Hello!

We believe that most of you who don’t know anything about amateur radio, have a lot of questions in mind. Who we are? What do we do? What is YOTA? Etc.

It’s hard to put everything into one simple answer but we try our best. The easiest way of course is to give you a Wikipedia link, that explains most of it perfectly.

But long story short. Radio amateurism also known as “ham radio” is basically just a hobby. It’s hard to say when and how everything started, but the fact is that after Marconi’s and Popov’s inventions it somehow started.

So what do we do? Well briefly, we are using radio waves, transceivers and antennas to communicate with each other. We can create contact with new people, but also chat with old friends from all over the world. Many have asked what language do we use and what are we talking about? Or even what is there to talk about? I would say it’s like Skype, Facebook Chat or any other App these days, that we use for everyday communication. Most occasions we use English of course, but there are no rules as long as your contact understands you. Believe it or not we can actually talk about everything, whatever comes to mind. There are just some simple rules or etiquette I would say, that we follow. For example we give our contact a signal report of how well can we hear them.

With every hobby, it can be more complicated. For example fishing, like what bait or rod should I use? Or maybe I should use a net to get more fish at a time. In amateur radio you can use for example morse code (CW) for communication. Or create digital signals and even send pictures (SSTV) over the air. Some people like to use the Moon from where the signal bounces back to Earth. They even use airplanes or satellites for that. In tricky conditions there are people who are using certain decoders to get internet access at places where they don’t have a normal connection. The list goes on and on!

For more competitive persons, there are several contests all year long. Notice that major contests can last up to 48 hours straight. It doesn’t matter how competitive you are, radio sport is a place where you can really test your mental and physical capability. Like we said, it’s hard to put everything into one simple answer.

What is YOTA?

YOTA (Youngsters On The Air) is a group of young radio amateurs from IARU Region 1. Most of us are under the age of 25. Each year we get together in different European countries to spend some quality time. Not only just having fun and playing games, we come up with new ideas, new projects, plans for the future, etc. And as you can see this website here is our newest project to show other youngsters among us, who we are and what we do.

We hope that you enjoy your time here!

As I like to say to all of my friends. Once you are in, there is no way out. You just love what you do!

Kristjan
ES7GM