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Comment by slr555 | Hacker News Reader

I just submitted my vote for N2RJ. ARRL leadership has seemed out of touch for quite some time. They seem more interested in selling wildly over priced books than advancing the interests of the Ham community. Amateur radio may seem like a quaint hobby for old timers but there are a number of newer hybrid operating modes that play nicely with the digital world. Ham's need a strong advocacy voice so that relevant policy decisions don't overlook the needs of amateur operators. Amateur radio is a great way to learn physics and electronics. I was a liberal arts major and now have my Extra class license. What I learned getting there is so much more valuable than the rag chews and 73s. Keep Ham strong!

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I got back into the hobby after letting my license expire years ago. SDR and GNU radio are what pulled me back in. I feel like it's a renaissance for amateur radio.

That’s what got me into it.

I’m not particularly social so qso’s around the planet aren’t really interesting to me beyond the basic astonishment of how far 5 watts can go.

The ability to tx from a weather balloon at 20 miles up and having an emergency means to communicate are way higher on the list.

Exactly. Terse QSOs get vacuous real quick. Most onair behavior seems to be stuck in the 1950s. With all the spectrum at your disposal, personal apps like (if in FL) monitoring red algae distribution using 23cm-band FPV on drones would be more interesting and practical.

Been pining over a SDR and that (well, TFA really) got me looking into renewing my license I let expire last year, luckily there's a 2-year grace period so all's not lost.

Also been wanting to play with some 70cm transceiver chips I got a while back off ebay but never really messed with.

FWIW, here is a GNU Radio based “parallel” scanner I wrote. You can listen to the entire 2m band at once.

https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon

I sorely missed the experimental side of the hobby (and the Shack's easy parts access)- always a big kick - after that dropped away.

What's the best place online to plug into what's going on in SDR?

https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ is an active community

You can also search on github for active projects, https://github.com/topics/sdr is a good place to start

I also like to browse https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide to get ideas for signals to look for

I personally use both rtl-sdr and a HackRF One. The HackRF makers have some pretty good videos on their site https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/

I've built a few basic radios from scratch as well, and the only reason is because the SDR makes it cheap to test and interface with whatever I make. Radio shack may be gone, but any component you could dream of is only a few days away via amazon, etc.

Thanks to you both!

As mentioned the RTL-SDR group on Reddit is good. You can also play without any hardware (and with better antennas) using online SDRs: http://rx.linkfanel.net/

Also http://websdr.org/

+1 I'd love to see lobbying for symbol rate limits replaced with bandwith limits for digital but it's not even on their radar.

The ARRL did petition the FCC to drop the symbol rate rules in 2013. It was met with tremendous opposition.

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=RM-...

Given that there is more space at higher frequencies, how would you express it? For example: It could be 1% of a band. It could be 0.1% of the center frequency, or perhaps 0.1% of the frequency at the lower edge. Maybe it needs to be expressed in some kind of log(Hz) unit, such as milli-Bel-Hz.

I don't think this accommodates spread spectrum very well. One might want to do something like CDMA, spread across the entire band but down in the noise level from the perspective of a traditional transmission.

I just joined ARRL 10 minutes ago. New ham, or more accurately, lapsed for 44 years and ham again since July.

I fear I may be too late for a vote at this time, but can't find where I would cast it on arrl.net in any case. Any advice?

I agree, as a mid 30s advanced I feel a bit out of place with the current leadership.

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