Step-by-step—Class 12

When you’re working toward your amateur radio certification, there’s a lot of theory to digest — regulations, electronics, antennas, propagation. But for most of us, the real excitement begins when we start to imagine what it’ll be like actually to get on the air. Al Penney’s Chapter 12 in the RAC Basic Certificate Course bridges that gap beautifully, showing how all the groundwork—resistors, Ohm’s law, decibels, and dBμV—comes together when you finally sit down at the radio, call sign in hand, and start operating for real. It’s a chapter that shifts the focus from knowing to doing.

From Q-Codes to Phonetics: Speaking the Language of Radio

One of the earliest surprises for many new hams is just how structured on-air communication really is. Penney revisits the history of the Q-codes, developed around 1909 to help ships communicate across language barriers. Codes like QRP (“reduce power”) or QTH (“location”) remain in use today—succinct, efficient, and a reminder that brevity is part of good operating [1]. Having said that, Q-codes have been one of the big challenges for me. As a systems thinker, I look for internal logic in coding systems. Unfortunately, there isn’t an internal system for Q-codes, except at the highest level. Anyway, I’ll start with the most important ones, and if there are more that I need, I’m sure I’ll learn them as I need them 🤷‍♂️.

Equally important is the phonetic alphabet, the backbone of clear voice communication. Whether you’re spelling out your call sign or confirming a grid locator, “Whiskey Delta Nine Tango Echo” is a lot clearer than “W-D-9-T-E” over a noisy channel. The modern NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet, with words like Alfa, Bravo, and Juliett, dates to 1956 and remains standardized across aviation, maritime, and amateur services.

And then there are the many on-air abbreviations used when communicating by Morse Code on CW (just a few):

• AR End of message
• AS Wait
• BK Break
• BT Separator
• K Over
• KN Over (to specific station)
• SK End of contact
• etc.

Then there’s HF, with SSB depending on the band and mode of communication, as well as digital modes such as Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), Amateur Teleprinting Over Radio (AMTOR), Phase Shift Keying, 31 Baud (PSK31), and others.

It’s a lot. This is an elephant I need to eat a bite at a time.

The Repeater: Your Gateway to the Airwaves

For most beginners, the first contact happens through a repeater—that wonderful piece of infrastructure that listens on one frequency and simultaneously transmits your signal on another. These are full-duplex systems, often perched high on towers or mountain tops, dramatically extending your range beyond what a handheld or mobile rig could achieve on its own.

Each repeater pair operates with a standard offset—typically 600 kHz on the 2 m band—and may require a PL (CTCSS) tone to access. If your local machine needs a 136.5 Hz tone and you forget to program it, you’ll be talking to yourself! These tones prevent repeaters from keying up in response to stray interference and are crucial in maintaining a civil and usable spectrum.

On the Air: First QSOs and Good Etiquette

Penney devotes an entire section to that moment every new ham remembers—the first QSO. The key takeaway? Listen first. Nothing will endear you faster to your local club than showing patience and situational awareness before you key up. Once you do, identify clearly, use your call sign at the start and end of each contact, and every 30 minutes in between. Never “kerchunk” the repeater (key up without identifying) just to test your signal—that’s poor form and, technically, illegal.

Al’s guidance on etiquette reads like a master class in radio citizenship. Give others a chance to use the repeater, keep conversations courteous and on-topic, and remember that repeaters are shared resources. Even small gestures—like helping maintain the repeater site or simply donating a few dollars to the local club—go a long way toward keeping our networks alive.

HF Operating: Beyond the Repeater

If VHF and UHF are your local playgrounds, HF is where you discover the world. Penney’s treatment of HF operation in this chapter demystifies what can seem like chaos: no channels, variable signal strength, fading (QSB), and the ever-present QRN of static. The key difference is that HF communication relies on the ionosphere, where refraction allows signals to bend around the globe—but also fade, flutter, and overlap in unpredictable ways.

SSB operation (upper sideband above 30 m, lower sideband below) dominates HF phone communication for its bandwidth efficiency—roughly 3 kHz compared to FM’s 15–20 kHz. Combine that with proper filtering, good receiver selectivity, and a healthy dose of patience, and suddenly you’re working stations thousands of kilometres away with only a hundred watts and a length of wire in the trees.

The Spirit of Amateur Radio

Perhaps the most valuable insight from this chapter isn’t technical at all—it’s cultural. Whether through repeaters, satellites, or CW on a quiet 40-meter band, amateur radio is as much about how we operate as it is about what we operate. Penney closes with a reminder that respect, curiosity, and generosity are the invisible glue that keeps this community together. Every “73” sent across the airwaves carries a little of that tradition forward.

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References

[1] A. Penney, RAC Basic Certificate Course: Chapter 12 – Operating a Station, Radio Amateurs of Canada, 2024.
[2] “NATO Phonetic Alphabet,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet.
[3] “IRLP and EchoLink,” Amateur Radio Wiki, 2023.
[4] “Ham Radio 101: Digital Signal Processing,” HamRadioSchool.com, 2023.