SCOUTING AMERICA · MERIT BADGE · KIA KIMA
CQ CQ CQ — CALLING ANY SCOUT
No towers. No cables. No internet. Just you, a radio, an antenna — and the entire planet within reach. Today you learn how invisible waves carry your voice around the world, and how to get your own call sign.
Those little marks above the lightning bolts aren't decoration. They're Morse code — the first kind of message humans ever sent with radio waves.
TURN IT UP — Real audio, generated live in your browser at 620 Hz, the classic CW tone. That sound has carried messages across oceans since the 1890s. Your badge is wearing it.
Einstein, explaining radio to someone who asked. The full quote: "The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat."
The geek answer: radio is communication using electromagnetic waves. The Scout answer: it's how you talk to someone with nothing in between but air.
Your phone is wireless for the last few hundred feet — then it needs towers, fiber, power grids, and data centers. Take any of those away and it's a brick.
Ham radio is off the grid: a radio, an antenna, and a battery. That's the whole infrastructure. That's why hams show up when everything else goes down.
The internet's last hop to your device is radio — 2.4 and 5 GHz.
GPS, satellite TV, satellite radio — very strong radio from very far up.
A 2-watt two-way radio that also happens to run apps.
Little radio transmitters in your pocket.
Radio waves so energetic they cook. (Short wavelength = high energy.)
Your car radios the gate as you drive through.
Yet another flavor of digital radio, ~30 feet.
Free over the air, from a very tall antenna on the highest hill around.
Broadcast vs hobby, one-way vs two-way, call signs, phonetics
Line of sight, ionosphere skip, WWV, DX, ITU & FCC
Frequency, wavelength, MF/HF/VHF/UHF — draw the chart
Transmitter → antenna → waves → receiver
Block diagram, AM/FM/SSB/CW/digital, NOAA, cell systems
Electricity, grounding, lightning, towers, DC
Go see a real radio installation
Technical, broadcasting, operating
Our track: the service, licenses, Q-signals, emergency calls, gear — and a real 10-minute contact
COUNSELOR NOTE — Requirement 9 has four options; this deck runs option (a) amateur radio all the way through its six sub-parts, ending at the mic.
Studios, big boards, computers, and a very tall tower on the highest hill. One station transmits, everybody listens, advertisers pay the bills. Nobody talks back.
AM · FM · TV · shortwave
Ham radio is the biggest group — no minimum age, every Scout in this room could be licensed. Plus RC cars/boats/planes, drones, CB for truckers, FRS "talkabouts" for hunting and hiking.
Always two or more people, taking turns. Businesses use it to be efficient. Hams use it in emergencies, to experiment with gear and antennas — and mostly for fun.
SPOT THE ANTENNA — A broadcasting antenna is very tall and sits near lots of people. A two-way antenna sits on a car, a roof, a backpack, or a hilltop repeater. Different jobs, different hardware.
Broadcast stations get 3–4 letters (WKNO, KLOVE). U.S. hams get letters + one number — and that number is your call sign district, from where you were first licensed.
REQ 1c ACTIVITY — Rob's classic: invent your own call sign. Pick K, N, or W, add your district number, add your initials.
Radio doesn't stop at borders, so the world divided call sign prefixes by country. Hear a strange prefix and you instantly know where that operator is sitting.
As Rob puts it: "My heart starts beating a little bit faster when I make contact with another ham from one of these faraway places."
🇲🇬 Madagascar
🇧🇷 Brazil
🇯🇵 Japan
🇦🇺 Australia
🇬🇧 England
🇺🇸 U.S. — district 4 (the South)
Weak signals and noise turn B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V and Z into the same mush. So radio operators everywhere use one standard word per letter — no guessing, no repeats, no mistakes.
ON THE AIR — "This is Kilo Four Tango Romeo." Say it once that way and the other operator writes it down right the first time. That's the whole point.
Voice
into mic
Transmitter
converts to RF
Antenna
launches waves
Receiver
+ antenna + speaker
Throw a rock in a pond and ripples spread out. Feed a signal to an antenna and radio waves spread out — in every direction the antenna is designed to send them, for tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles. Any receiving antenna they touch can pull them back out of the air.
THE BIG DEAL — Nothing in that chain is a wire, a cable, a tower, or a data center. That's why radio still works when everything else has failed.
Radio waves move at the speed of light. A signal can circle the entire Earth — 25,000 miles — in about 0.134 seconds. Faster than you can say "hello."
The simplest way for a wave to travel is line of sight: straight from your antenna to theirs. VHF and higher basically require it — which is why those antennas live on the tallest hill in town.
Line-of-sight signals bend a little, but not much. Go far enough and the curve of the planet gets in the way — your signal sails off over the horizon and the person on the other side hears nothing.
So how do hams talk to Japan? They bounce. →
THE VOCAB — The bounce is a skip. The dead area where nobody hears you is the skip zone. Bounce twice and you've made a second hop. Aim too steeply and your signal punches through the ionosphere into space — nobody hears you but an astronaut.
NIST's time stations — WWV near Fort Collins, Colorado and WWVH in Kauai, Hawaii. Atomic-clock accurate, transmitting around the clock on 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz.
They share frequencies, so WWV uses a male voice and WWVH a female voice. Hams use them to check the clock AND to hear how well the bands are working today.
Long-haul contacts bounced off the ionosphere. DXing is the chase — collecting distant stations for awards. A DXpedition is a trip to activate somewhere rare and remote, like a reef in the South China Sea.
I ♥ DX
Radio waves ignore borders, so nations sign treaties. The ITU (Geneva) coordinates them worldwide. The FCC writes and enforces U.S. radio law — and issues every call sign, including yours.
REQ 2b–d CHECK — Be ready to say what WWV is for, what DX means, and who the ITU and FCC are. Three sentences each and you're done.
That count is the frequency, and its unit is the Hertz — named for radio pioneer Heinrich Hertz. One cycle per second = 1 Hz. Nine cycles = 9 Hz. A thousand = 1 kilohertz. A million = 1 megahertz.
The distance from one peak to the next is the wavelength. The two are locked together — squeeze the waves closer and more of them go by each second:
WHY YOUR MICROWAVE COOKS — Very short waves carry very high energy. That's also why hams name their bands by wavelength: the 20-meter band's waves are about 20 meters from peak to peak.
REQ 3 CHECK — Your requirement is to sketch this chart yourself: the four groups (MF · HF · VHF · UHF), their frequency limits, and at least one service in each. Sweep the dial and copy down what you find.
Turns your voice into an electrical signal.
A key or a computer can take its place — that's how you send CW or digital instead of voice.
Transmitter + receiver in one box. The heart of the shack.
Inside is a schematic with hundreds of parts. Want to read one? That's the Electronics merit badge.
Optional. Makes the outgoing signal stronger.
More power punches through noise and reaches farther — but a good antenna usually beats more watts.
Special cable carrying the signal out to the antenna.
Usually coax. Bad feedline wastes your signal as heat before it ever reaches the air.
Radiates your signal into the world — and catches theirs.
A wire, a beam on a tower, a metal rain gutter, even a flagpole. The most important part of any station.
BLOCK vs SCHEMATIC — A block diagram shows the whole system at a glance (these five boxes). A schematic maps every component inside one box — essential for repair, useless for seeing the big picture. Your requirement: draw the block diagram.
The transmitter sends one steady tone and the operator chops it up. A short piece is a dit. A longer one is a dah. Strings of them spell letters.
It was the first messaging ever sent over the air — and in a real sense the first digital communication. It still gets through when voice can't: a tiny CW signal punches through noise that would bury a conversation.
HAM SLANG — CQ = "calling anyone." DE = "from." 73 = "best regards," the way hams sign off. So "CQ DE KA4RAL" means: anybody out there? this is KA4RAL — your counselor's actual call sign.
Chop the carrier into two lengths instead of two sounds — say a 58-microsecond burst for 1 and a 100-microsecond burst for 0. A computer on the other end reads the string.
…which could be a character, a command, or a piece of an image. Modern ham digital modes send text, photos, and even slow-scan TV around the world on a few watts.
A normal digital link goes computer → encoder → wire or fiber → decoder → computer. Every piece of that middle depends on infrastructure somebody has to build and power.
Swap the encoder and decoder for radios and antennas, and the exact same data crosses the gap with nothing in between. In a major disaster, that's the whole ballgame.
"NWR All Hazards" — a network broadcasting nonstop from a forecast office within about 40 miles of you, 24 hours a day: warnings, watches, forecasts, observations.
It also carries non-weather emergencies through the FCC's Emergency Alert System — AMBER Alerts, chemical spills, national security. Put one in your family's emergency kit.
162.400–162.550 MHz · VHF
Your phone is a 2-watt two-way radio with a computer attached — transceiver, antenna, mic, speaker, battery. Base station antennas divide the town into "cells."
Near a tower: strong call. On the edge of a cell: dropped call. Outside them all: "no service."
Ham radio runs on batteries, generators, and solar — and its only "load limit" is trained operators taking turns.
PERSPECTIVE — A wall outlet can deliver 15,000 mA or more. You only need about 50 to stop a heart. Electricity finds the shortest path to ground — and if you're standing in a puddle, that path may run straight through your chest.
Always power down and unplug before opening gear. Leave "hot" service to people trained for it.
Two hands on a live circuit sends current across your chest and heart. One hand sends it down your side. Bad shock beats fatal shock.
Never wear headphones while repairing equipment — the cord is a ground path right through your head.
You're not effective doing homework tired. You're not safe doing electricity tired. Stop.
Three-prong plugs, GFI outlets, and a real Earth ground: rods driven 6–8 feet down. Never gas lines. Cold-water pipes aren't reliable anymore — too much plastic plumbing.
The scourge of ham radio. Lightning arrestors in the feedline plus a serious ground system at the antenna base. With a bad ground, the shortest path to Earth runs through your radio — and through you.
Proper fall protection, always. And never put an antenna anywhere near a power line — going up OR coming down.
A car battery pushes over 1,000 cranking amps. Short a ham power supply and you'll get the same fireworks. Red = positive, black = negative — always.
◉ ◉ ◉ REQUIREMENT 9 · OPTION A ◉ ◉ ◉
Six sub-parts stand between you and the microphone: why the service exists, the three licenses, Q-signals, the emergency call, the equipment — and then a real 10-minute contact.
STAND BY… TUNING UP…
Community service and disaster help — one more way to do a Good Turn daily.
Talk with people in other countries, one operator to one operator.
Hams have invented technologies used far beyond ham radio.
Clear, calm, and understood the first time.
The entry license — and the one most Scouts earn. Basic operating procedures, key regulations, and some basic electronics.
Privileges: all amateur bands above 30 MHz — full VHF/UHF, repeaters, satellites, ISS contacts — plus limited HF privileges. No Morse code required for any license today.
Intermediate understanding of operating practices, regulations, and electronics theory.
Privileges: everything a Technician has, plus most of the HF shortwave bands — this is the license that opens up talking around the world.
An exam on advanced electronics theory and practice.
Privileges: every band, every mode, no restrictions — and the ability to administer license exams to others.
HOW YOU TEST — The FCC lets certified volunteers give the exams. They're called Volunteer Examiners (VEs), they're usually local hams, and sessions happen at clubs, hamfests, and libraries. There is no minimum age — the youngest licensed hams are in elementary school.
Requirement 9a(3) asks you to explain at least five Q-signals or ham terms — you just met eight. Pick your five favorites and be ready to define them out loud.
THE LAW — In a genuine life-or-death emergency, anyone may use any radio, licensed or not. The rules bend for saving lives.
Three dits, three dahs, three dits — chosen because it's unmistakable, easy to send with cold hands, and impossible to confuse with anything else on the band. It has been the international distress signal since 1908.
Two young Marconi operators — Jack Phillips, 25, and Harold Bride, 22 — sat in the wireless room of a ship called MGY. They weren't even crew; they worked for the radio company, and their normal job was sending passengers' telegrams.
WHY BOTH? CQD was the Marconi Company's own signal — "CQ" (all stations) plus "D" (distress). SOS had been made the international standard by treaty a few years earlier, but plenty of operators still hadn't switched. Titanic sent both — one of the first major uses of SOS at sea, and the one everybody remembers.
Cyril Evans was her only wireless operator. At about 11:30 PM he tapped out a friendly warning: "Say old man, we are stopped and surrounded by ice."
Phillips, buried in passenger telegrams, fired back "DDD" — operator shorthand for stop sending, you're stepping on me. Evans, no hard feelings, switched off his set and went to bed.
Ten minutes later Titanic hit the iceberg. The nearest ship never heard a single call for help.
Harold Cottam was in his cabin, undressing for bed, still wearing his headphones out of habit while he waited on one last message. He was unlacing his boots.
That's when Phillips's CQD came through. Cottam ran for the bridge. Captain Rostron turned the ship, pushed her past her rated speed through an ice field in the dark, and drove ~58 miles in about four hours.
Carpathia reached the lifeboats after 4 AM and pulled 705 people out of the North Atlantic — the only ship to arrive in time.
Two operators — one asleep with the power off, one in his headphones by pure chance. The world decided luck was not a safety system.
CONNECT THE DOTS — Requirement 2d asked why nations write radio treaties. This is the answer.
That same 1912 law shoved amateurs off the "good" long wavelengths and banished them to everything below 200 meters — the short waves, which everyone was certain were useless junk.
A decade later the hams, playing in exile, found those "useless" waves bounce off the ionosphere and circle the world.
Every HF band you tuned — 80, 40, 20, 15, 10 meters — and every skip you bounced exists because amateurs were sent somewhere worthless and found the best real estate in radio.
"SOS, from MGY." The signal that saved 705 people.
Short for Handy-Talkie. Nearly every ham owns one and carries it just in case. A few watts, a stubby antenna, VHF/UHF.
range: a few miles… unless →
Mounted in a vehicle — more power, a much better antenna. Many hams use theirs more than anything else. Some go international right from the car.
Lives in the ham shack with the heavy gear: big transceiver, amplifier, power supply, tower or wire antenna outside. Shacks range from one shelf to gloriously complicated.
A little H-T can't punch through hills. So hams put a repeater on top of the tallest one: it listens for weak signals and instantly retransmits them with real power. Suddenly your pocket radio covers the whole county.
Link repeaters to the internet — EchoLink, IRLP — and your 5-watt handheld can reach an operator on the other side of the planet through a chain of repeaters and servers. Small radio, big world.
The requirement: a 10-minute real or simulated amateur radio contact — properly logged, with signal reports exchanged. (Or submit five QSL cards from contacts you've made.)
Readability 1–5 · Strength 1–9 · Tone 1–9 (CW only). "Five nine" means perfectly readable and very strong. It's the most-spoken number in ham radio.
BE READY — Bring your operating card, log every contact, and be prepared to talk about it with your counselor afterward. Nervous is normal. Every ham on the other end was a first-timer once.
A broadcast station, a public-safety dispatch center, a club's ham shack, or a camp station like K2BSA. Four questions to bring back:
JOTA — Jamboree On The Air, the third weekend each October: Scouts worldwide talk to each other by ham radio. Paired with JOTI (Jamboree On The Internet).
Field Day,each June: clubs everywhere set up emergency stations outdoors for 24 hours. Show up — they will absolutely put you on the mic.
HOW TO GET THERE — Most jobs need a high school diploma; engineering needs a college degree. You can gain broadcast experience at a college radio station, get technician training at community college, and earn FCC and industry certifications along the way. Your ham license is a real credential — put it on the résumé.
◉ END OF TRANSMISSION
No minimum age. No Morse code requirement. There is a volunteer examiner near you right now and a room full of hams who would love to help a Scout pass the Technician exam. Your call sign is waiting for someone to come claim it.