oh his was a radio too but he was only putting out a few watts so can only really talk to a few of states near him, But with code you'd be talking across the world on a good night. All his equipment was hand built from kits he purchased. it was a really nice setup except some goofy family things happened and all his gear was sold off :af: :af: among many many other family items.
Dont feel bad. Some guy ripped my grandmother off and bought everything for a song, later, an appraiser came for what was left and told her how much it was worth. She was pretty angry as she had sold half of the stuff and it was still worth a good amount, not only financially, but also sentimentally.
Probably was on 20 meter band if he was doing code work. 2 meter (around 144 Mhz) is mostly FM used for local contacts through a repeater. 20 meter is HF (High Frequency-around 14 Mhz) and, depending on time of day/season/phase of sunspot cycle, is used for world wide communication. When you are using Morse code, you are operating "CW" (Continuous Wave). It is the most often overlooked way of communicating around and can be quite entertaining to some. It uses the least amount of bandwidth and is the first "digital" form of communication. Just dot's and dashes (0's and 1's). When voice communication does not get through, often CW (Morse code) will. Remember the movie "Independence Day"? The only thing that got through the alien jamming was Morse code. This is not far off the truth. CW WILL get through with other forms of radio transmission will not. Your "tappers" are called "key's" and some old ones can be quite valuable. Don't let anyone talk you out of one until you check out what is there. (added in edit: Oops, too late!) Amateur radio is a lot of fun, if you enjoy that type of thing. The tests are not that hard, just a little study is required. If you want to gain operating privileges, there are higher class licenses that do still require learning Morse code, but the speed requirement is way down to only 5 words per minute. When I took my code test and I went for a higher class license, I got up to 20 words per minute, but have lost most of my speed here lately.
a big reason they changed the test and created a lower test for it is for the model airplane guys and less people use it. technically your supposed to have atleast the low end licence for using those kind of radios that RC planes use and the power they output.
