Who am I and Why I am a Radio Amateur
Fernando R. Arroyo, EA4BB
I was born in Madrid in 1964.
Trying to recall how and when my interest in communications and international affairs began, I must now confess I had quite a naughty start.
When I was a small boy, payphones in Spain worked in a peculiar way: You could initiate a call without actually putting any money in the phone. For a few seconds you would hear the voice of the receiver of the call at the other end saying “Hello?... Hello?...” and then the communication would end unless you put a coin in the slot.
As a young child I never had too many coins, but I had loads of imagination instead. One of my favorite pastimes was making random international calls to exotic places, just for the thrill of hearing for a couple of seconds a voice from far away. All International Dialing Prefixes and area codes for the main cities were printed on a colorful chart conveniently fixed inside the booth, something I found of course very educational. I must have “worked”, as radio operators say, quite a few countries that way and I probably made some people wake up in the middle of the night in time zones far apart from that of Spain. No harm meant, just a 7 or 8-year-old boy in Madrid having a bit of fun when his parents weren’t looking.
There were –and there still are- special broadcasts on shortwave targeting DXers (people interested in shortwave listening “per se”), and those were another step in my initiation to Amateur Radio, as I learnt through them about antennas, receivers, schedules... I remember and dearly miss the broadcasts in Spanish of “Sweden Calling DXers”, transmitted from Stockholm by Radio Sweden International and presented by Britta Brandt, whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years later in Stockholm, during my backpacking days.
Sometimes I would hear on my radio mysterious transmissions that appeared to be kind of muffled, sounding as if Donald Duck was speaking in Gaelic to someone. Now, that was a very intriguing thing indeed for me as I did know someone was obviously talking to someone there and then, and the fact I could not understand a word of what was being said made those communications all the more interesting. I guess I had in mind undercover agents, possibly talking to their bases about nuclear secrets etc, and I obviously got terribly interested in finding a way to crack the mystery. Another challenge for that very young listener; another possible step forward. It was only after quite some time that I learned that is the way SSB (Single Side Band, one of the modulation systems used by radio amateurs to transmit their voice) sounds in a conventional AM receiver such as my Philips, not equipped with a detector to make them intelligible.
For me the next, big step, was acquiring a CB radio, that is, a real transmitter and receiver through which you can actually communicate with other people over the radio waves. CB radios operate on the 11-meter band, the so-called “Citizen Band”, and had the great advantage of being relatively inexpensive and not needing a license to be used. You have seen these radios in many movies, typically operated by the colorful character of a lonely truck driver during a long haul trip, anywhere on the roads of America. Once you got hold of one of those you just needed to procure a small 12v power supply, such as an old car battery, put up a simple antenna you usually made yourself with a few feet of wire (a dipole), and voilà, you were “on the air” and ready for new boundaries of excitement. And how exciting that was! I started making contacts first with neighbors, then people in Europe, then America, Asia… I still remember that summer afternoon when I logged in my first contact with Australia… With all that excitement my hand was shaking so bad that it could hardly hold the pencil :-)
The next step was quite predictable: At some point I decided to sit the test for an official Amateur Radio license, as that should provide access to additional frequencies and new exciting features, and that is how I got my first official “novice” call sign the early eighties, EB4AHJ, which I subsequently upgraded to the “upper class” call EA4CPX. After a few years I changed this one to EA4BB, or EA4 Brigitte Bardot, which was issued to its original holder sometime in 1934 and was appealing to me, and was available when I applied for it in 1985.
I eventually finished my studies and became an Architect by the Polytechnic University of Madrid. As a student I was already very much infected by that early interest in foreign countries and peoples. And then I was very lucky to get a student job as a tourist guide. Now, don’t get any romantic ideas about that kind of job, for it is extremely hard work and carries a very heavy responsibility with it. I was specialized in Scandinavia, one of the regions of Planet Earth I have a weaker spot for. This job allowed me on the other hand to work only during the holiday season, and study for the rest of the year, though I usually took much longer summer breaks so I could visit on my own other countries. Back then there were some great travel possibilities for young backpackers: Inter Rail, very low budget Round-The-World trips from London… All this was quite cheap and straightforward, and there was a certain glamour to it, too. International travel was very, very different in good old pre-September 11 days, before we all became potential suspects of something and started being treated as such.
Soon after getting my degree I started working as a volunteer for an NGO, planning and building medical and education facilities in different African countries. I did that for a few years before moving into the private sector. In 2000 I joined the UN, and I still work there as a specialist in the coordination of humanitarian affairs. This is the job that brought me to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I have been living and working since March 2016. Before this I have been working in some other places for different periods of time and, wherever possible, I have obtained an amateur radio license and kept in contact with friends and the hobby. In the past I have signed TZ6BB (Mali), Z21BB (Zimbabwe), ST2BF (Sudan), D2BB (Angola), TU5BB (Ivory Coast) and 9Q5BB (Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). Here in the DRC I hold the amateur radio callsign 9Q6BB, with which I am fairly active. Also, I “make noise” now and then from my station in Madrid EA4BB, whenever I am there on leave.
Still today, switching on my radio and turning the dial in search of something interesting is in no way less of the thrill it was when I did it so many years ago with my grandfather’s radio. The “radio bug” is still there, stronger than ever, and it seems it is there to stay :-)