Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies | Hacker News Reader

Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies

mobile.abc.net.au

290 pointsjimmcslim143 comments

This redundancy and skill set is paramount.

In a past life as a Police officer in a very remote and isolated town, we had a fibre cable severed which took out all telecommunications (fixed/internet/wireless - the works).

Besides myself, not a single office knew how to work the HF radio, which was our only lifeline to the outside world thanks to a broken sat phone.

Moral of the story is don't get complacent and forget how to use old tech, when the unexpected wipes out modern methods.

While you make a good case for radio, there have to be cut-off points, at which techniques must be considered obsolete, not to burden educational systems and students unnecessarily in perpetuity.

While having the skill is a 1 or a 0 (either you know how to use a radio with some proficiency or you do not) the use cases for older/simpler technology get fewer and fewer gradually.

At which point can a system no longer afford to support technique x? Of course, it depends on the system but you are probably not going to wait before the probability hits 0 if you care even slightly about being efficient – but it's never an easy call to make.

Of course that's true - we probably don't need to start re-teaching the abacus... but I'm careful about getting too complacent. When everything has been going well for a long time it's tempting to think this will continue forever. But one, say, global pandemic can bring everything down - and some of our modern conveniences can be gone... possibly for centuries.

An interesting (programming) talk by Jonathan Blow on the subject of losing knowledge! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Well, yes, a big enough global pandemic can derail a lot of our current systems. That is exactly where it gets problematic to me: To what extent is what kind of crisis a reasonable scenario that has to be taken into consideration? Is it reasonable to widely prepare people for a civilization ending pandemic? A meteor impact? And to what extent?

The potential costs are limitless (both in money and in lifetime because you can never be too prepared), the potential benefit is absolute, the risk (when assessing by statistical impact on total human lifes so far) very low. How do you possibly weigh such things?

All-digital communication systems are notorious for failing in natural or otherwise disasters; that's the reason why radios, whether used by official agencies or hams or both, are very relevant in those circumstances. Hence this isn't really a discussion in my opinion.

> we probably don't need to start re-teaching the abacus...

I get where you're going but concerning the abacus, I respectfully disagree.

I'm guessing you haven't seen the way some young Asian kids start using a Japanese abacus (Soroban), and after a few years have built a mental model of it enabling them to perform mental calculations -- faster than with a calculator.

Most of the good videos on YouTube seem to have disappeared, but some short snippets remain.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus

But when do people need to do more than a handful of mental calculations? While you might be faster with a mental abacus than with a calculator, I doubt that you beat an Excel spreadsheet. If Excel is unavailable for some reason either the source data you would need is unavailable too, or your mental calculation speed is not fast enough to be useful, even with the mental abacus.

I was recently in a line at the store where a person paid using cash, a rare thing these days. The Cashier, mid 20's person, could not even tabulate the total amount handed to them in their mind to enter that total in the computer to get the change amount. Ended up handing it back to the customer using "how much is there"

I wept for the state of public education, basic addition is lost skill it seems

> I wept for the state of public education, basic addition is lost skill it seems

What does this have to do with "public education"?

They could have been taught it in elementary school, but if they were in their mid-20s, then it would probably have been over a decade since they were tested on it even in secondary/high school.

And that skill would have atrophied with non-use on a day-to-day basis.

basic addition is not a skill that atrophies. We are talking the most basic math there is, adding whole numbers. 1+1 = 2, or in this case 50+20+1+1+1+5 = 78

> basic addition is not a skill that atrophies.

The evidence you provided suggests otherwise. :)

I'm sure the person can still add, but it's a bit slow(er) without practice, they got frustrated, and so handed back the change.

Let me offer a different perspective. Is rf engineering and research obselete? Should the ability to experiment be locked into spectrum owned by monopolistic companies? And from another angle, is an Arduino project that blinks an LED worthwhile? Spectrum is a limited resource and amateur bands are one of the last ways I know of for folks to experiment within radio without submitting for expensive fcc certification.

This!!

My (admittedly limited) understanding of baseband demodulation started with the swling I did as a teenager.

As we lose obsolete skills, we simultaneously become more interdependent on other humans, as the web of dependencies becomes more complex. More people need to coordinate action to complete even basic tasks.

With that in mind, preserving communications would seem to be near the top of the list (perhaps just below clean water?) when things go wrong. Radio seems like a good backup -- perhaps even ideal.

So I don't think we should compare radio to just any obsolete tech out there.

You are absolutely correct, but we are not near that point with amateur radio. If you haven't seen what's going on with amateur radio in a while, you might be pleasantly surprised. The hobby has not stagnated or gone away due to the advent of cell phones.

> not a single office knew how to work the HF radio

I'm not sure what you mean. I've never seen an HF radio that wasn't a case of just putting in the frequency in a digital keypad and then pushing to talk. And I've used radios in very austere and dangerous environments in practice. What is there to know to use or not?

All I can say to this is, you must not know what an HF radio is. Perhaps you're confusing them with VHF radios?

https://www.universal-radio.com/used/sold050.html

Those are all HF radios, and not particularly obscure or sophisticated ones.

In addition to frequency, there is the issue of modulation, power, and tuning of the antenna. You can certainly have someone that knows what they're doing setup a station, and make it fairly turnkey (similar to how HF communications on an aircraft work), even then it can be more than just frequency. Also, if you're at the level of punching in frequencies on an HF radio, you have to contend with propagation.

In all but the most restricted HF radios, the interface can be intimidating to those without training. Maybe you have to accept that not everyone is as smart in gadgets as you are.. but many reasonably intelligent people will see a rig and their eyes will glaze over.

> you must not know what an HF radio is

No I've used HF, VHF and UHF, voice and data, clear and encrypted, in war-zones and around the world. I've seen people sometimes have to do some innovative things with antenna geometry for special use-cases, but apart from that I usually just switch them on and push to talk.

> Maybe you have to accept that not everyone is as smart in gadgets as you are..

As I say, I just switch them on really.

> As I say, I just switch them on really.

Ok. It sounds like you're mostly talking about military communications. For a very restricted set of short distance communication a pre-configured HF radio set with a pre-matched antenna may be pretty straightforward to use, but buying a brand new HF rig and getting it to communicate hundreds of miles is a lot more than just "switching them on". There's more to HF communications then you seem to realize. In the amateur service there are power restrictions, and modulation restrictions. If conditions are suboptimal there is then the issue of filtering or signal processing.

Oh ok.

That's not what HF radios look like in commercial services. Those are ham radios. You don't generally have a VFO.

Here's what somewhat older HF radios used for commercial and public safety purposes in Australia look like: https://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/cotswold-hills/audio-gps-car...

Channels. Not a lot of options. No VFO.

Yes, I am quite aware (I mentioned preconfigured radios and gave aircraft radios as an example).. American CB radios are HF, after all.

But the poster claimed they had "never seen an HF radio" that was more complicated then turning it on, which is a very limited view. Further, you will see more featureful ham radios placed into public safety use in the US. It is perhaps not the best idea.

There is usually the not entirely trivial problem of knowing how to set up the antenna. HF antennas that are efficient tend to be very long, and different lengths for each frequency. Let's say somewhere between 60 and 120 feet long being typical. If you are relying on a pre- installed antenna then it doesn't sound very disaster proof.

Then knowing what frequency will work at what time is worthy of some study. 2E0XJM going clear

> There is usually the not entirely trivial problem of knowing how to set up the antenna

Although efficient design is important, it's not always the case...

Once, as a kid I lost the antenna to a handheld (military band) radio and couldn't communicate with home base several km away. However, there was a fence nearby with broken wires. Problem solved, communication established. (Yes, I just plugged the one end of the broken fence wire into the antenna socket.)

I'm sure that my worldly and knowledgeable older self wouldn't have even tried it as a solution, assuming it wouldn't work.

> I'm sure that my worldly and knowledgeable older self wouldn't have even tried it as a solution, assuming it wouldn't work.

You have to keep reminding your older self that everything that conducts electricity can be used as an antenna in a pinch :). Up to and including your own body, or a stream of salt water squirted from a tube (in fact I recall reading about military testing out such antennas made of sea water on ships).

In a college class we tried using rockets for transmitting.

Like, the middle-school "rocket club" style rockets, a simple kit with a control board, and another that just had a very large spool of wire a la guided anti-tank missiles. They both sorta worked. Had to get clearance from the local airport about it, actually.

You made a "random wire" end fed antenna. Your more knowledgeable older self might not have tried it, but an even more knowledgeable amateur radio operator definitely would have.

As long as you avoid even multiples of half the wavelength you're trying to work, it's an easy way to make a usable antenna.

Do you the difference between LSB and USB, AM and FM? Do you know what SWR is? Do you know about daytime vs nighttime propagation? Do you know what a balun is?

Maybe these things are obvious to you but they are certainly not obvious to everyone. Maybe you can get lucky but to effectively operate an HF radio you need to know what you are doing.

How did the phone break? Or was it not tested regularly? I think there's a lot of fallback that could exist before we need to pull out the HF radio.

You think that, and I think that, but what we now have is two guys on the internet with ideas of how things should be done, versus one first-hand account of a real thing that actually happened.

Yup. Certainly not giving a "you shoulda done X" response. But I remain skeptical that it really needs to come down to "and I was the only one who knew how to work the radio."

Why would phone be independent of the fiber link in an isolated place?

GP was contracting sat-phone, from the article, to phone. The entire point of satellite phones is that they do not rely on cell towers.

thanks, misread that.

> How did the phone break?

It could have as simply as not paying the bill because "why do we need this? we never use it".

I live in an area [0] prone to severe weather and especially violent tornadoes. The local Skywarn [1] repeater is probably the best source of immediate first-hand information when things get bad. There's usually at least a few storm chasers out following the storms, and reports from various places in the area help you get a real feel for how bad a particular storm is.

Moreover, the repeater is monitored by all of the local TV and radio stations as well as the city EMA (Emergency Management) and the local National Weather Service office.

I'm not licensed (yet, it's on my to-do list for this year), but I still have a small handheld that I tune in whenever the weather is bad. Ham radio is still very much alive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Alley

[1] https://www.weather.gov/SKYWARN

Since you're planning far ahead for the exam, have a look at writing both Technician and General in the same session. I took (just) my Tech a few months ago and several people at the session did both. After studying for General I'm kicking myself for not doing it myself. There's a lot of overlap and a lot of it is pretty intuitive if you have a science background.

What happens if you use the ham radio without taking the test? Like, what’s the point of this whole system?

You run the risk of getting fined by the FCC (and having your equipment confiscated).

Yeah, and you also run the risk of breaking something important: your neighbor’s circuit breaker, or a nearby hospital pager system, for example.

Power tools require care; you could know how to use them without the license, but if you do know how the license is $15 and an easy evening test.

In re: the $15

I suggest checking if there's a Laurel VEC test in your area first:

https://www.laurelvec.com/

They're free and they submit results digitally to the FCC rather than mailing them off to ARRL HQ, so you'll get your ticket in a day or 2 rather than 2 weeks.

To clarify, you can listen without a license. You just cannot broadcast.

That said, a ham radio license can actually help legally with some listening.

Some US states have laws against having and/or using a scanner to monitor police or emergency services frequencies while driving. For example, in New York you cannot equip a motor vehicle with a receiver that can receive frequencies allocated for police use. There are similar laws in Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Minnesota.

The FCC, however, has ruled that Federal law preempts state laws in this area in the case of a licensed ham radio operator using a radio that can incidentally receive frequencies outside of the ham bands.

For example, I have a Kenwood TH-F6A [1], a handheld transceiver for the 144/220/440 MHz ham bands. In addition to those ham bands, it can also receive on 0.1 - 1300 MHz (minus some bands in there assigned to cell phones). Since I have an Extra class ham radio license, I can go ahead and listen to police frequencies that fall in that range even in my car in those five states.

[1] https://www.kenwood.com/usa/com/amateur/th-f6a/

> listen to police frequencies that fall in that range even in my car in those five states.

Haven't most services switched over to encrypted Public 25? How much is still accessible?

In an emergency, nothing. They define emergency as "eminent danger to life or property".

> There's a lot of overlap and a lot of it is pretty intuitive if you have a science background.

Same goes for General and Extra, so I'd recommend considering going for all three in parallel.

One of the issues around amateur radio operators is their age. I have a friend who, at 55, was the youngest member of his local ham radio club. It's just not a hobby many people pick up any more.

Enrollment is up but it's not clear how many actually engage with local clubs.

Age and gatekeeping is definitely an issue. It would be nice to see more focus on SDRs, GNURadio and things that connect more with a wider crowd.

A lot of the gatekeeping and lack of interest in SDR, GNURadio, etc is from the older HAMs. Having local clubs with upper age limits of 45 or so might encourage more digital experimentation and openness to the kinds of innovation that used to go hand-in-hand with amateur radio clubs.

A friend of mine who's in his mid-20s works at an infosec firm where he and quite a few of his colleagues have recently obtained ham licences.

They went along and tried to engage the local club. They gave up and now refuse to deal with them. He suggested to me that either someone needs to start a digital-only club, or, as recently happened with our overarching national body, someone needs to intervene and take over the club to keep it relevant.

The old elmers have every right to run their club the way they want and use the bands too. Just start up a new club. Pretty easy these days.

HN Hams anyone? :-)

I’m too lazy to run it but happy to hop on.

Same.

Same

I think it’s a case of finding the right club. I’m licensed in Canada along with my dad and it took us a while to find a good club where we live (Toronto). A good club, IMO, has a mix between old and new technologies and that’s been in line with my experience in the hobby so far

"a good club where we live" implies the existence of more than one club...

It's true, many of the clubs have not been doing a good job of marketing themselves to younger hams. Check out the photos at the top of the websites for a couple of our local clubs:

https://www.paara.org/

https://www.fars.k6ya.org/

Not too exciting to say the least. How about some photos of people doing interesting things with ham radio? And as you said, there are plenty of those interesting things.

For example, here are some recent talks at PAARA:

- 3D printing for ham radio (coming up this week)

- Amateur radio communications during disasters

- Using piezoelectric material as a radiating element for VLF communications

- Making waves at UCSC: from ham radio to SlugSats (University of California Santa Cruz's CubeSat research on high frequency communications and particle physics)

- From Faraday to Hertz: the birth of wireless

- Designing off-grid solar power systems

- Parachute Mobile (a local group that skydives with ham radio transceivers and makes contacts on the way down. Why? Because they can!)

About the age thing: don't sell the oldsters short. One ham I know is probably in his 80's, and is setting up a system to track down malicious interference using Gforth for realtime analysis of SDR data, and now he's learning Python to build an application around this for volunteers to help track down the jammers.

I’m above the age limit for your club, and have done plenty with GNU Radio.

https://github.com/madengr

See https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjt.html.

The spread of activity of FT4 and FT8 is worldwide and extremely active.

Another issue is the obsession with regulating implementation, there really should not be any other terms to follow beyond power and general FCC interference guidelines. The stuff on encryption is obsolete and puts up unnecessary barriers in this day and age.

Plenty of young people are involved in "maker" and "hacker" activities using radio communications on the unlicensed bands. The cost of entry is on the order of $10 compared to $1000 for a half-decent HF station that's less versatile and less interesting. That's where amateur radio needs to provide value to stay relevant, not drawing youngsters into weird club meetings to hang out with a bunch of ancient totally-not-CBers.

I think a big challenge with that is the no-crypto-on-airwaves policy. It severely limits what you can control/observe over radio if everyone in the same area can do the same.

I don't understand what the hobby is now.

What's the skill they're doing? Operating a radio? Is the skill voice procedure that's the skill? Or is it maintaining the physical radios? These days any radio I use is basically a full micro-computer, so you can't just jump in there and start soldering like a transistor setup from decades ago.

I suppose setting up and siting some unusual antenna geometries is still a skill.

Well, you can still pull out a soldering iron and end up with a radio. That’s part of the draw, using home built equipment to talk to modern machines across the world.

There are actually a large number of particular interests in ham radio overall. One interest is public service. The disasters in Montana couple years ago, in California fires, and in Australia are helped out by hams who can operate in environments without regular power. Hams supporting events such as the Chicago Marathon, which is so crowded that cellular networks are overloaded and not reliable in emergencies.

Another interest group are folks who build their own radios. One very active group are those who build Elecraft radios, which end being up competitive with the most expensive radios out there.

Another very active group are ham radio contesters, that draw hams from all over the world to compete, including events in morse code.

An event that happens every four years is the World Radio Team Championship: https://wrtc.info/ . Again, hams from all over the world converge, the first year was seattle, another giant event was in Boston, another in Finland, and most recently Germany.

A particularly exciting merger of ham radio and computers are the modern digital protocols, particularly FT8 and FT4 that are effective even in low power and compromised antenna situations. This has been created and supported by Joe Taylor, K1JT, a Nobel Laureate.

A very serious technical challenge is communicating by bouncing signals off the moon called EME or moonbounce. This is at the edge of abilities, and only a few amateurs are successful at this.

As far as age is concerned, many clubs today are taking up the challenge of getting young folks interested. Tim Duffy, K3LR, has sponsored an event with very young folks: https://dxnews.com/forum/forum/yota-ycp-scouts/13318-k3lr-wp.... One very active ham is Violetta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or512r7vels

> I suppose setting up and siting some unusual antenna geometries is still a skill.

Yeah, or even just knowing how to hack together a random wire end fed antenna...

My housemate who is a ham is designing, building and programing a micro-computer based SDR portable transmitter.

Hi there! Could you please give us his call sign and a link to the project. Sounds very interesting.

His callsign is VK4SQL but he hasn’t published anything about the project yet. Though hen does intend to.

Hope you can publish it here as interested. Just got the sdr up

The hobby is many hobbies. If you try to think of all hams doing one thing, or even just having one common set of skills, that's bound to fail.

Some hams are into HF antennas and DX phone or CW contacts, same as always.

Some hams are into WSPR and other QRSS/QRPP modes, getting around the world on milliwatts.

Some hams are launching and working satellites, in all sorts of modes.

Some hams are doing digital TV, especially the lucky ones in the QO-100 footprint who can do TV over wideband amateur satellite transpoder.

Some hams are playing with various internet-connected radios and repeaters, like the old Echolink/IRLP but now there's DMR and Brandmeister and stuff.

Some hams just want to use HTs that don't suck, while off-roading or otherwise in places cellphones might not work.

I could go on. It's a hundred hobbies that have a license in common and sometimes very little else.

I know ham clubs that hide a transmitter in an undisclosed location in the woods, and they race cars for who can find it fastest (by triangulation). It's basically rally for geeks, with lots of unknowns.

I may be naive but I'm pretty sure any young person would be amazed at assembling and tuning a crystal radio to communicate over the quantum void.

Its relatively unchanging both by location and as a percentage of the population WRT "pick up any more"

For more than half a century, the demographics have always been its a life long hobby most pick up in their middle age, and a steady fifth of a percent of the population are hams.

Because of the baby boomers the number of hams in the USA is larger now than ever.

Note that if contemporary "broadcasting" has taught anything, its even a very small fraction of the population can have a distinct healthy culture AND quite a bit of variety within that culture. So most hams are 60 yr old retiring EE-type men, but there are certainly all kinds of folks and its a very social hobby.

What is "old" is the concept of local clubs for any hobby or activity. Young folks don't do "clubs" of any sort, so naturally all the hams in the local clubs are old. There are also correlated effects where VHF FM repeaters were affordable and high tech for a small (dozen size) club in maybe 1980, and with the decline in that form of operation the average age is quite high. In the 80s it was fairly normal for FM repeater club members to be pretty young as that was the high tech rebellious thing to do.

I got into ham radio when I was 15, before that I was fascinated with CB radio, FRS/GMRS, DXing distant AM/FM stations, and radio scanning. I also played a lot of video games and texted nonstop, built and fixed PCs for my friends, played in the school band, cherished my first car, had girlfriends and breakups, like a normal kid.

I'm 28 now, and it's basically the reason for my career. So to "pay it forward," advocating for youth in ham radio has turned into my (very unpaid) side hustle. The current run of leading amateur radio organizations are aged, and more-or-less self serving the older demographic. I'm not sure if ham radio just was and always will be an old persons hobby, or if younger people can enjoy it too.

Right now I help run a ham radio club for youth (https://yarc.world/), with a 1300-member young hams discord server (https://discordapp.com/invite/E7GY7fR), as well as a youth advocacy organization named Youth on the Air (https://youthontheair.org) that will be running a summer camp for 30 young hams from North and South America at the Voice of America museum in Cincinnati, OH.

Something about tech I learned when I worked on container ship autopilots: always have a manual failover! The highest layer of abstraction invariably fails due to its complexity and you’ll need to be able to use the next layer down the stack... all the way to rudder control by hand.

How capable are the satellite communication devices (Iridium, Inmarsat, etc) in a disaster? Do the satellites get overloaded easily?

They aren't that expensive any more, you can get a phone for around $500 and basic plan for $50/month.

Or you can get a satellite communicator (mostly meant for hiking in the backcountry) that can only send an SOS message or text message for ~$300 for the device and as little as $12/month for a basic plan with a few SMS's included.

Always on party line PTT is a very different thing from PSTN voice calling, although some satellite networks do offer the former. PTT is indispensable in a real-time group coordination scenario, but can’t support in depth conversations or (usually) long distances. You want both.

It’s also basically impossible to receive a call on a handheld sat phone unless you schedule a time to be pointing the antenna at the sky.

Does smoke interfere with operation? Is a clear line of sight to the sky required?

Seperate but related, I hope it draws attention to the fact that FM receivers should be a legal requirement in mobile phones. Even if just for emergency purposes

It’s amusing to me when they market 5G network like it’s going to be a big help to emergency workers. They even have a scene of firefighters battling a forest fire. 5g has a range of 1000 feet in perfect conditions. Nobody is going to be using it in a forest fire, unlike amateur radio and HAM.

5G New Radio (the 5G physical layer) adds a couple of high frequency, low range bands to the game.

But low-frequency, high-range bands are available with 5G, too. It's a matter of policy and deployment strategy if you use these bands for 4G, 5G wide area coverage.

Some countries will continue having 2G on these Higher range bands. Others will re-use the bands for 5G.

So far, it's about public networks. You can use network technologies like 5G to roll your own network, too. The vendors market turn-key solutions for emergency services, e.g. a basestation on top of the firefighters truck.

5G works perfectly fine on same long distances as 2G/3G/4G did.

But it adds a dedicated frequency range for emergency services, so when shit hits the fan, and everybody is calling everybody, the emergency workers can still communicate.

Compared to TETRA, pretty much everything is an upgrade.

so when shit hits the fan ....

... the infrastructure that mobile phones and the internet depend on, will be non-operational.

It's 'wonderful' having a laptop or mobile phone when those things have nothing to connect to.

Spend a bit of time in places where your phone says 'no coverage' and you'll understand just what a great paper-weight it can be. <grin>

So it becomes merely a PDA taped to an iPod. That's still pretty good.

Nah, usually it works, just the calls don't get through.

Even after the Boston bombing, the people there couldnt get/take calls, because the network was flooded with other people calling.

Mobile networks survive most of the "shits hitting the fans", but usually the sheer amount of calls to/from that area makes them useless for emergency communication (unless you get a dedicated channel... or have "QoS" set up very very well)

> But it adds a dedicated frequency range for emergency services, so when shit hits the fan, and everybody is calling everybody, the emergency workers can still communicate.

Cool. Now if only Verizon's commercials were about that, and not claiming that the short-distance part of the network is going to revolutionize emergency services on an everyday basis.

But the fast part is what they want to advertise, so who cares about accuracy.

The average end user, or even a technical user paying half-assed attention, is not going to pick up on, or care, about those nuances.

We're nerds on a tech nerd forum, so we care. But HN isn't a good reflection of society, or even STEM.

Frequencies are a nuance. The claim that the new network is making ambulances more effective is not a nuance, it's a lie.

> Compared to TETRA, pretty much everything is an upgrade.

You are comparing two different things here AFAICT.

5G is a cell phone standard, and the dedicated frequency range you are referring to is used by something like the (LTE-based) FirstNet.

TETRA is a non-phone based protocol, and it is more comparable to the Public 25 radio system.

Tetra is the "mobile phone" that our emergency services (well, police and firefighters atleast, not sure about ambulances) use. It offers "normal" calls and messages, ut it also offers push-to-talk, and group talks (needed for teamwork).

5G is set to replace tetra, with dedicated frequencies for emergency services, and those features implemented - so this will become the "mobile phone", using dedicated frequencies on current basestations, while the data in the backend will be transfered via 5G standards (with additional moficiations for PTT and group talk).

So yes, the technology behind is different, but the usecase will be the same.

Dedicated frequencies for emergency services is not something new that 5G brings to the table. See FirstNet for an example of LTE running on dedicated public safety frequencies.

> 5g has a range of 1000 feet in perfect conditions.

This depends on the frequencies used.

Marques ("MKBHD") Brownlee has a good video on this:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmnTAOU44SI

When I was a bicycle messenger 13 years we used two way radios, celphones weren't reliable enough. They still use two-way radios out there today.

When it's clear that civilization is going to collapse, I'll figure out how to use grampa's old ham radio equipment.

You might want to do it early - it's so much easier to learn with the wealth of the internet to help you. I'm a huge fan of https://hamstudy.org/, I've gone from zero to making my own gear and playing a lot with gnuradio in a little bit of time. It's really fun stuff. :)

Ham radio volunteer and emergency communications is an awesome way to serve the community.

It's also 99% of the reason why I got into electrical engineering and landed in the career I'm in. It's still a fun and technically relevant STEM hobby.

de NØSSC

This is particularly amusing to me, after the “amateur radio is obsolete” sentiment expressed by the general public and FCC when a portion of the spectrum was scheduled to be reallocated to unlicensed commercial use last year.

Raw voice, or even morse code, will always have value in emergencies; but it’s easy to forget and ignore that when everything is calm.

EDIT: Clarified that the bands were not sold, but up for re-allocation for commercial use.

I'd like to learn Morse, but I'm concerned that my skills would quickly atrophy if I stopped practicing.

Thankfully, there’s lots of practice options, including a number of apps. Here’s the one I’ve used for years now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/morse-it/id284942940

I'm on Android. Morse Mania looks decent.

Learing is not too hard. It took me about a month of drilling while I was walking to work to learn the letters and digits well enough to do 5 wpm (which basically means that you have memorized them).

Are you interested in keeping them up? Morse on the air can be fun, and a not too expensive hobby.

My experience as well. And one hour on the air each day led to a 5 wpm increase each month for several months.

You may already know this, but for anyone else reading, Morse code is no longer a requirement for any amateur license in the US. (I don't know about other countries.)

It still can be a useful skill - and fun when you get into it - but there is a lot you can do in ham radio without Morse.

Is there such a thing as a straight key or paddle (iambic?) key that connects to a USB interface? The amount of bandwidth required to conduct a CW QSO via the internet would be far less than a VoIP call. A Morse code chat program would make for an interesting Show HN project.

Yes. https://hackaday.com/2017/10/03/a-vintage-morse-key-turned-i... There are others.

Making one to your own spec is actually pretty easy with an Arduino.

https://hamprojects.info/mortty/

You probably already know this, but for the information for anyone else interested in becoming a Ham, you don't need to learn Morse to get an amateur radio license - that requirement was dropped in 2007.

In all of the disaster drills or other ham volunteer events I've participated in (like providing radio support for a race in an area with little cell phone coverage), Morse was not even a part of it -- it was all VHF/UHF voice communication.

That's not to say that morse is useless or completely unused, but don't feel that you have to learn it to become a ham.

Also there are morse modem apps you can get on the smartphone and just put it next to your radio. It's a non-issue these days.

I think if you are in a situation requiring Morse code, you likely don't have access to a smart phone.

Not true at all. Infrastructure can go down leaving a lot of compute at the nodes. If you can power a radio you can power a smartphone.

I don't really care if it's not a formal requirement. At least I can flex on my friends :)

I think Morse code was dropped in the 1990s.

I got a license without Morse code back then. Never really use it though.

I always thought packet radio might be interesting, but no one in my local group was interested. Did it ever become popular.

Packet radio doesn't allow encryption so its utility for most applications is pretty limited.

Neither does hackernews* (the threads are readable by the public).

*yes, yes, https, username, passwords... i know.. but you write a block of text, post it, and it's shown here... no encryption needed for that.

What did you want to do with packet radio?

That's probably somewhat of a special interest since it requires a smart device.

Packet radio doesn't support encryption to any meaningful specification, and also is intolerably low-bandwidth for any real-world applications outside things like instrument telemetry.

What about communicating during a disaster? ..as in the article?

Amateur radio in general doesn't allow encryption, but that doesn't make it useless, especially for disaster communications.

- install Google keyboard - use the Morse code Tasker plugin to read your messages to you using morse code vibrations

Use a Morse code email reader :-).

I started implementing an Android "Morse" keyboard widget but gave up realizing how deeply into Android I was going to have to go to make it do what I wanted. My plan was to use the accelorometer to read the finger taps so that I could send texts by tapping my phone while it was upside down on the table next to me.

Gmail Tap gmail.com/mail/help/promos/tap/

Okay, that is just hilarious.

When I was in the ham club at Michigan State knew a student who built a code reader for his Masters. He wrote the code for the university's IBM 360, inputting it with punch cards. My memory is that it worked quite well.

Now you can get one that runs on your cell phone, that's progress!

I've got a Morse code decoder and encoder running on a Rasberry Pi, it both sends the ident for my WSPR beacon and records contacts of other beacons. It does better on non-human encoded Morse which is more consistent than a human but still does pretty well.

I'm learning morse code, and I stream my lessons daily on Youtube [0] and twitch [1] using LCWO [2]. It just takes 10 minutes a day, and if you leave it it's incredibly easy to pick up again, just like riding a bike.

[0] https://youtube.com/c/n0ssc [1] https://twitch.tv/kawfey [2] https://lcwo.net/

Re allocated for unlicensed commercial use = more airspace where wifi- and bluetooth-type protocols can exist?

> Re allocated for unlicensed commercial use = more airspace where wifi- and bluetooth-type protocols can exist?

No, they were gonna be used for some sort of drone company in France.

It wasn't been planned for unlicensed commercial use, and the 2m band is quite useless for "wifi- and bluetooth-type" things.

I admire the WICEN volunteers. Sending messages across oceans with a AAA battery is not easy, and a community will only need to do that once in anyone's lifetime. But, on rare occasions like the Indian Ocean tsunami, when a continental-scale catastrophe destroys whatever didn't fit in anyone's pocket, that capability is really useful to have. You have to respect the people who keep organising to make it available through the decades where nothing happens, and organise effectively enough that things work when they need to.

I’m pretty sure the Ragnar Relay uses ham radio volunteers to call in finishers. I don’t know if there’s any technical reason for it.

I feel like amateur radio is dying not because it's old, but because regulation blocks it from staying new.

> ...regulation blocks it from staying new.

What do you mean?

You’re restricted to relatively narrow bandwidth, and to no crypto. It’s great for experimenting with the radio tech, but not for designing the next WiFi. (But you can use unlicensed spectrum for that)

Why would it prevent you from designing a new wifi? The encryption is a software layer on top of the physical signal. You can design it skipping the encryption step.

Thanks for that clarification.

Don't forget about the baud rate limit too. Who likes that?

Nah... it's just that we've got flashy new devices to communicate with, and "noone" cares about the old ones.

The same thing is happening to every other tech, from IRC to SMS.

Radio is very decentralized. I wonder if that could be a nice avenue for modernizing the hobby.

You may be interested in https://othernet.is/ and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_S...

I hadn't heard of othernet. APRS is cool and ripe for disruption.

The story about nasa and Russian Mir with The 80 years old ham radio operator Is good.

Progressive enhancement

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