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Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

Personally as a HAM I think our technology is becoming too stale.

Commercial tech is now migrating towards high-speed data networks to be used even for voice. With HAM radio we're still stuck with analog voice and very low-bitrate voice codecs in the digital standards. None of which really offer much that analog (and linking tech) didn't. APRS is a joke with its low speeds.

The whole idea about ham radio was to innovate... We're not doing that at all, at best we're just using commercial technology. Some advancements to adapt firmware of commercial rigs (MD-380tools, OpenGD77) are amazing, but we're still lifting on what's commercially possible. This is not the ham spirit :(

We really need something good to offer and at the moment we haven't. It used to be so cool you could talk to people around the world for free. Now anyone with a phone in their pocket can do that.

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There’s still plenty of innovation left to do. Low bandwidth, low power, long distance signalling is interesting. As are ridiculously high frequencies. Also new modes and repurposing some of the modern radio ICs you can get.

But the issue I found is that the technical community is about as dead as it gets. It created a stereotype and then proceeded to get stuck in a hole. This was around 1970. Any newer thinking made it into appliances which cover the 95% of the rest of the user base. Most hams can barely solder a PL259 without destroying it. Even talking modulation schemes solicits a glazed look and some mumbling about 80m QRM. I was about done.

This year I didn’t renew my RSGB sub and sold all my radio equipment and test gear. I spent the money on an iPad Pro with Procreate and and a new Mac and am in a better place with respect to personal satisfaction and have some cash left over to spend on experiences and not things.

Compared to innovation in radios for commercial telecom microwave and millimeter wave radios (2.4 all the way up to 86 GHz), ham radio is moribund.

There's a whole lot more on the ground real world innovation happening in people building WISPs in very rural, challenging locations with no pre-existing telecom services (except by two-way satellite) than there is happening in ham radio.

Now you see that's a thousand times more interesting. It's providing utility to people and that has a purpose.

I don't personally find a need for digital voice communications on HAM. Analog is perfectly fine. You get much more reliability and stability from analog voice. There's not really a rush to move away from it, especially on HF. Digital voice unless in a stable environment or with multiple expensive tower sites, you'll be dropping packets and not be able to either make out a conversation as you get scambled robot voices, or simply dont decode it at all. Analog, you can still pick voices out of deep noise and some people are very very good at analog low signal reception with their ears/brain in combination with the receiver. It's also nearly impossible to get huge bandwidth rates on HF with major fading and unpredictable communications.

Non-voice digital modes are certainly innovating especially on HF, picking out signals well below the noise floor.

Since we're currently in a solar minimum (which reduces the propagation of radio signals here on Earth, and generally makes it more difficult to make long-range contacts), you would expect innovation to be happening in... making contacts in high-noise conditions! That's exactly what is happening with FT-8, WSPR, etc. The thing that excites me most about FT8 is that its implementation (https://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html) is open source, which means you can decide to modify or improve it without asking permission. That's exactly what the author of JS8CALL did -- he took FT8, which was designed for short "call sign and signal" contacts, and turned it into a conversational protocol (http://js8call.com/). The ability of FT8 and its descendants to transmit information waaaaay down in the noise is pretty awesome, and I hope it spawns at thousand imitators.

Spot on. The bulk of the people out there just use store bought equipment. If they build anything at all it is antennas.

not if you combine it with new tech. for example long range UAV. as a hobby it's good fun to experiment with different frequencies, antennas and other electronics. quite some innovation done last 10 years.

I wasn't aware of that development, but wouldn't the ban on data encryption on HAM bands hurt that usecase? You wouldn't want someone else controlling your drone.

Here in Europe long-range drones are forbidden anyway.. You must have line of sight at all times.

I believe you can work around the encryption ban.

eg, for the UK; “ 11(2) The Licensee shall only address Messages to other Amateurs or to the stations of those Amateurs and shall not encrypt these Messages for the purpose of rendering the Message unintelligible to other radio spectrum users.”

You can sign a message to authenticate it, without making it unintelligible. (compare pgp signing, snmp AuthNoPriv, etc)

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