AMATEUR RADIO CALL SIGNS HAVE A SECRET
“We pause now station identification…”

For the older readers of my ramblings, this is probably a phrase that you have heard in years gone by. It’s familiar, but not something that you can put your finger on. Just hanging out in the corners of your memories, but nothing that you really thought of.

It wasn’t something that you thought about because of course you knew what channel you had set your radio or TV to, so what purpose did that server for you, the listener? You already knew the identity of the station, those words were an indication that you could tune out for 10 seconds without missing anything.

Truth is, station identification is a REALLY big thing when transmitting on a channel in a licensed band. Whether that license is for a specific frequency (like easy listening FM 100.1) or news stations (KSL 1160 AM comes to mind for me) or in the amateur community where the person transmitting has the license, not the actual space on the band, license serve a purpose. Most regulatory bodies require that stations identify themselves at periodic intervals (those intervals change depending on other factors) but identification is almost always a requirement. When people pay a lot of money for the frequency or work hard to be licensed for the privilege, knowing who is transmitting where is a key component. The reason is not for when things go right, but for when things go wrong.

Much like an AP transmitting on channel 9 or a device that is sending DHCP discovery frames 20 times a second, wireless engineers the world over are always looking for a way to identify those devices so they have a chance to track them down. WiFi is easy with it’s source and destination addresses, but what about signals that don’t contain any “data”, just audio and/or video? When they start to misbehave, there are ways that RF engineers can hunt them down, and a station identifying themselves occasionally in their broadcasting is a key component in that. Sit on the spectrum for a while and engineers know they can count on hearing something that identifies who is transmitting the signal they are interested in. With that information, there are ways to track down the owner of that signal.

In the scenario I listed above, it seems pretty innocuous, but what about when the license is the person, and not the business? Truth is, the information is just as readily accessible for amateur radio holders the same as corporations, and I’m not sure everyone is aware of the dangers contained in this.