The vast majority of my younger ham friends got into the hobby because a family member had their license. I became involved in amateur radio through a mix of influences: my school club and my grandpa and mom, both of whom were hams. (It’s always an entertaining story when I explain to people that my mom and I both had our licenses before my dad, though he rectified that shortly after I got mine.)
That being said, amateur radio is the perfect hobby to pursue as a family. There are seemingly endless different subcategories of interests within it, so nobody will ever get bored. The hobby also manages to help bridge generational gaps easier than any other hobby that I know of. Since getting my license in 2019, my two sisters have also gotten their licenses. Our family now enjoys the hobby together.
Sharing amateur radio as a family hobby is very rewarding, but it can also come with oddities here and there. Let’s start with some of the amateur radio equipment that can be visible around the house. Suddenly there are wires strung through the trees in the backyard, maybe a tower and a beam, and perhaps even a radio sitting in the living room. Depending on which family member you ask, these are either great parts of living with hams or, perhaps, a “less glamorous” aspect of having a family of operators.
My mom had never really used her license before I got mine, despite also earning her callsign in early middle school. This meant that my parents had to get used to having an active ham in the house. Now, there was a rather loud, static-emitting HT sitting next to me when I did my math homework, in the hopes that someone would get on our local repeater.
Saturday nights became net nights, where the family computer or one of my parents’ cell phones would be occupied by EchoLink. Headphones were quickly instated since, apparently, my little sisters didn’t care to hear what was going on with my 25 other young ham friends checking into the net. (Eventually, they also became interested and ended up both checking into the same net.)
Once I learned Morse code, there wasn’t an evening—for a while—where my father didn’t hear me practicing or getting on the air while he was in the family room directly above trying to watch TV. Even better than overhearing CW seeping through the ceiling, my parents had the privilege of learning the respective callsign prefix per country—like they would be tested on them. Our dinner table conversations consisted of which states and countries I had worked that day.
As we all became progressively more involved in the hobby and I got into contesting, it became normal for me to spend full weekends on the radio, forgoing sleep to get the best score possible. Contest Online ScoreBoard became a frequently used website in our house, though we wouldn’t have it any other way. When it wasn’t a contest, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for someone to have a remote station running on their phone or laptop in the living room, trying to work a DXpedition.
Between the lovely sounds of Morse code floating through the air, the very aesthetically pleasing equipment dispersed around the house and yard, and the very odd operating windows that occasionally reached far into times of the day reserved for sleep, living with an active ham can be quite an interesting experience…but a rewarding one as you bond together as a family.
While some of these aspects can take getting used to—even with just one active ham in the family—it won’t be long before you’ll all be using Q signals in your texts with each other and discussing propagation over coffee.
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