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Comment by Dicey84 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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