The Following review is reproduced via the December 1995 Issue of QST Magazine with the kind permission of the ARRL;

Reviewed by Steve Ford, WB8IMY

Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure is a marketing tool of sorts. The target audience is nonhams and the sales pitch is simple: Try Amateur Radio. You’ll like it.

Ed Hammond, WN1I, weaves a very personal description of our hobby from the perspective of someone who has spent about 25 years at the microphone and key. Ed’s narrative style imparts a warm, conversational tone to the book. It draws you into the flow of the story and holds your attention reasonably well throughout.

Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure is not a reference book. There is very little instruction material and no schematics or formulas. Because Ed is covering an immense topic in only 220 pages, depth of detail in any one area is minimal. Packet radio, for example, warrants little more than a page. Amateur television (ATV) is explained in a single paragraph.

Instead, the focus is on the human side of Amateur Radio. The book is packed with names, call signs, and the stories that go with them. If it’s true that every person has a life story worthy of a novel, Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure allows you to glimpse a page or two of some pretty fascinating biographies. Ed introduces you to the world of DXing and DXpeditions by recounting the dangers faced by hams who dared to operate from far-flung islands and other isolated areas. Even something as mundane as antenna safety is illustrated dramatically through the story of Walt Martin, KB5HOV, who was almost electrocuted when the antenna he was disassembling came in contact with 7,500-V power lines. (Miraculously, Walt lived to tell the tale!)

When you’re painting a canvas with a broad brush, some details are bound to be lost or distorted. When discussing VHF/UHF DXing on page 95, Ed states that E-layer skip is a byproduct of severe weather conditions. If he means sporadic E propagation, that’s not true. Sporadic E is not caused by weather. From the description (which uses a hurricane as an example), it’s obvious that he meant tropospheric propagation. On page 131 he says that satellite operating requires an azimuth/elevation rotator and directional antennas. If you’re talking about an optimal station, that statement is probably true. But hams have been successfully working RS-10, RS-12, RS-15, FO-20 and the digital satellites for years with omnidirectional antennas such as ground planes, J-poles and so on.

Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure devotes a decent amount of space to VHF/UHF operating, but the bias is clearly in favor of the HF bands. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure is a great inspirational tome for the prospective ham who shows an early interest in dabbling in the worlds above and below 50 MHz. It’s also the kind of book you’d give to a person who’s viewing Amateur Radio with a little uncertainty. If they read this book and they’re still not sold on the hobby, forget it!

It’s worth mentioning that most of the hams profiled in the book are middle aged and up, and the language is definitely geared to that audience. This is not to say that a young person won’t find motivation in the pages of Ham Radio: Your Worldwide Ticket to Adventure, but the stories will resonate far better among the 30-and-over crowd.