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The Bands

Just like we all have our favorite Super Bowl food, we Hams have our favorite bands. The band to chose may be secondary to your favorite, but the key question to ask is “what band or bands will my license allow me to operate on?” From your first day of your licensing process you will learn this.                                                                                                     Secondly you need to know what equipment covers what bands. Just cause you have a base station doesn’t mean it will cover HF as well as VHF. We’ll discuss equipment later on in these lessons.

Band Restrictions                                                                                                              Besides what band you can use, you also need to take into considerations of any band restrictions based on your license. For example, here in the US all hams can use 10m, however Technicians are limited on how much of the band they can use, along with being restricted to only SSB phone and RTTY.   So again the higher level the license the more privileges you get.                                                                                                            Not to mention the ITU has split the world into 3 separate regions, each with it’s own band plan.  The good news is most of these overlap with each other, so you can communicate around the world as long as you use a frequency that’s acceptable for that region and yours.

Popular Bands                                                                                                                    So what are some of the most popular bands? The following will show the more common bands and when to use them. Just make sure your license allows you that band and check the restrictions.                                                               

 

Band (meter)

MHz

Use*

HF

160

1.8 - 2.0

night

80

3.5 - 4.0

night and local day

40

7.0 - 7.3

night and local day

30

10.1 - 10.15

CW and digital

20

14.0 - 14.350

world wide day and night

17

18.068 - 18.168

world wide day and night

15

21.0 - 21.450

primarily a daytime band

12

24.890 - 24.990

primarily a daytime band

10

28.0 - 29.70

daytime during sunspot highs

VH F

6

50 - 54

local to world-wide

2

144 - 148

local and medium distance

UH F

70 cm

430 - 440

local

* It should be noted that band conditions vary for many reasons and thus all of these bands can at times take on the characteristics of others. We will discuss this in the section titled Propagation later on.

HF Bands                                                                                                                           For those that want to try for that long distance or overseas contact the HF bands are for you. They offer propagation sometime during the day, night or season, allowing one in Japan to talk to England, or the US to talk to Australia. No matter what time of day it is there’s usually a band available for the DX.                                                                                                   During sun cycles and solar flares different bands can be used for communication , this will be detailed later on in the lessons.

FOR A LIST OF US BAND PLANS CLICK HERE

 

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