Farang Voice From the North

Well, One Day at Least!

2011 PAARA Field Day antenna 1186 x 891 Image 1218 cropped.jpg

On 25 Feb 2015 my new Thailand Amateur Radio license was issued. Yippee!!

HS0ZMD

All hams in Thailand who are not native Thai get the HS0Z prefix, so the only question was what the last two letters of my callsign would be. Farang is Thai slang for a foreigner. Not really a derogatory term, but often used in a playful way to poke fun at the expats living in Thailand. We will eventually have our own home in the North of Thailand, hence the Farang Voice from the North moniker.

Of course it's more likely to be Farang CW from the North, as I generally prefer using Morse Code over voice communications with ham radio, but then you have to explain what CW (continuous wave) is to the non-hams in the audience.

I actually delayed submitting my license application a bit when they were issuing licenses in the HS0ZLX to HS0ZLZ part of the alphabet. MD works much better on both voice and Morse Code than those earlier choices in the LX to LZ series. On voice it is Mike Delta when given phonetically, short and sweet. And the sounds on Morse Code for those letters are also short, with a good punch on the D.

When I get postcards made (QSL cards) that hams send to each other to confirm the contacts they made with others, I'd like to find a font that has a wider, fatter zero than the one above, which looks a bit squished, like the S and Z are closing in on it.

Update

Today my actual Thailand Intermediate Amateur Radio License arrived in the mail, forwarded to me from our Thai family home. It is quite official looking, on stiff blue plastic the same size as a credit card. It has my picture, a barcode along the left side and two red logos. Most of it is in Thai script, but with some in English as well. The license is valid until 24 Feb 2020. It also has a signature block under my picture, but it is a rectangle that is only 3 X 18 mm in size. I'm practicing signing my name in such a tiny space!

Full Disclosure

That picture at the top isn't of my antenna installation in Thailand. In fact it is a picture I took in 2011 of one of the antennas used in my local radio club's (PAARA) Field Day operation. PAARA takes the annual Field Day event very seriously and so we use BIG antennas on towers. In 2014 we were eleventh in the nation, out of nearly 2,700 entries, second in our operating class, less than 300 contacts shy of first place. Hopefully one day I can have a nice ham station in Thailand and my PAARA buddies can come over and work the world from the other side of the globe.

And maybe once again, I'll see my ham buddy, Gerry N6NV, climbing up a tower! 2014 PAARA Field Day - Gerry on tower 1079 x 1438 Image 15738 cropped.jpg - Photo by Jim, K6SV

Image by Jim, K6SV