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 Previous: Great Lakes Members Choose New Director; Incumbents Re-Elected Elsewhere |  Next: Annual SKYWARN Recognition Day is December 7 |
By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
November 16, 2002
This week, guest writer, Tim Lewallen, KD5ING, takes us to a Web site where you can download radio equipment manuals for free!
We have all been there, cruising the tables and booths at some hamfest or swap meet and we find that deal of the century, an Icom XYZ or a Yaesu ABC. It has more doodads than a James Bond movie and sounds better than Frank Sinatra--all for a price that Archie Bunker would pay! How can you resist? One reason might hinder you is that the seller has no manuals for the radio.
In the good ol' days, this may not have been such a big issue. You have tubes and components that you can see without using a microscope, and you can more or less figure it out. But try to program or operate a rig made in the last 10 years without a manual, and you will find yourself in dire straits, beating your head against the radio to see if that might work better.
Certainly there are companies and individuals who can send you a manual for a fee, but why get a copy of the manual that you have already paid for with your tax dollars? Our favorite government agency, the Federal Communications Commission, has many user manuals on file as well as other documents related to every piece of equipment that requires FCC certification (formerly known as "type acceptance.") The department within the FCC that manages this service is the Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), and it has made it very easy to get this information, provided you know where to look.
 Need an equipment manual? Try the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology FCC ID Search Page. |
To gain access to all this information, first go to the OET's FCC ID Search Page. In the center of the page are two blank fields that you can fill out with information on the radio in question. This information is physically on the radio, printed on the sticker or label that contains the FCC ID number.
The first three letters or numbers of the ID number designate the manufacturer, and the remaining letters or numbers designate the equipment product code. For example, for the Yaesu VX-5R handheld, the FCC ID number is K66VX-5R. K66 is Yaesu's FCC number, and VX-5R is the equipment product code. In another example, on the Radio Shack HTX-200, the label has an FCC ID number of AAO1901102 with AAO being the FCC ID number for Tandy Corporation and 1901102, the equipment product code. See how easy that is?
On the Web page, enter the FCC ID and equipment product code in the appropriate field for the radio you are interested in, and click the "Start Search" button. After a bit of crunching, you will arrive at a Web page with a list of possible matches. While there may be several matches in the list, all the links will take you to the same Web page. The links we are interested in are in the second column labeled "Display Exhibits." Under that column are selections labeled "Detail" and "Summary." While the "Summary" link will take you to a page that only lists files that are available, the "Detail" link takes you where you can actually download those resources. So, click on the "Detail" link.
At this point, you will arrive at a Web page listing of all of the documents the FCC has on file for a particular make and model of radio. Those documents usually include the owner/operator manual, external and internal photographs of the radio, schematic and block diagrams, test reports, photos and sometimes parts lists--all free of charge and just waiting to be downloaded and printed out! I am sure you would agree that much of this information could be very useful! (One caveat: Material submitted to the FCC as part of the certification process might subsequently have been updated by the manufacturer.--Ed.)
The FCC ID Search Page has other uses as well. A few weeks before the Yaesu VX-7R was due to be released, I went to the search page and clicked on the "Advanced Search" link where you initiate more sophisticated types of searches. I did a search on Yaesu's FCC ID number to see what documents they had submitted in the last month or two. Naturally, several items came up. I hunted around and found the documents I was looking for--such as photographs and the operator's manual of the VX-7R--weeks before this product was released to the public!
Now this might not seem like a big deal, but it was kind of exciting getting to see the radio before everyone else.
Next time a friend asks you to come over and help program his radio, get the FCC ID number from him and prepare yourself with help from the FCC. You will be glad you did!
Until next time, keep on surfin'
Editor's note:
Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and is a member
of the QQCC (QST quarter century club),
i.e., he has been a QST writer for 25
years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée
in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager),
but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio.
As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station (WA1LOU-15)
from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan has been a long time
advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio and wrote programs to dupe
contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he is on the
board of directors of the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and uses his Mac
to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio web page. To contact
Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.
| Previous: Great Lakes Members Choose New Director; Incumbents Re-Elected Elsewhere | Next: Annual SKYWARN Recognition Day is December 7 |
