How long should a radio transmission actually be?

Fifteen seconds. Twenty is the absolute ceiling. Count that out loud sometime — it's barely a sentence and a confirmation, and most operators blow past it before they've finished saying hello.

The reason is mechanical. Direction finding needs your carrier present long enough for a station to take a bearing, and it takes several stations doing that at once before their lines cross into a position. A short over gives them one bearing and nothing to cross it with. You're not hiding the transmission — you're making it too brief to be useful.

There's a checklist for what gets extracted from intercepted traffic, and it has a name worth memorising: SELDOM UP. Strength, Equipment, Logistics, Disposition, Organization, Movement, Units, Personalities. None of it has to be said deliberately to be given away.

Some habits hand it over for free. Tuning and testing on air broadcasts your position with no message attached at all. Chatting between operators builds a pattern of life. Using your own name is the easiest entry point there is. Calling when the net has been silent tells them something just changed.

The fix is unglamorous: write the message out before you key, strip everything that isn't needed, then read it once. The pauses and the corrections are where your twenty seconds actually go.

And a correction to how most people rank this. Encryption is the third line of defence, not the first. Before it come not transmitting at all, and transmitting briefly. If they can't read you, they still know you're there — and they can jam you or come find you instead.

Save this for your comms binder.
Send it to someone whose overs run a full minute.
Full comms course on the profile.

#hamradio #recon #emcomm #opsec #radio