You can pass all three exams and still have no idea what to say when you key the microphone. The exams test rules and theory; they do not test the rhythm of a contact, and that rhythm is learned entirely by listening.
So: listen first. A week of listening before your first transmission will do more for you than any amount of reading, including this page. What follows is the structure underneath what you will hear.
Before you transmit
Find a clear frequency, then check it anyway. On phone, ask “Is this frequency in use?” — or on CW, QRL?. Ask twice, ten seconds apart, and listen properly in between.
This matters more than it seems. HF propagation is not symmetric: a station running a contact 5,000 miles away may be completely inaudible to you while your transmission lands squarely on top of theirs. The asking costs you twenty seconds. Not asking makes you the person who dropped a signal into the middle of someone’s DX contact.
Never tune up on an occupied frequency. Use a dummy load, or find genuinely clear space, and keep it brief. Modern radios rarely need it at all.
Stay inside the band plan. Not just the legal sub-band edges — the conventional segments too. Running wide SSB through the digital or CW portion of a band is legal in some places and inconsiderate everywhere.
Calling CQ
The format is simple and the common mistake is making it too long.
“CQ CQ CQ, this is November Four Lima Lima Zulu, November Four Lima Lima Zulu, calling CQ and standing by.”
Three CQs, your call sign phonetically twice, done. Then stop and listen for a full ten seconds. Long CQs are counterproductive: people tuning across the band need only a second or two to recognise a CQ, and every extra second is a second you are not hearing the person trying to answer you.
Use standard ITU phonetics — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie. Cute substitutions (“Nancy Four London London Zanzibar”) are harder to copy under noise, which defeats the entire purpose of phonetics. The reference page has the full alphabet.
Directed CQs are fine and useful: “CQ DX”, “CQ Japan”, “CQ Parks on the Air”. They tell people whether to bother answering.
Answering someone
Send their call once, then yours phonetically. That is all.
“November Four Lima Lima Zulu, this is Whiskey One Alfa Bravo Charlie.”
If conditions are poor, send yours twice. Do not send theirs three times — they know who they are.
What a contact contains
The minimum useful exchange is a signal report and your location. Everything beyond that is conversation, which is welcome when both parties have time and unwelcome in a pileup or a contest.
Signal reports on phone use RS: Readability 1–5, Strength 1–9, spoken as “five nine”. CW adds a Tone digit: RST.
Give an honest report. “Five nine” reflexively given to a barely-readable station is useless information, and the other operator may be using your report to evaluate a new antenna. If they are weak, say so — “you’re about four by five, some fading” — and mention QSB, QRM or QRN when present. Real reports are a courtesy.
Transmit your call sign at least every ten minutes during a communication, and again at the end of it. In English, in a mode the receiving station can decode. That is the whole rule, and it is the one rule that is genuinely easy to break by accident during a long ragchew.
Working a pileup
When a rare station appears, a hundred people call simultaneously. There is a correct way to participate and it is counterintuitive.
Listen first, for at least a minute. You need three things before you transmit:
- Where they are listening. Rare DX usually works split — transmitting on one frequency and listening on another, to keep their own frequency clear. They will announce it: “up 5”, “listening 14.205 to 14.210”. If you call on their transmit frequency, you are transmitting into a frequency they are not listening to, and everyone hears you do it.
- Whether they are taking calls from you. “Europe only”, “North America only”, “stations with numbers 5 through 9”. Ignoring a directive is the single fastest way to be blacklisted by an operator who has a very long memory.
- Their rhythm. Where in their cycle they start listening.
Then: send your call sign once, and stop. One clean transmission of your full call, then listen. Repeating it continuously does not improve your odds — it means you are transmitting while the DX is answering someone, so you never hear whether it was you.
Do not call on the exact frequency everyone else is using. If the DX is listening “up 5 to 10”, find a clear spot in that range — 400 Hz off the crowd is enough. A DX operator with a pileup is trying to pull any single readable call sign out of a wall of simultaneous signals. Being slightly separated makes yours the one they can copy.
When they come back with a partial — “N4L, again?” — that means you. Send your call again, clearly, twice. When they confirm, give the report, say thanks, and get off. The contact is complete. There is a queue.
Small habits that mark a good operator
- Do not repeat yourself unnecessarily. Say it once, clearly, at a normal pace. Speed and repetition are not the same as clarity.
- Leave gaps. Pauses let other stations break in with emergency traffic and let the other operator ask you to repeat something.
- Do not talk over fading. If they are fading out, wait — they will come back.
- Use plain language on phone. Q-codes belong on CW. “QTH” and “QSL” have crossed over and are fine; laying the whole Q-code catalogue into a voice contact is affectation.
- Do not editorialise on the air about other operators, politics, or how bad someone’s signal is. Everything you transmit is public, recorded by SDR receivers you do not know about, and permanently searchable.
- Answer a call for help immediately and clear the frequency. Emergency traffic outranks anything you were doing.
- Give new operators room. Everyone was terrible on their first contact. A patient reply to a nervous station is the best thing you can do for the hobby.
Logging
Log every contact: date and time in UTC, frequency, mode, call sign, and reports both ways. Paper works; software is better, because it feeds the confirmation systems.
- Logbook of the World (LoTW) — ARRL’s cryptographically signed confirmation system, accepted for most major awards. Set it up early; the certificate process takes a few days.
- eQSL and QRZ Logbook — easier to join, accepted for fewer awards.
- Club Log — excellent analysis of what you have worked and, critically, what you have not.
- Paper QSL cards — slower, and still the most satisfying confirmation there is. Direct with return postage, or via the bureau.
Whatever you choose, confirm promptly. Someone on the other end may need your contact for an award they have been chasing for years.
Next: POTA: Your First Activation is the fastest way to get a lot of contacts under your belt, and Reference Tables has phonetics, Q-codes and RST in one place.