Amateur Radio
snell-pym.org.uk
snell-pym.org.uk
I'm 28 years old and I fucking love amateur radio.
I always had a curiosity about radio, being so interested in two-way radio that my parents had me tested for ASD. My mom had a police scanner and it had a button titled "HAM" [sic]. I found a repeater and no more than a few weeks later I was absolutely enthralled and was licensed in 2007.
I got a radio, an antenna, installed it, and I was absolutely hooked. It did not matter that the average age of a ham was around 50 or 60, and I was only 15. It was just so much fun and there was so much to do an learn using it. I studied for my General and got it a few months after my first Tech license. A few months after that, I got Extra. All the while, I ran a YouTube channel documenting my experiences.
I chose to go to Missouri S&T (formerly University of Missouri - Rolla) because they had a ham radio club (W0EEE). I declined a full ride to Truman State in Chem or CompSci, and went to S&T as undecided engineering. I naturally nestled into EE realizing a lot of the basic circuits knowledge was already covered under the Extra exam. Myself and one other ham became de-facto President and VP of the ham radio club, which we re-grew from near death.
I ended up working at an Electromagnetic Compatibility lab for a while, before having a co-op at the Very Large Array radio observatory in NM where I ran cabling, designed antennas, and worked on mitigation of RF interference. My manager specifically sought me out because I was a ham.
Acheving full time employment was also a no brainer. I applied to Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Garmin, Boeing, Honeywell, Black & Veatch, maybe a few more, and had offers from everyone but Garmin (apparently proving my way around a smith chart dedicated to quiz grad students in the off-site interview, but choking at an unannounced op-amp circuit analysis by hand while two managers watched on-site wasn't good enough for them!). And now I design antennas for a living! All because of ham radio.
Ham radio never ceases to entertain me. There's science, there's experimentation, there's socialization, and there's public service. I'm a advocate for youth in ham radio, and I'm starting to get into things like ARRL reformation and other politics, since - like the author says - ham radio has a bad image. Through programs like YARC[0] and YOTA[1][2] I'm trying to help change that.
[0] https://yarc.world/ [1] https://yotaregion2.org/ [2] http://ham-yota.com/
-KE7BRP
This little nerdy hobby, turned into a fabulous career.
That gets you a SDR with spectrum scope and waterfall, a portable HT UHF/VHF transceiver, and your Technician license, for ~$80. From there, you can look into getting your General license to transmit on HF, and a cheap HF radio and antenna, for less than $500 total. A higher quality HT like an Icom or Yaesu would be money well spent for VHF/UHF, as the Baofeng is notoriously hard to program and allows you to transmit outside the legal band limits.
(Note: the RTL-SDR works best for VHF and UHF. For an HF SDR, you'll want to check out something like the Airspy HF+ Discovery and perhaps a cheap $30 magnetic loop antenna from eBay, which is what I use.)
Edit: My apologies for the acronyms. SDR is software defined radio, allowing you to receive radio signals on your computer. HT is "handy-talkie" or handheld transceiver. HF/VHF/UHF are defined in the parent post.
* https://hamstudy.org/ is the go-to place to study for your license, and it's free. Use it, love it, thank the devs after you get your license.
* Don't listen to the naysayers (which aren't as loud these days), a Baofeng radio is a perfectly acceptable first radio, and it's impossible to beat the price.
* If your interests tend towards the tinkering with electronics side, you can pick up inexpensive/generic RTL-SDR dongles cheaply (less than $10) and modify them to receive HF. Or use them as-is.
* For zero dollars, you can use someone else's web-connected SDR, such as https://websdr.org/
* Look around at the various digital modes (there are many, with FT8 and WSPR being the most popular at the moment), especially if you're into computers. Many allow a structured way to get familiar with things without worrying about messing up on the etiquette front.
* For an HF rig, the uBitx (https://ubitx.net/ & https://www.hfsignals.com/) is hard to beat, and they just introduced a new version (v6). $199 with a case ($150 without) will get you a full-band, all mode, dual VFO 10 watt radio. That's unbelievable value for an HF rig. Add an amp later on for more power.
* For HF especially focus on making/buying good antennas before you go spend a bunch of money on radios.
Anyone who wants a demo should post their location in this thread... My station can be demo'ed just via a laptop (remotely, such as from a bar or coffee shop) and I'm sure many of us who are hams would be happy to help any interested person from HN get familiar with what it's all about.
Now in the digital era, you can spend $250 on a handheld that can literally reach any spot on the globe. The primary digital platform for amateur radio, D-STAR, allows cross-band communication by connecting to the internet.
A lot of the cost of amateur radio is people trying to get the best equipment possible to transmit and receive via FM modulation over the longest distances with the best possible audio quality. But that's just one aspect. That's what costs a bundle, but there's much more to it than just that.
IMO, what's interesting about radio is that, if you know how to use it, you can get a message from anywhere to anywhere else on the planet… or even low earth orbit. It requires minimal infrastructure and it can work with AA batteries. The community is very friendly and people are happy to help/relay messages.
Honestly, amateur radio, for me, is a lot of what the internet used to be when it was difficult to use. Since amateur radio is still relatively difficult to use it keeps the trolls away.
Yaesu is a pretty solid "cheap" brand. BaoFeng/BTech is a less solid, even cheaper brand (my advice would be to avoid them, despite the fact that that's where I started...)
The downside though, is that they can be very frustrating in some environments (esp with a high noise floor, or with a strong transmitter nearby - the frontend is _very_ easy to overload), and they're generally pretty bad about spurious emissions (though the newer tri-band model seems pretty good in that regard).
$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.
/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.
For 500, maybe you can get a used FT-857D. You'll need a power supply, too. And an antenna.
If you have a local club, talk to the folks there and tell them you're interested in getting started. Someone might have stuff to sell or give to you.
That kinda depends on what you consider "interesting". IMO, there's plenty of "interesting" stuff to do on 2m / 70cm, plus anything you can do in receive only mode on other bands. But to me, "interesting" includes things like listening in on air-traffic control using an RTL-SDR, participating in the local ARES group, working the local repeaters in voice mode, and experimenting with decoding various digital modes.
This is not to say that working HF doesn't open up additional doors, because clearly it does. My point is just that there's a lot of fun to be had with just what you can do with a Technician license, a $40 Baefung radio, and a $25 RTL-SDR dongle.
That's basically it. Shit, I was a tech for twenty years, but never did much because I wasn't interested in club stuff or chatting on the local repeater. At some point I got an RTL-SDR, but dealing with noise and frustrating software issues killed my interest in it... Then around the time my license was up for renewal again, I studied for a week and got my extra ticket, and bought a rig that could do HF-70cm and suddenly I was able to try anything that interested me. If you've got a $500 budget, you can do the same... no reason to limit yourself.
Second this. I'm VP of an active club and for someone with a real interest we can do a lot. Here is a way to find a club, in the US: http://www.arrl.org/find-a-club
If you want to get into satellites, you'll want to a specialized antenna for that, and then it helps to have a computer setup or a fine-tuning dial that can help deal with the Doppler shift and tracking, etc. Then you're easily getting up there in price, probably well past $500.
The other thing I've seen people do is set up extreme long-range setups. They'll get the General license that allows them to use frequencies that bounce around the atmosphere better and build their own antennae, get higher-power transmitters, etc. and their rigs are easily into the thousands of dollars.
If you prefer to buy not build your antennas, you can still do that for less than $500 all in, you just might have to look at used antennas.
No seriously though, why isn’t there a platform that would let me host, or listen to, live audio broadcasts? I mean, you could do it by twitch or youtube, but something optimised just for audio would be great. Somewhere out there must be people with interesting taste in music who’d be happy to curate shows I could listen to throughout my workday.
Some choice projects:
https://www.winlink.org/ Long range email over HF bands
https://aprs.fi/ APRS real time position tracking map
https://aprsdroid.org/ APRS text messaging + tracking app
http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map WSPR HF propagation map
https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx.html Digital high performance HF mode application
I'm an extra working on developing classes for introducing modern radio to the next generation of hams. Feel free to ask about anything.
No license needed!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Define...
At the end of the day, analog modes aren't going anywhere and the old curmudgeons have no administrative power to prevent people from using newer modes and otherwise enjoying the available bandwidth as defined by the regulations.
This is a hobby. There are a few constraints on what you can do with it due to licensing and that's about it. Whatever happens is fine be it cranking CW out on a one tube transmitter on 80m, pushing the envelope on digital modes on 134 GHz or talking about tomatoes on a local 2m repeater. That is choice.
What is important is we stop pissing on each other's interests and longevity and trying to restrict choice. It builds resentment and that resentment is loud and destructive.
At the time I did my full license, in 2018, there was a large interest in "old modes" because it's an escape from daily complexity in technical professions.
No individual should be burdened by the interests of another, thought there is a very vocal group that wants to complain about the interests of others. As I see it, it's safe to disregard the views of this group if your views don't align with theirs.
Recipe for success for me is staying away from clubs, 80m and QRZ.com :)
There are some clubs in the CO front range that are pretty progressive though. I just don't have the time to go to meetings right now.
Many hams find contesting traffic to be a nuisance.
It's much like the early days of the internet when people would tail -f /var/log/http/access.log and keep track of how many countries contacted their webserver.
At least there's not a js8call which gasp actually allows keyboard to keyboard chat. Even allows relaying through a 3rd party as well as async communications through a storage and forward process.
This blog was my introduction to Summits on the Air (SOTA), in which operators broadcast from mountain summits.
More to the point, why would I want to have to get the government's permission in order to talk on it?
Also:
> If you like outdoor activities in areas where cell phone coverage is poor (camping, hiking, skiing, dense urban gatherings)
If you mention this as a possible use, mention that it is illegal to encrypt amateur radio communications, so you must broadcast your family's information and plans for the world to hear. That's quite the security risk.
One of the key purposes of the amateur radio service is experimentation. This brings with it the risk that I might inadvertently disrupt other communication services, potentially endangering human lives. The tests/licensing guarantees a minimum level of competence to mitigate that risk, while the clear-text and station identification requirements makes it possible to tell me to stop it if I do end up disrupting other services.
I see it comparable to our driver license system. Yes it invades our freedom somewhat, but it reduces a lot of human suffering.
As far as your encryption concerns go, you have to go to extra effort for any of your ham transmissions to be heard by the whole world. Generally it's just a mile or two radius, line of site, only to those who are listening during the short interval while you are transmitting. Far, far different from posting something on the internet.
My main point being that amateur radio only has security through obscurity as it only takes one device locally listening/relaying your signal to invalidate the distance assumption in the same way people posting things online thought 'nobody's ever going to care about this post' all those years ago. A key difference being that you have no option to encrypt and the other party doesn't need to MITM you to get any potentially interesting information.
Being heard by the whole region is even worse.
So, how can I prevent the people in my region from hearing my plans when I broadcast them unencrypted?
> Far, far different from posting something on the internet.
I don't use public Internet fora as a cell phone replacement.
You advocated using amateur radio in that capacity.
FRS: unencrypted, type accepted radios only. Extremely low radiated power and sensitivity.
GMRS: Gotta pay $70 to the gubment every 10 years, type accepted only, unencrypted.
MURS: Unencrypted (mode restricted), and very few usable channels, type accepted.
CB: Unencrypted, unwieldy equipment, full of lunatics, type accepted.
At the end of the day, you live in a society that requests you follow some laws and get licenses for things that can effect others. The encryption issue is contentious and not entirely one-sided but realistically you're far more likely to be bothered over the public bands and the security risk you fear is rather non-existent. I don't exactly know of a hams being kidnapped or attacked in the streets. The US is far safer now that it ever has been on a crime level so having some trust in your fellow man is not unwarranted.
If you really want to be left alone, use Fusion or Dstar over simplex :)
I wouldn't use ham radio as a replacement for normal cell phone personal chatter, but more for updates "Hey dad, me and Judy are going to that cave we saw last year, will call you when we're back out. KG12345 signing off" or "Help, my father fell off a cliff on the John Doe trail about a mile from the trailhead"
It's a broadcast channel, not a private channel, so don't use it for personal chatter that you wouldn't want other people to overhear. Using some common sense eliminates the privacy risk of other people overhearing you
Actually, I really appreciate this sentiment.
One thing that has always seemed odd to me (as a non-HAM with a marginal interest in RF comms) is how authoritarian and ... adherent the community is.
There is no deviation from the established regulations and a striking lack of interest in even discussing amendments or alternatives to the rules.
Whether it is the prohibition of encrypted comms or the radio typing categories (that cause me to respond to fire calls with, literally, three radios in my hand) you will find very little sympathy or enthusiasm for stepping outside the party line even a bit.
... which surprises me because you'd think HAM would be skew libertarian ... or something like that ...
If you want to go off and be a pirate you can probably get away with it, given that the top selling walkie talkie on amazon is an incorrectly marketed ham handheld that can also broadcast on public safety/police frequencies, with or without being set to them. I wouldn't advise it though because if you do get caught they tend to make an example of you, and if you know enough to not get caught, you can easily pass the tech test and beyond so just get licensed for the cost of a happy meal and enjoy.
Personally, I actually support having encrypted sub bands like we have for everything else, with the exception that station ident should be in the clear and I would like to see the tech test be easier.
What I'd want would basically be tinc or another P2P VPN via radio. Like WiFi meshnet, but not limited to line of sight.
As for wifi, it's worth noting that while you can get a ton of gain, you do so by making the signal directional so long story short you always cover very roughly the same volume, be it a long super skinny wedge, medium donut or a small sphere.
But then, here I am on a wired uplink. I guess it's just that I trust my understanding of nested VPN chains in Linux. And that I trust the hardware and software enough.
Android and iOS, though, I don't understand or trust.
You make a good point about WiFi. Not going transcontinental with that. Except adjacent continents, maybe.
And not only teach RF but then apply across other things like robotics and flying. One of the major public service aspects of Amateur Radio is emergency communication. Rather than humans trying to word-paint what's happening in a storm why not have a camera-equipped drone zoom out to a vantage point and shoot back HD imagery via 1.2GHz? How about weather stations communicating primarily via APRS instead of via WiFi directly?
So many possibilities... though without low-cost VHF/UHF SDR radios much of this will remain a dream.
This is a hobby. Bar the license constraints, the scope is amazing. And you don't have to achieve anything major. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to create a service or act as a service for some cause. Sometimes it's just about playing, a thing many of us have forgotten since childhood.
I myself like to climb up hills with homebrew radios and send and recieve morse code. There is no point in doing this at all. Not even one. I can't think of any at least. Some people pretend it's going to save them if the world ends so it gives them purpose. But really it's nice to have no pressure, no deadline and no dependency on it at all and just tinker with things!
Oh, we also need handheld transceivers that can be charged with a standard mobile phone charger.
The Xaomi Mijia Walkie-Talkie has all of this, but in the U.S. you have have to side load a hacked Android app to get it. Not quite there
Too bad 1.25m and 33cm radios are in so much lower demand; while it's not hard to find acceptable quality 1.25m radios for inexpensive prices I haven't seen the Chinese radios show up with transceivers covering 902 - 932 MHz.
For me, the ideal platform would have the following characteristics
* python programmable
* Easy to hook them together, and to hook them up to a real computer
* Consistent modem spec, with adjustable parity-checking levels
* Cryptographically signed streams, I should be able to verify the callsign/origin of anyone on the network
* Streams should describe how to decode the data on them, maybe something like a mimetype injected into the flow every N seconds?
* Basic data types for voice and image
Notice at no point did I include "packet switching". I think one of the issues with current digital amateur radio projects is that they look like they're trying to reinvent the internet, but worse.
Also interesting: Live reports of radio amateur transmissions via https://www.pskreporter.info/ and http://www.reversebeacon.net/
Amateur Radio is a great hobby that will give you unlimited possibilities to play and learn. From tube transmitters in Morse code (which is still a thing, and it's fun) to sophisticated weak-signal modes like FT8.
I think connecting with maker spaces is a real opportunity. I've been a member of the Lansing club since the sixties, although I rarely attend meetings anymore. Friends with the guys who started the local makerspace and they were genuinely interested in ham radio. I tried several times to setup a tour of the makerspace but the local club is run by a clique who made it clear they had zero interest in it. I still think it was a missed opportunity.
I was president my junior year of the Michigan State club and it was strong and vibrant. A few years back it apparently had declined to only a handful of members. The local faculty advisor started reaching out to freshmen in the fall and started classes to help those get licensed.
The program has been a huge success and now the club in reinvigorated. It only takes one or two people in a community to help out because the interest among young people is there as it has always been. Elmers are what ham radio calls people like that faculty advisor. What the hobby needs is more Elmers like him.
With js8call you can do similar with other radios sprinkled around the planet, without prior coordination.
What's even more wild is that under certain conditions you get a weird distortion... from the signal taking the short path between two points AND the signal taking the long patch between two points.
Freaky.
Maybe I will muster up some courage and dive into this.
Imagine a story called "The Command Line", a straightforward take on the core concepts thereof. I think everyone here is pretty familiar with that topic, and would regard such a story as pretty much the opposite of news or even interesting.
To my eye, this story is just as out-of-place because it's a topic I just assume everyone here is already quite familiar with it. Am I mistaken? Or is HN just that different a crowd?
Not being snarky - I want to check them out!
I still enjoy Slashdot because, like HN, it's a single feed and gets me stuff I might not find in my regular subreddits.
I also read Arstechnica and The Register on a fairly regular basis, but not daily.
But honestly, my main firehose of news and ideas is IRC. I'm on 5 networks and about 25 channels, and I try to read all the scrollback in about half of those. There's lots of good stuff on Freenode and OFTC in particular, but I feel like this is one I should leave as an exercise to the reader. ;)
#2 problem: the snitching mentality. HAMs sure love to snitch on those who don't follow the rules to keep their clubs very exclusive and very obedient
#3 problem: banning a bunch of interesting uses. Can't transmit encrypted - linked to #1 and #2 I guess.
Overall, a nice hobby for someone who aims to work at a FANG: if your life objective is to obey, serve and extend the order decided by the status quo, HAM is a nice matching hobby.
If it's not for you, stay out of the snitchers band, and play on low power on the unlicensed bands instead. The smell of freedom is intoxicating.
As others have said, it's not generally a problem, and if there is something that requires confidentiality you're free to use another method e.g. phone, email, etc.
But it's worth noting that not all cryptography is banned, just anything that obscures the contents of a transmission. For example, you can cryptographically sign messages to authenticate that they came from you. Similar to how you can use digital modes that aren't human-understandable (in the same way that morse or voice is) as long as the protocol specification is published somewhere such that it is possible someone could implement it from spec and decode the messages, or append checksums to your transmissions, etc. - as long as the content gets through in the clear it's OK.
Someone said below: "If you're made aware of your mistake (failure to adhere to rules, spurious emissions, etc.) you're given the opportunity to stop transmitting until you fix the issue."
I believe most people do not want to willfully commit mistakes. Letting them know is sufficient. There may be a few bad apple like in everywhere, but that's why you have laws and law enforcement.
Without the identification requirement it would take a lot longer to track you down, puting human lives at risk.
Communications technology has advanced since 1960.
I agree with the other person, this is just parroting the official position.
The world has changed, and pseudonymous communication is a valid alternative: HAMs could simply be required to provide an email - good enough to add a layer of anonymity, and not sufficient to stop law enforcement.
A reliable out of band back channel is needed. Currently that is what it is. I am not saying there are no better alternatives possible, go ahead design them and start the political process..
Pseudonymity? Yeah, that's working so well on the internet. Trolling and Spam are not a problem at all. Lets see how that works in a much more resource constrained environment like our radio spectrum.
Read again what I wrote above: email. Hell, add twitter or a phone number on top of that if you really want. That's still a good extra layer of anonymity.
And sorry, but I won't design anything now - I won't touch HAM even with a 10 ft pole, let alone engage in politics.
I'm not saying that to hurt you. I just assume you care about HAM and wonder why younger people are not interested anymore, as discussed in the original article.
The problem is that several of your core values have become show stoppers for people like me. Address the big 3 problems I listed, and maybe you'll have more success interesting more people to HAM. Personally, I don't care anymore. I now prefer unlicensed spectrum.
FYI, I have black tape over the barcode that's on the back on my driver license, and the number and other non essential fields on the front.
People can see my photo, my first name, the year I was born. They can't scan much out of that in bars.
What you might view as "snitching", others like myself view as keeping the bands open and enjoyable for everyone, or at least as many people as possible given the narrow bandwidth of HF bands. If you fire up a many-kW wide-band FM transmission on 160m where the band is only 200KHz wide for example, you're ruining it for everyone and possibly blocking emergency communications (see ARES/RACES). You're entitled to experiment and enjoy the band within the rules, which ensures you're not depriving everyone else of that opportunity, just as traffic lanes ensure you're not blocking oncoming traffic. But really, I have yet to hear of issues on the air with people "snitching" on others. Most hams are respectful to one another and are mature enough to know the system only works if everyone shares the limited bandwidth and coordinates with one another via band plans. The band plans help ensure that your SSB transmission doesn't interfere with someone else wanting to do Morse code CW or moonbounce or low-power beacon propagation reporting. The privilege to use this spectrum would disappear quickly if these rules were not in place and enforced.
Encrypted and obfuscated communications are prohibited in these bands precisely because this is "amateur" radio. It should not have a purpose other than exploring radio science and communicating in a public and open way. It cannot be used for commercial purposes, either. Therefore encryption and obfuscation are not needed for these purposes, and you cannot ensure the transmissions are meeting the rules if you can't decode them. I might be wrong about this, but I believe encryption would be allowed for experimentation purposes as long as the protocol is publicly documented and you make the decryption keys publicly available. (You would also probably want to begin and end your transmission with a non-encrypted message explaining where to get more information to decode it.) If your concern is learning how to do encryption over radio, this would allow you to meet that goal, with the understanding that everyone would be able to decrypt your transmissions. There are "experimental" sections of the band plan available for this kind of experimentation and learning.
If you wish to transmit on radio waves without identification, amateur rules, or with encryption, you can certainly do so in the ISM bands within regulatory power limits, or if you need commercial use, there are non-amateur bands out there. The spirit of amateur radio is to encourage learning about radio science and to communicate with other people around the world interested in this hobby, not to be the wild west of our limited radio spectrum.
But others said that you could use it as a cell phone replacement; that is, for personal communications.
How does that work when it's illegal to encrypt it?
FCC Part 97.113, "Prohibited transmissions":
> Music using a phone emission except as specifically provided elsewhere in this section; communications intended to facilitate a criminal act; messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification.
(I believe the only "otherwise provided herein" obscured communications are control commands sent to satellites, to ensure they cannot be improperly controlled.)
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Regulatory/March%208,%202018....
I'm providing this link not as an endorsement, but as an example of encrypted business band radio: https://midlandusa.com/business-two-way-radios-secure-commun...
Amateur radio operators seem to be actively opposed to welcoming new people. I'll have to keep that in mind when I tell others about it.