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