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Comment by throw20102010 | Hacker News Reader

throw20102010·

The loss of this band would really hurt ham radio. The cheap Baofeng VHF radios that use this band are probably second only to the RTL-SDR for enticing people into the radio hobby.

It would be pretty easy to move all the current VHF activity up to UHF if you have the equipment, but a lot of tech class (or the European equivalent) hams that only have a cheap handheld are going to need to buy a new radio. That’s going to be a bummer.

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It's "easy" to move, but not cheap - particularly for all the clubs which have thousands invested in 2m repeater hardware.

There are many thousands of repeaters around the world, worth hundreds or thousands of dollars each, mostly in remote locations or on private land, and almost entirely funded and maintained by volunteers.

The loss of this band would definitely hurt ham radio!

Where do you move to? the bands in the states are full

This varies on the region. 70cm here in the midwest and mountains is nearly empty, and 2m isn’t completely full. If you combined both you would have an exciting band. The downside is that there won’t be a whole lot of space to expand in the future. I’m sure that on the east coast it’s a different story.

But gaining an exciting and active band is probably not worth losing 2m, and I’m sure that once 2m is gone in Europe it will be on the chopping block in the USA.

The cheap Baofeng radios are all VHF/UHF dual band. Single band handhelds are pretty rare. There are more VHF only mobile radios.

Cheap radios and also the most easily accessible band in the US license wise.

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