes used by operators is RTTY, which encodes and decodes transmissions into information that can be seen on a computer screen.

Or, it can be done the "old-fashioned way," voice to voice over the radio.

Ham Radio from a Chair

Amateur Radio Remote Broadcast

A team of radio fans will go to great lengths to be on the air from the ends of the Earth.

This is not the kind of trip you can book on Travelocity or Orbitz.

Later this month, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts, including two from Central Florida, will embark on a journey to a remote Antarctic island called Peter I.

The expedition might as well be going to another planet: Peter I is one of the hardest places on the globe to reach, an uninhabited, volcanic island about 280 miles west of the Antarctic mainland and roughly 8,000 miles from Orlando.

One of the biggest challenges members have faced already is explaining why on earth they're doing this.

Ham Radio in Antarctica