Amateur Radio: A Hobby, Not an Earthquake Plan AI

After earthquakes and other natural disasters, people flock to amateur radio as a sort of plan B. To be honest, when I first got the itch, that was my intention too. Once you actually get into it, you realize it’s a hobby — and an expensive one at that.

TA1ANW here, coming to you, folks.

Turkey’s earthquake-radio myth

Because TRAC (Turkey’s amateur radio society) and ham operators were so active during the 1999 earthquake in particular, amateur radio in Turkey has become deeply intertwined with the idea of search and rescue. Considering that GSM communication was still pretty much in its infancy in 1999, amateur radio came to the rescue after the infrastructure collapsed. As a continuation of that era, most search-and-rescue teams still steer their members toward getting an amateur radio license.

But the hobby doesn’t really have much to do with earthquakes or disasters anymore. Sure, amateur radio can be somewhat useful as a backup system if modern communications hiccup, but in Turkey it is definitely not some earthquake communication method.

Amateur radio is people trying to communicate without a specific “provider”, mostly using equipment they built themselves or can keep running on their own. It’s a hobby where you try to reach the farthest distance and the most people that way. When getting into it, your main goal should be “I’m going to make contacts with lots of people, in lots of locations.” So if your goal is “I’m buying this for earthquakes”, you’ll be disappointed — don’t.

”Let me buy a radio for earthquakes” — do I need a license?

We can split radios into two groups: PMR and amateur radios.

• PMR radios, by design, have a fixed antenna that can’t be removed, and they don’t require an amateur radio license.
• Amateur radios are usually the ones where you can enter a “frequency” — they require an amateur radio license.

If you’re only thinking of it as a fallback “in case the phones go down”, a PMR radio suits you better. (When buying one, there’s also an option called DMR — that’s not it, watch out.)

It gives you relatively short-range communication. It outputs 0.5 watts. The device has 16 separate channels, meaning technically 16 separate conversations can happen in the area around you. Say you bought one for your kid and one for your spouse: set them to the same channel and you can talk on that channel within the same area.

But don’t forget this: if someone else talks on that channel at that moment, if everyone uses it at once, you won’t be able to get through. If there are 10–15 other families who bought the same radio and use the same channel, technically there will be chaos at that moment. That’s why neither a PMR radio nor an amateur radio is a mobile-phone alternative — just a distant fallback that covers one limited need.

You can think of the usable range as roughly your own neighborhood, but there’s no fixed “X kilometers” definition. You can also think of it like sound or light — the distance they reach drops when they hit obstacles. Sunlight, say, will reflect off whatever it hits; radio signals have similar technical characteristics.

The only sensible disaster-related use is this: if you’re saying “I’m going to join search-and-rescue operations”, then buy one. These people mostly use their organizations’ frequencies too, and organize their SAR work there. For example, during the forest fires in the summer of 2021, the search-and-rescue teams in the region were very helpful.

And unless you have an official duty, you can’t keep those organizations’ frequencies in your radio, you can’t listen to official agencies’ frequencies, and you can’t contact official agencies over the radio. Plenty of people in Turkey try to pull off things they shouldn’t with a “nothing will happen anyway” mentality — and even if law enforcement doesn’t track it down, we as the amateur radio community do, and we report it to the relevant units.

In short:

1. If you don’t have an amateur radio license and just want a backup → buy a PMR radio.
2. If you don’t have an amateur radio license but want to get one → get your license first, then buy an amateur device.

It is not a device to buy thinking “if there’s an earthquake I’ll reach the police or the army from under the rubble” — it doesn’t serve that function and it can’t.

I want to become a ham

Let me start with the word “amateur”. Beginners usually read “amateur” as something like “novice”. The amateur/professional distinction is about whether you do the thing as a profession, whether you earn money from it.

An amateur footballer is someone whose profession isn’t football and who doesn’t earn money from it; a professional footballer is someone who earns money from it. Playing in the third division or being bad doesn’t change that. And “professional” doesn’t mean doing the job very well either — it means doing it for money or as a profession.

That’s the difference between an amateur/professional fisherman, an amateur/professional driver, an amateur/professional photographer, and so on.

As for the second part: in Turkish we distinguish between “telsiz” (a two-way radio) and “radyo” (a broadcast receiver), but the device is actually a radio either way. The term “radio operator” is used a lot in the community, because what we actually do is send and receive radio signals. In Turkish, the device that can transmit got named “telsiz” (literally “wireless”), while the one that can only listen got named “radyo”.

Why do we do this? Because it’s a hobby. We learn electronics and radio frequency. We meet lots of different people from lots of different places. It’s a broad hobby in scope, too — I, for instance, have mostly done listening; I get more enjoyment out of RF and the projects built on top of it. I know the devices I use.

We’ve all watched television; the terrestrial antennas we use, satellite receivers, FM radios, phones, garage remotes, tire pressure sensors — every one of them is a radio receiver/transmitter. While digging into those is what excites me, someone else finds decoding and listening to a digital radio transmission more exciting.

There are specific frequencies allocated to us; we listen and transmit within those ranges and try to make contacts. In Turkey these ranges are set by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK, the Turkish telecoms regulator) and announced as the “National Frequency Plan”. The body responsible for amateur radio affairs is the Directorate General of Coastal Safety. The Amateur Radio Operations Service, established within it, handles all the paperwork and procedures that concern us.

The license process in a nutshell

I’ll go through the details of these procedures later, but in short:

• You apply for the amateur radio certificate via e-Devlet (Turkey’s e-government portal).
• You pay the exam fee.
• You sit the exam on a date set by the Ministry of National Education, at e-exam centers (not online).
• If you pass the exam, you pay the certificate fee and pick yourself a callsign.
• Once your certificate is issued and you own a callsign like TA1ANW, you can start operating.

As I said, first I wanted to answer those asking “what is amateur radio, why do we do it, what do we do?”; later we’ll look at the fees and procedures in detail. Let this stand here as a primer for people who apply without knowing what they’re getting into.

Amateur radio repeater map

An old Google My Maps repeater map — shared as locations; I drew on it when adding location data to amatortelsizcilik.com.tr and @telsizbot.

I also developed an Android app as an alternative to amatortelsizcilik.com.tr and @telsizbot — amatör telsiz röle.