Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio How far can I talk on radio? A question that regularly hits the enquiring minds of people who are not (yet) radio amateurs is one about distance. For both amateurs and those who are not ye) inducted into our community the concept of distance speaks in ways that other parts of our hobby don't. It's a simple concept, between these two points, how far can you talk? The interesting thing to me about this phenomenon is that distance isn't a metric that we as amateurs use for anything other than calculating repeater coverage and then only for frequencies that are line-of-sight. If you're not an amateur then this might be unexpected or even illogical. Let me give you two questions: How far can you talk in amateur radio? - and - How far does light shine? If you're an amateur you'll know that those two questions are pretty similar, if not identical for certain frequencies, but if you're not, then these two questions appear completely unrelated to each other. Let me start with someth