There are tons of things you can do, so many that it's hard to sum up. It also combines well with other hobbies. Or it can be a symbol or inspiration of its own kind, an objective reminder that more science in your life is a good thing.
One of the biggest advantages is the practically free education. If you upgrade your license you'll learn a lot of really fascinating stuff. I really wish I knew about propagation and differences between the various bands and band schedules back when I was a kid, fooling around with my dad's Patrolman radio. I also learned how effective logging can be, and have applied that in just about every area of my life.
Finally, there's just something about breaking the silence and making that call when you're out in the middle of nowhere. Even if you're the world's biggest introvert, you might end up helping somebody by keeping your radio turned on and tuned in.
https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/9c9n0q/my_for...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAHJfE7EBlI&t=12s
You can use an app like "ISS Detector" to get alerts when the ISS is over; that one also has an IAP that will show you any amateur radio satellite that's over your head, as well as the uplink and downlink frequencies. (Last time I was listening to cubesat AO-92, my social "nerd antenna" apparently went up to about 1 MW transmitting and I ended up pointing into the clear blue sky a lot while explaining to interested random passers-by why people still use ham radio. :-))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwm-6tf7KCs
(That amazing feeling post-contact...funny that he left in those clips, but I definitely identify with the adrenaline rush. :-))
Be sure to check out #hamradio and #hamr on Twitter, and /r/amateurradio on Reddit. Edit: And your local club, too! And welcome!
This statement really piqued my curiosity. Would you mind expanding on it?
In many areas of life, I knew I was really far too subjective due to my research into my personal psychology (I'm a professional coach) and wondered about different ways I could be _more_ objective without actually becoming an external sensing-measuring device. :-) Reading about logging tools like SINPO[0] helped me intuitively identify new ways of logging & spreadsheeting my way through different activities and situations.
As an example, when I get sick, I now engage this logging skill rather than just feeling my way through the illness, and I get to see some really cool emergent properties of this new personal system. I usually monitor my vitals in addition to writing down some subjective 1-10 ratings of how I feel in terms of general wellbeing, nausea, depression, and anxiety as the day passes. I have an autoimmune condition and while I can't just take a pill and cure that, my logs have shown me the peaks and troughs of amplitude within every passing hour of severe illness, when those illnesses come. I discovered that as I watch this data I can be more nuanced about the way I treat my sick time, and ended up actually getting productive work done that I _wanted to get done_ while "sick", by recognizing the high points and patterns in rest and energy buildup. "Riding the waves" with more precision, so to speak. There is also the analytical side of this, where I'll occasionally look back through my logs and see icons like a circled "!!!" which means "wow you tried something new here and it worked amazingly well, please add this to your toolkit for this activity from now on."
Because you're effectively engaging more of your "sensor suite," you kind of feel more like the space ship that can navigate the asteroid field vs. the one that really gets banged up. When you fold in the analysis step, it's like you're now better able to approach even more treacherous asteroid fields--your machinery is getting upgrades over time.
Incidentally, when I meet up with a doctor, I can be much more accurate about what happened and when.
I do the same logging thing at work, and now keep logs as part of just about every project. In some cases this is a literal mini-blog on a web page, and in other cases it's a text file tucked somewhere 15 folders deep, and in still other cases it's a small mark in the margin of a paper journal page.
I also discovered that this helps with other hobbies. I run RPGs for my kids and develop my own table-top RPGs, and keeping a log is a huge tip for a really effective campaign. Later on the log can become a published, written narrative (e.g. Record of Lodoss War), or mined for new ideas.
I used to struggle to keep a personal journal, but I've since found that I can more easily approach the practice by starting from the "Stardate" mindset and being a tad more robotic regarding current circumstances than I can by trying to keep the personal history that used to come to mind when I'd consider journaling.
Another thing I've learned is that we are extremely brittle about this practice, as a society. Our thinking about keeping logs tends to be black & white (a common sign of lack of education on the matter) and we hesitate or think in terms like "OCD" when people around us really leverage this practice[1]. IMO this is really unfortunate.
Anyway I hope this expands on it a bit!
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINPO_code
1. https://qz.com/507727/a-man-who-recorded-his-every-sneeze-fo... (example)
As for the hardware issue, his notebook was kept because he was an important person. Average Joe's notebook had a much greater chance to go into the landfill.
That's the same for today persons' digital files: Average Joe laptop goes to landfill but I'm sure presidents and whatever's files are archived by State or their families, same as they did for the paper notebook back then.
In Emacs one has org-mode, in Vim, vimwiki, even for plain Notepad, one can easily create a time log by pressing the F5 key. It will fill in the time and date automatically. Create a text file like day_log.txt, open it at the start of your day and press F5 key to fill the date and time. Just add couple of words on what you want to note. Done.
That's some wisdom
Words to live by.
Even though my household weren’t HAM’s at the time, he’d “call” us every few days through a “phone patch” to give status updates in the middle of the Pacific.
Basically, he’d make connections to various HAM’s somewhere, trying to find someone who could do a “phone patch”. That person would then connect the audio to their phone, call my house collect, and we could have a two-way conversation. Pretty cool stuff.
Back in the 90’s when I had my license I thought packet radio was cool as hell. Checking your email in the middle of a field? Amazing. Of course that’s all obsolete now.
And then just for the ultimate geek factor. You know what the very first communication satellite was, right? The moon! HAM’s still do “moonbounce” communications to talk to people on the opposite side of the planet by bouncing signals off the moon. Requires very directional antennae, and brings with it the ultimate latency. But that’s some serious geek cred there.
Checking mail on the BBS on the MIR space station. Kids these days trying to get an extra 10m range out of their wifi...
(From Steve Blank's "Secret history of Silicon Valley" talk. https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/10023411/steve_bla... )
I was "the radio guy". Which was good because my attempt at being the "motor guy" didn't end so well.
Was it more software or hardware? I write software for a living so that’s what I’m more interested in; don’t know about parent comment, though.
So amateur radio was a very cost effective way to communicate with like-minded people with very rapid payback. That said, a lot of people just liked chatting with strangers from far away places.
[1] There were commercial services and BBS's but they were also relatively niche until the late 80's largely due to the actual cost of the phone call as described above.
I've talked (in morse code) to people on the air that are former US Navy radio telegraphers, submariners, Air force mechanics etc. That generation is heading into their golden years and many of them will be gone in 10-20 years. It's interesting to hear about their lives in their own words.
I've made contacts to Moscow Russia on 100 watts, Asia, most of Europe and most of the States in the US.
I've also built the tiny QCX in that article by soldering and hand winding toroids. Fired it up and made a contact several hundred miles away on a tiny amount of power. I used an arduino to create a scratch built keyer with all my own circuts and code. Then I hooked it up to my paddles, set the speed and used it for tons of contacts.
In short, it can be a very satisfying hobby if you are nerdy enough.
Just after the turn of the century we had a fully functional station for long distance terrestrial communications (HF) and satellite communications (including amateur satellites and the ISS). Much of the station could be disassembled and relocated for operations in the field, specifically Field Day. Members had various technical projects ranging from building the station (antennas, feed lines, and radios), to software defined radio. Other people had tangential interests which fit in well with the group. In other words, there was a lot of experimentation.
Amateur radio is a lot like computers: there are those who build the tools and those who use the tools. Both groups serve a purpose (many of the users are involved in community service and emergency communications). What you choose to do largely depends upon what you are interested in.
It's a feeling of power and independence that is very lost with the Internet to me. With the internet - I'm connecting to something very very large. With ham - I'm building my own. I'd see it as the same draw as setting up your first website in the late 90's/early 2000's, with the visitor counters and comments sections. Each interaction is a treasure.
As a listener myself ("SWLer") my next project is to make a radio to pick up telemetry from small cubesats.
https://www.zipscanners.com/resources/are-police-scanners-le...
Kinda like using a gun in the commission of a felony...is a felony.
Or being arrested and the only charge is resisting arrest.
See Indiana’s law: https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-35-criminal-law-and-proce...
Some do, just like the internet. You're random to me, and we're conversing. Remember "chat rooms" and similar (IRC)? Mostly anonymous people talking to each other. Yes you might have some people you "know" in there, but there are strangers as well.
It seems like the majority of serious amatuer radio hobbyists are retired man, many of whom have a background in military communications or electrical engineering.
At marathons and such the Hams are the ones with the antennas and the frequencies to get around the physical terrain and help bridge police departments.
I can also use it for communication when the cell networks go after a few hours without power (new england ice storms).
When 911 happened we had massive communication network failures and the Hams were the ones that were desperately needed by emergency crews to get messages in and out.
I remember a time when someone on the CB got 64kbps connection to the internet through packet radio, faster than dial up!
It's a bit like how mucking around with microcomputers was very cool back in the day, but now why would you bother when you can run a C64 in an emulator? But there is something nostalgic about it that makes me sometimes want to buy and old computer.
Once you dive into Retro-computing, you'll find loads of us getting and keeping old kit running, with a whole host of strange old and new add-ons, with new bits of kit being designed and built everyday. It's a really fun (but expensive) hobby!
There are a million different areas in this hobby. Chatting with random people is just the most obvious (and boring) one.
They can be made while your hands are otherwise occupied (driving, flying, etc.)
They don't require web access (can be done while in the middle of a forest, or 10,000 feet above the ground)
They lessen the chance of being DDOSed by a bored teenager
Doing them while within range of the internet may be less efficient, but they're also not limited by the internet.
We normally have somebody free who can travel to any field station if they have equipment problems etc.
Most events pay a small fee for our help, which goes to the local club.
What I mean by "a stack of radios" is at the two races I've marshalled that had radios, they had half a dozen license-free walkie-talkies like [1] which they handed out. The "stack" was figurative, as they wouldn't have stacked up very well.
I assumed you'd be the only license holder and you'd somehow co-ordinate between the license-free radios. If you could get half a dozen license holders, obviously it's a different matter!
(The license-free radios didn't work at either race)
[1] https://www.radio-solutions.co.uk/motorola-walkie-talkie-xt1...
On a well run event you have "net control" which is basically a central point that you pass messages to and they pass them out. They're usually an experienced ham set up with a good antenna, and a reasonably powerful transmitter, at a location that can hear from and speak to everyone even if people with handhelds can't hear each other because of distance or terrain. There's a convention for getting permission to speak and how messages are conveyed and passed on.
In my particular case, we set up an antenna for ham frequencies and public service frequencies, officers from our town are deployed, and can talk to us on their police radios but frequently can't speak with each other because we're not in our home town and don't have our repeater (other towns use other frequencies). So I relay messages between officers and I relay messages to and from net command.
Also, if you think about what happens when an emergency (like the Boston Marathon Bombing) happens... imagine how much slower and more disorganized the response would be if all the departments had to make cell calls to each other and wait for each to get off teh line... the central point would call one police dept. Then they'd call the fire. Then they'd call.... and now people are dead because you can't communicate with more than one person at a time.
it's just WAY more efficient than cell phones.
That was all before the arrival of software defined radio. Radio math as computer code.
Some of my nerdy friends can't stand analog voice and CW, preferring instead to push bandwidth limits on the microwave bands, doing mesh networks, etc.
Hehe, we can't all be hardcore HF/AM godfathers like Timtron WA1HLR. Big signals from home, big signals from WBCQ :-)
That was a lot of fun, each country contacted. The far you go, the more you are happy :)