Every Sunday morning starting at 0900 hrs local time sharp—as in atomic clock sharp—if your trusty shortwave radio receiver is tuned to 7,075 kHz LSB, you are likely to hear a crackly voice calling “This is 5Z4… Good morning and welcome to the RSK Sunday Net…” almost without fail! That call comes from a dedicated RSK member beaming out from his/her humble radio shack at home.
This has been a proud tradition on the 40 meter band for well over 50 years, drawing call-ins from numerous hams across Kenya and eastern Africa!
From a bygone era of analogue radios well before the cellular, video conferencing and social media epoch, amateur radio was the only way to communicate in real time and from any location. Arguably, a scheduled radio call remains the only truly independent means of synchronously and collectively checking in with a group of remotely operating hams even today!
The RSK is privileged and proud to have this long social legacy of radio activity to its name in the region. You don’t need to be a trained and licensed operator to listen in on the week’s bulleting, traffic or highlights on Sunday. Just a capable shortwave radio and a decent aerial out the window would afford you a gander into radio chatter and a world connected at the speed of light.
The 9:00 a.m. callout is the responsibility of a designated Net Control radio manager, much like a news anchor or meeting moderator. In keeping with rules and regulations, ham operators check in in an orderly fashion and typically share information on their callsign, location, radio signal and weather conditions, traffic or news to relay if any, and finally banter on almost anything under the sun—who said hams don’t have etiquette?
The concept of scheduled check-ins are practiced not only on HF but on other bands, and in Kenya currently, we have maintained a VHF or 2-meter band repeater rig on duplex, largely serving the Nairobi and environs from Isinya to Thika with a robust antenna. A 2-meter repeater has a more localized reach, but affords the use of simpler and affordable handheld transmitters. It’s both a transmitter and receiver, or transceiver, and generally of fixed frequencies with suitable signal separation between transmitted and received frequencies.
In lay terms, think of a repeater as a cellular mobile ‘booster tower’, where your 5-watt ‘walkie-talkie’ size HT signal can be amplified to 50 watts over a much wider area covering possibly thousands of square kilometers. Beyond scheduled calls, or ‘scheds’, ham operators usually monitor the repeater for ‘CQ’ call-outs or spontaneous breaks to chatter. The current RSK repeater is a station in its own right with the callsign 5Z4NBI transmitted in CW (Morse) mode every 10 minutes.
The sky’s literallythe limit on opportunities to enjoy using and building radio systems!
