You have two primary sets frequencies that your legal to operate
in when you get the first basic license, you have to take a test,
the basic first ham license is the technical license. If you pass you are
licensed by the FCC. You get a call sign. There are Ham clubs in every state and
most every county and all over the world. You can get radios
and software that can actually track your position and post that
on the internet. This tech is now growing and I don't know what
competing technology will come out on top, a couple of different
types of systems. The coverage is spotty in the mountains.
You have repeater systems supported by the ham radio clubs, this
is done by them, out of their own pockets. The ham radio clubs
also have rescue communications and so on for disasters and events.
Repeaters are boosters for hand held radio operations, a station is
set up someplace often as high as possible and then you transmit
at one frequency to the repeater and the repeater repeats what you
say and send it out at another frequency. The radios are designed
to operate at this and in effect it boosts your signal and you can
reach out 30 and more miles.
Many ham radios can be modified to be able to transmit in the
out of the ham radio range into the range of military and police
and rescue frequencies. Recently they are making it harder to do
this modification. What you typically do is remove one or more diodes
from the circuit board.
K5EHX Amateur Radio Repeater Mapping
Look at the above map and go the area your interested in and see
what Repeaters are there. Typically most populated areas have good
repeater coverage and less so for less populated areas, but usually
there are a few in the mountains and so on. Typically you want to
be up high in the mountains to be able to communicate. You manually
program the repeater frequencies in your radio or use your computer
to do so.
For normal usage for hiking and so on, the dual band hand held radios
are fine, I have a Icom which is said to be more easy to operate, the
Yaesu Radios are very good, but harder to figure out how to operate.
As for actual usage in the mountains, I just got my hand held ham radio
and yet to have much experience in the north cascades, but I did hear
of a story from last year that a guy broke his leg on the mountain in
winter, mount baker and he used his hand held ham radio to call for
help, it was said a guy in Idaho heard him and relayed the information.
The hand held's typically put out five watts max, the car radios are more
powerful, I think twenty and fifty watts are their power levels for the
two different frequency ranges.
I belong to mountain rescue, I used my radio on a mission a few weeks ago.
It was out of my area and I had to manually program my radio, also they
put up a portable repeater, and I had to program for that. I was way out
in the mountains on the mission, the central cascades. Zero cell coverage
and I had ham radio repeaters that I could hit with no problem.
As for in general, I suppose that I can hit a repeater anyplace in the Cascade
mountains if I was up high enough, and if I had the needed repeaters programmed
in or I had their frequencies and locations wrote down with me.
Also you can get the frequencies for law enforcement and many other
government and military, medical entities and you can listen in on these
frequencies if you wanted to. Of course a hand held scanner probably would
be better for this, I may get a scanner in the future.
If you wanted to talk around the world or if you had a boat and want to
talk around the world, as you can imagine this can be useful on a boat
or out in the wilderness in a cabin as in the far north and so on. You get
the Ham Radio General or higher license then you can get a base station
that can use a lower frequency and you can have much more power and
you can if weather/sun conditions are right , can talk around the world.
I use a radio for mountain rescue, I volunteer in this and go on a few
missions a year. I really enjoy this activity.
Dan