Handbook, chapter 1. Why radio in 2026
Somewhere on the short waves, right now, a woman's voice is reading groups of digits. No callsign, no explanation, on a schedule. It has gone on for decades: the station is audible, people record it, nobody can decipher it, and nobody has ever said whose it is.
These are called numbers stations, and as an answer to «why radio in 2026» they work better than any argument. The air still holds things the internet does not — and above all, things that ask nobody's permission.
Count the links
On an ordinary day both rows work and there is no difference at all. Press any of the buttons and the difference appears.
On an ordinary day there is no difference at all: both chains work and the message gets through. Press any of the buttons and the difference appears.
The point is not that the network is bad. The point is that it is made of other people's parts: of nine links not one is yours, each belongs to somebody, each is powered by something and each can be switched off. In a radio contact between two people there are none of those links.
This is not an argument against the internet. It is an answer to why you would keep a second channel.
What people actually do on the air
Amateur radio is not one pursuit but a dozen different ones, held together only by a licence and shared bands. People arrive for one thing and stay for another.
DX — working distant stations. Catching a station from an island an expedition visits once a decade. The thrill is the angler's: most of the time nothing happens, and then it does.
Contests. Competitions for the number of contacts in a day or a weekend. It looks pointless until you try it: a sport of stamina, hearing and the ability to hold a frequency.
Satellites. More than a hundred amateur spacecraft are in orbit, and for some of them a hand-held antenna and a handheld radio are enough. A contact through a satellite you can see with your own eyes is an experience many people never get over.
Digital modes. FT8 and its relatives: a contact to the other side of the planet on five watts from a balcony dipole. And, incidentally, the largest propagation-measuring network in the world, built by amateurs.
CW. The oldest mode, regularly buried and showing no sign of going away. There are two explanations: it is audible where a voice no longer is, and it is simply a pleasure to work.
Building things. From a wire antenna to a receiver made of a dozen parts. This is the part that exists nowhere else: hearing the bands on an instrument you made yourself.
Emergency communications. The dullest and the most important part. People remember it only when everything else has stopped working — which is exactly why it is practised in advance.
What it gives you personally
Three things, and none of them is about «socialising»:
You understand how it works. Not figuratively. You work out the wavelength yourself, hang the antenna yourself, see for yourself why by day you hear your neighbour and by night Europe. After that Wi-Fi, mobile networks and GPS stop being magic — they are the same subject, only on other frequencies.
You have a channel that depends on nobody. Two hundred watts, a wire between two trees and the ionosphere — that is enough to reach half a continent away with no infrastructure at all.
You get problems that never run out. An antenna that could be better. A receiver that could be more sensitive. A CW speed that could be higher. This is a hobby you cannot come to the end of.
What it costs
Less than it seems, and not where it seems.
Expensive — the transceiver. A used set of the previous generation costs about as much as a decent phone; a new one, several.
Cheap — everything else. A 40-metre antenna is twenty metres of wire and an insulator; it works better than anything bought, if there is somewhere to hang it. A key, cable and connectors are trifles beside the set.
Free — the beginning. You almost certainly have a receiver already: in half an hour you can connect to somebody else's receiver over the internet, turn across the bands and hear what is going on there, before spending anything and before any examination.
And that is the best first move: listen. Everything else comes later.
Where to start
The order that saves the most time:
- Listen. For a week or two, across different bands and different times of day. You will hear that the bands are alive, and work out which part of them interests you.
- Get the physics straight. The wave, decibels and the bands are enough — three short chapters, after which the rest reads itself.
- Get a callsign. Without one you may listen as much as you like but you may not transmit — and that is not a formality but the law.
- Put up an antenna. The cheapest thing in the shack and the most important.
- Make a first contact. It will be clumsy, and that is normal: everybody's was.
How a callsign is obtained in Ukraine, and the conditions for operating under martial law, are chapters of their own, and they have to be written from the documents in force, with the date of checking in the text. Until then, check with the regulator and the national radio society directly rather than with articles on the internet: here «I think it's allowed now» costs someone trouble with the law.
Next — chapter 2, the callsign: how to get one in Ukraine and what it costs.