Congratulations! You finally earned your amateur radio license

[Jonas]

Congratulations! You finally earned your amateur radio license...

You're an officially and legally licensed Amateur Radio Operator, complete with a call-sign and your "ticket" hanging on the wall. Now it's time to buy a short-wave high-frequency radio transmitter-receiver (or in "ham-slang", a "transceiver"). I won't push a particular brand or model here - you can get that information by talking to the members of your local ham club, and doing your own research. What I will do is make the case for a "portable" rig vs. a "base-station" rig.

The base-station rig is as the name implies. It's big, has lots of dials and knobs, plugs directly into commercial power (the electrical socket on the wall), and is probably what you pictured sitting on your desk while you were studying for your ham exams. This may not be the wisest choice however.

A portable rig works off 12 volt DC, can be mounted in a car or truck, will cover all the same bands, frequencies, and modes as a base station rig, will put out 100 watts of transmitting power, and can quickly and easily be adapted to run on emergency power if the commercial power grid goes down.

My own rig is the Kenwood TS480SAT. It sits on my desk, although it doesn't look nearly as impressive as a big base station rig, and it requires a separate power supply to convert the commercial house power down to 12 volt DC (I use a separate Astron SS-33M power supply for this purpose).

Some portable rigs also have a built-in antenna tuner - one less piece of hardware to buy, hook up, and power up in an emergency. Most portable rigs come complete with mounting brackets for a vehicle. All you have to do is unplug your rig from the power supply, screw it into the brackets premounted in your vehicle, plug it into the vehicle's power supply, hook up the mobile antenna, and you can "beat feet and get outta Dodge (or Devon)" - and still have good and reliable long distance two-way communications!

Best of all, A portable rig, which will pretty much do everything a big base-station desktop rig will do (except anchor a boat), costs about $1,000 less than a comparable base station desktop model! What's not to like?