Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving
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Millenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials!
That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects.
I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!
Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.
There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.
Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.
Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people.
In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.
An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.
People like that say the things they say for the attention it attracts to them. They are not ashamed of their dumbass bigoted opinions otherwise they wouldn't be transmitting halfway around the world in the clear. If you engage them in any way, even to try to shame them, you have already given them what they want. They are the trolls of amateur radio.
The right thing to do is what most of us hams do: spin the dial and find someone more pleasant to talk to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/iatqth/a_lot_...
social ostracization and penalty has its time and place, and this is one of those occasions. Same reason cars have number plates.
At the moment there isn't a financial incentive to perform this at any reasonable scale, but this doesn't mean that it can't be done at all.
Not discriminating here, just want to make it easier to correlate statements to the public record with public call signs.
Mention about the independent country of Taiwan or the autonomy of Hong Kong on radio.. well you've enabled the punishment of said behavior on a very real level. (In this case that would be invoking the national security letters recently introduced)
Is this really worth it for a few people with terrible opinions?
My stance: Let people have stupid opinions, let them blow off steam, recognize that you don't agree with them, don't be their opinions.
If it crosses the line where it wouldn't be allowed on over-the-air TV, it's not allowed on HAM radio spectrum. You can report it, and with evidence it can lead to nasty fines and/or revocation of license.
CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.
> Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it.
You're feeding into their behavior. IMO We're seeing a huge conflict in culture: one side that is authoritarian against unpleasant language and the other that doesn't accept that (or the suggested changed). (That's a very simplified view of it)
We were too young to object at the time, and now we're stuck with it.
And we spend all day on Slack at work so clearly the Amateur Radio version of Slack/IRC has to be called "Apathy"!
A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.
Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?
Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.
Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.
Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.
So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.
Why would you gatekeep on something that is mostly a hobby and for volunteers. Putting a continuing ed requirement on that is just going to piss off people. People who build these networks are mostly volunteers and they put a lot of effort into this. I think there should be a bit of respect given for that.
Got briefly involved a few years ago. Still dominated by 60-70+ year olds. Me and a friend in our early 40s were the “kids”
With the improvements and rising affordability of cellular networks, satellites, wifi, IoT protocols, etc. — not to mention to overall transition from analog to digital — will amateur radio even stay relevant?
Just to provide an example: I made a keyer in the 70s. The way to make a PCB was to get a 3x4 copper-coated board from Radio Shack, use a sharpie to draw your desired traces, then etch the board in an HCl bath. After that, you used an old-fashioned soldering iron to attach your components to the board. You became excellent at soldering ICs, to avoid the additional cost of using a plug-in socket.
(Now get off my lawn.)
What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?
I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.
... which I don't find surprising and seems to fit, but what I was very surprised by was the tremendous amount of submission, and appeal, to authority that pervades HAM communities.
FCC regulations are not to be questioned. Even to discuss other, possible regulatory regimes or changes to rules is met with incredulity and sometimes outright hostility. God forbid one bring up issues of circumvention, etc.
I find it surprising because it is such a contract to the UNIX/FOSS community which places such a high cultural value on freedom and exploration of the gray areas of systems.
It's an odd cultural aspect of the HAM community ...
In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.
If ham radio goes digital then it’s just people wasting spectrum on something they could be doing on the Internet.
The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club.
This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique.
I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!
I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.
I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles.
Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.
- a bunch of interesting radio things are available without a license today - e.g. hunting for various signals with a cheap SDR receiver. Which could potentially be a way for ham communities to then get people deeper into it, but the communities seem quite distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities)
- online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through)
A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory).
EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!
I still have a radio (several, actually) and one day when I have a larger piece of property I may even set up a reasonable HF station to participate in contests and the like but right now it's hard to justify spending time on a hobby that has little productive value at the end of the day.
Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
This is what always kept me away from HAM Radios. Everyone I knew that was into it was a huge stickler about the rules and would talk about all the bad stuff that should happen to rule breakers.
It was pretty unnerving.
Like most things in life, if you're not actually actively causing trouble things will probaby be ok. But yes, some amateurs do seem to be a rule loving/enforcing bunch. Anyone would think they were regulating something actually dangerous, like getting a driving licence.
(Note, I'm not belittling the importance of being a responsible amateur - just that a lot of the time the general tone seems a bit 'DO NOT DO' more than 'do...')
However, the rules are actually not that hard to follow and part of getting your license is learning about those rules. The FCC views amateur radio as largely self-policing and will quite literally never go after an individual until they have had multiple complaints, issued several warnings, and have a documented pattern of intentional, malicious violation of the rules.
But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)
Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.
These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.
As someone commented below, sending encrypted data over HAM frequencies is not allowed (IANAL), which also rules out a lot of interesting projects and use-cases.
Previously, in the 1980’s, yes I could see a Taxi/Plumber/etc using amateur radio equipment as a cheaper workaround for their business, but now it’s so much cheaper (and better) to use cellular or, if you really needed business radios they aren’t crazy expensive as they once were.
However, as an ham radio license holder, I would still not want to see our amateur radio frequencies, which are purposefully set aside by the FCC for hobby and experimental use, used for any commercial purposes at all.
Commercial radio has its own spectrum and rules, and the cost to use it is not insignificant. Many businesses in my area still use radio because it is more reliable and controllable than the services provided by mobile operators. A lot of these would absolutely jump at the chance to use the ham bands and ditch their expensive commercial equipment, regulation, and fees if it were legal to do so.
For non-local communications, HFT companies have been looking at the HF bands for years to shave a few milliseconds off their micro-arbitrage transactions (compared to wired networks) and ham radio has the largest chunk of spectrum after the military.
As to the Russian Spies, tech has changed so much that anyone who would still argue this is fooling themselves.
First a receiver and fascination with all the signals I could find. Then the discovery that for a couple hundred dollars I COULD TRANSMIT TOO???!!!!!!
Except that my receiver was a “police scanner” and my transmitters were various “walkie talkies” (first CB, then 2m amateur repeaters.)
What you are describing IS radio as a hobby.
If SDR had existed back then, I would have totally tried it out. It’s just Moore’s law making insanely advanced technology accessible.
I love living in the future!
“RTL” is from a particular chipset that has great support for hackability.”
There a few different apps that can decode signals from it.
I even got a USB-OTG (“on-the-go”) adapter and used my RTL dongle with an app on an Android phone. And that was 5ish years ago.
Or this nicer one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011HVUEME/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Zl...
Sdr# for Windows. GQRX for the others. For a blog with help and project ideas check out http://www.rtlsdr.com/
Just browse to here: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
Aside from SDR# on Windows and gqrx on Linux, there's also GNU Radio [2] and a variety of lightweight applications that can run on, let's say, a Raspberry Pi Zero [3]. Oona Räisänen has a fascinating blog that touches on digital signal processing as well, applicable to SDRs as well.
Me? No ham license, but that may come someday.
[1] https://www.nooelec.com/store/
tl;dr for the rest of my post: ham radio is the best type of radio for hackers.
Undoubtedly you can have tons of fun with a $30 RTL-SDR and basic antenna, but there are lots of things you can do with ham radio once you grow tired of that, or if you find yourself being interested in how radio works generally, but more fundamentally, you can actually talk to people who are _actively hacking on the same types of things you are_ using projects you've both worked on, maybe together.
Regarding FRS/GMRS walkie talkie frequencies: these are UHF (Ultra High Frequency) frequencies, which means a couple of things: range is limited to well under a mile in most conditions, and building a radio to work on FRS or GMRS would be _possible_, but would require a lot of specialized equipment and maybe an engineering degree. Additionally, power is extremely limited on these radios, so you might be able to transmit back, but you'd better be near the business's parking lot to do so legally. Again, as far as a hobby goes, try breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant's recitation of someone's waffle fry order to ask whether you're coming in clearly on your home-built radio.
Ham radio has a community that's thriving and full of fun for new and/or young modern hackers. You just have to know where to look. For starters, consider Ham Radio Village at DEFCON (https://hamvillage.org) or the online Young Amateur Radio Club (https://yarc.world/) (an inclusive and active club centered around a Discord channel full of people interested in the latest tech in ham radio), or Ham Radio Workbench Podcast (https://twitter.com/HamWorkbench) (a podcast focusing on the latest in ham radio with a focus on new technologies and the intersection with the maker sphere). Hackaday frequently hosts new, fresh takes on ham radio hacking as well.
I think ham radio is back to its roots. With the resources of the modern maker movement, it's possible to learn about radio and hack something together that puts you on the air with people as excited as you are.
You could build a radio that transmits on FRS frequencies, but it would be illegal unless you submitted a radio to the FCC and received type approval. FRS radios must be type approved, limited power, and with non-removable antennas.
I think GMRS radios must also be type approved, but they can have removable antennas. You need a GMRS license to operate one legally. FRS does not require a license.
"...breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant..." Seriously? Come on.
Other than those nits, you do have a lot of good information in your comment, so thank you for that!
Good to know about FRS and GMRS. Those things just underscore how really limited experimental transmission privileges are without a ham license.
About the Chik-Fil-A thing, that was a silly way to say that even if you do transmit on FRS or GMRS, it's not like there's a community of other experimenters making it fun to do so.
I still have a quite a bit of gear left, mostly 2M stuff but the fact is I don't really have anyone to talk to and the biggest reason I got into radio (public service/storm spotting/emergency prep) have not been very active here. We do radios for parades, but they haven't activated storm spotters here in nearly 2 years.
If I had more people to talk to, I'd be on it more. But it's hard to get kids 3 kids 6 and under... to get interested in it.
If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup.
The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Arealsexycyborg%20ham&src...
It’s one of the few Amateur Radio clubs I know that has a Github repo [4]
[1] https://tapr.org/about/ [2] https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ [3] https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ [4] https://github.com/TAPR
If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call
And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o
It's great, I love it and have been enjoying it for the last few months - thank you so much!
Edit: added radio model, fixed price
Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?
Our club/repeaters don't have any obvious "cultural" norms or rules. Announcing your call sign as required by FCC ham rules is about the only obvious rule.
That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.
That's a great phrase.
My first exposure to HAM was back in ~2000 when I started working at a car stereo shop and the owner (NU5K) was huge into HAM. He was an asshole most of the time, but very knowledgeable and loved to tinker with different HAM components both benchtop and mobile.
Everytime I would try and get interested the end result promise was something like: "You can bounce a wave off a cloud and talk with someone in Ukraine!"
Ok, well I can also do that on ukraine.bbs - and being able to choose my topic instead of whomever is actually on this random band at this random time.
Even moreso now - there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc. I see no reason that anyone would mess with HAM.
First of, there's a wack-ton of science you can just dive straight into, with a lot of literature around because ham's been around for a long time.
Are you in to EE and hacking? Cool! You can build your own radios!
Are you into pushing boundries? DX (chasing long distance contacts) is for you.
There's QRP (super low power) where you can talk to an amazing amount of people over morse code with just 5 watt and a deadnuts simple transmitter. It's like making a cellphone with a 9v and an altoids tin and talking to someone halfway cross the country.
There's also the civic duty aspect, there even folk with just handie talkies (walkie-talkie-sized ham radios made for shorter-distance trasmission) can do their part in a natural disaster.
But above all that, there's a really hands-on feel to making something out of bits and bobs and suddenly someone is talking to you!
It used to be that one of the public services that amateur radio operators performed was weather spotting. Before the age of cell phones that was a vital service. Now if I see severe weather I can text a GPS-tagged photo directly to the NWS.
Mentioning RaspberryPi and amateur radio: I've been interested in combining weather observation stations with packet radio and a truly open database of weather observations that, from the beginning, is dedicated to weather and climate research and will NEVER allow the data or sensor network to be acquired (like Weather Underground). The idea of sticking a weather monitoring station somewhere remote with a PiZero, solar panel, battery, and transceiver to send weather observations to a weather research database... that would hit the sweet spot of combining amateur radio, hardware, cloud architecture, and contributing to science and the public good.
I think this is one of the big advantages of amateur radio. No need for the infrastructure of the internet...it's just you with some TX/RX equipment, power, and someone else with the same. No ISPs, governments, servers, software, etc... getting in the way.
I'll be honest, I've been into the hobby for 16 years now, and have actually been on phone no more than a few times. To me, all the fun is building things, tinkering, just generally understanding and overcoming the technical challenges. And then when I get things working I prefer CW or digital just because it makes me a little self conscious blasting my voice out for all the world to hear.
Sure you can tinker with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos... but come on, what could be cooler than building your own radio and antenna system, and using it to make contact with some dude in Kazakstan without any Internet, or undersea cables, or satellites, or anything. Just two guys on the planet with wires strung up some trees. :-) How cool is that?!
I wished we had the USA's books and exam guides. It all looks like such a smooth licensing process. In South Africa - there only seems to be two licensing opportunities per year and I think I need to travel to another province to take exam. I have an uncle that is quite deep into the hobbie and he is also an E.E. He has this basement lab full of electronics and radio gear that just makes me a software dev giddy with excitement :) Think dexter lab !
ps. Any hams in and around Cape Town that wants to give me a quick intro or hands-on experience :) ??
Ps2. SideNote: Ive been trying to get into old school irc again. Had some good friends and community back in the 90s there.
I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next. This is more that people studying online aren't part of clubs. I'm still learning etiquette and I think we'll end up with a lot of new passes ignoring it in 6 months time as behaviours become ingrained.
Must confess that I don't actually live in the UK any more so I am having to hold out for the Full to become available online before I get back on the air so I haven't been listening in or transmitting. For me though I'm really keen to just build analogue circuits and QRP stuff, so I've been enjoying studying this lately.
That's the problem I had in Canada. I passed my exam, showed up to a local club meeting, and was like "Now what?" "Whatever you want." "I don't know what I want." "Whatever you want!"
Myself and one other young member of the club tried suggesting some local events we could offer services to to provide members a public service opportunity, their answer was "We don't go to them. They come to us." (Spoiler Alert: They don't come to us.)
I've sinced moved somewhere that has a very active emergency communications group that's well tied in with the city's emergency response plans and the police and works proactively with the city to provide communication for many large public events. That very quickly evolved into getting much more into the hobby as there was suddenly a _purpose_ to what I was doing. Testing equipment, fixing and maintaining equipment, solving problems _with_ radio (we need to link point A to point B -- what do?!) practicing emergency communications, etc. And once you get in to the hobby, it's much easier to branch out into adjacent areas as opportunities come up.
I think a big part of getting more people actively involved could just be... providing things for them to do. Where I used to live the question "Why should I get an amateur radio license?" was hard to answer. It's an incredibly easy sell where I am now to get people interested and involved as part of an emergency preparedness and public service group. It's all the feel good of volunteer work with all the fun of playing with a bunch of electronics and technical stuff. There are a lot of people that appeals to.
I have kids aged 9 and younger, and their friends are starting to get cell phones. I'm hoping I can get them to earn their technician licenses so I can give them cheap radios instead; then they can have their own "social network" without all the harmful stuff a smartphone gives access to.
I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not.
More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?
Not all data is best graphed starting at zero. Such as graphs with negative and positive values or ones intended to show differences in values where the magnitude of the changes are substantially less than that of the values.
There is a movement/revolution in ham radio occurring, led by young people online. Large youth-oriented groups like YOTA (in IARU region 1[0], 2[1] and 3[2]), YARC[3], YACHT[4], ILYH[5], and others. The advent of SDR and software-based radio peripherals has really opened the ham radio door up into the hackerspace, such that it's increasingly common to see radio-related articles on Hackaday. Remote operation is also growing immensely and giving young people a lot less barrier to entry into the real fun parts of HF operating.
I have high hopes for the future of ham radio, especially after emailing with the new ARRL CEO [6]. He has a lot of plans and visions to fill the void where youth advocacy and modern marketing led by ARRL have fallen short.
[1] https://youthontheair.org/
[2] https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/
[4] http://yacht.younghams.org/
[6] http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-...
And the attitude if you try to suggest a simpler process is "you are a criminal wanting to circunvent the laws!" (this attitude also comes from guys in the US if you suggest things like asking if you could license on a country and operate on a different one.
I'm better off using marine band, off road VHF frecuencies and GMRS as I please.
There are plenty of ways to communicate with whoever you want, however you want, whenever you want and completely encrypted too!
I see a lot of anecdotes of special distaster cases when HAM was the magical solution, but I don't remember normal communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?
Just like people who own old motorcycles and tinker with them and join biker gangs. Similar idea
Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked.
It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation.
There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed.
Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.
There's something completely magical about making an inter-continental contact with 5 watts and a wire in a tree, or bouncing your voice off an amateur-built satellite with a handheld yagi. There's an eerie beauty to the atmospherics on the HF band, the music of signal emerging from the noise. The anticipation of the dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah of a CQ call, the excitement when a rare callsign weakly breaks through, the frenzied pile-up of operators jostling to get their QSL. The bizarre geopolitical madness of 7055kHz.
Hardly anyone needs to use amateur radio, but it can be a tremendous amount of fun.
I'm in North America somewhere densely populated that you could reasonably expect a massive earthquake to hit.
Nobody realistically expects that this will be an issue any time soon. It hasn't been in the past 30 years, and hopefully won't be for the next 30. The government here _does_ prepare for it because it would be irresponsible not to. It's at the same level as maintaining a stockpile of medical supplies to prepare for a one-in-a-hundred year pandemic. Looks silly until it doesn't and tens or hundreds of thousands of people die following a disaster due to a lack of preparedness. And in this case, "preparing" is basically letting a bunch of volunteers provide these services largely for free.
I volunteer with an organization that is integrated into the disaster response planning at multiple levels of government and with the local police. The group spends a lot of time building out and maintaining backup communication infrastructure throughout the area as an integrated part of the emergency response plans. Not just with amateur radio, but with satellite phones, the police radio systems, some of the regional backup radio systems the government maintains, some of the city departments' independent radio systems, etc. We're tied into it all. There's another group here that maintains a microwave link from within the city to 250 miles outside of it that provides communication outside of the potentially impacted area.
Our systems are the _only_ point to point communication systems left in the city as far as I know. Every city radio relies on a repeater or system of repeaters. The police radios are all cells with a physical back haul between sites. We have systems tied in at most main city services, community centers, the regional staging areas, etc and plans for how to get the appropriate information where it needs to go and people trained to do so if it ever needs to be turned on. The tie-ins with the other radio systems at points throughout the city allow us to act as a backup route if for some reason part becomes segmented and direct communication isn't possible. No matter how bad the physical damage, our system will be working as long as there are people still alive.
Some people volunteer at a soup kitchen or animal shelter. Myself and a couple hundred others use our technical skills volunteering to maintain a resilient communication backbone for the community.
And I mean... it's fun?
Step 2: sit back and relax as the rest of your brain goes into overdrive to attain a license in order to justify purchasing one of these radios.
You never knew you wanted one until now! Time to start revising for the license exam!
OMFG! Really? This corporate BS question, that I get tired of it every time I find a interesting project to bid on, and the naive potential client has it hidden in there - it's here for youngsters? I usually just go with a snarky "because I'm awesome" or "because I'm the best you'll get" on my potential clients. Hope youngsters are replying to them with "It's not, I'm a masochist".
This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language?
When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. When you were a kid few adults took you seriously or cared about your opinions. I joined a club, met all sorts of people. I became an expert on certain arcane parts of the hobby because they interested me. Suddenly when questions on this area of expertise came up I was the expert people four times my age consulted and this helped me gain self confidence. I also saw examples where not only age but race or sex just did not matter because we were all part of the ham radio fraternity.
I think we need to pitch ham radio as a worthwhile pursuit to those budding nerds. Pick up technical knowledge that could lead to a career in engineering. A social club where the work done to pursue membership had its rewards. A chance to compare yourself to others in competition. Not everyone is a natural born athlete but we all have a desire to compete in something and ham radio contests are a way to do it.
I got my General license last year and this month I decided to give CW a try. I do have to say that as an absolute beginner developing my listening skills brings me back to when I was first learning Spanish in high school and how much effort it took to figure out where words started and ended. Obviously it's not quite as hard because you don't need to learn a large vocabulary, but don't brush it off as trivial.
> When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%.
I think this has much more to do with economics and the progress of technology than it has to do with lack of interest. The Antique Wireless Museum recently posted a series of videos on their YouTube channel on the history of amateur radio and one of the things I learned was that before the 1950s commercially-produced transmitters for the amateur radio bands largely weren't a thing, so building them yourself was pretty much a requirement to get into the hobby.
Additionally, up to the 1960s commercial electronics were largely still made entirely of discrete components hand-wired point-to-point which was a very labor-intensive method of construction. If you bought the parts yourself or you bought a kit you would be doing pretty much exactly the same thing they would be doing in the factory but on your own time, giving you large savings of money since you weren't paying for someone else's labor. Since then electronics manufacturing has advanced greatly: PCBs, surface mount components, pick-and-place machines, wave soldering, integrated circuits, etc. Many electronics devices you buy today would be much, much harder to try to build in a DIY environment than they would in a factory, even with a kit, and the labor costs are so much less due to these innovations (and overseas manufacturing) that you don't get the savings you once did.
I see the surge in interest in SDRs (which bring the infinite malleability of software to radio at zero marginal cost once you have the SDR itself) as a sign that this interest in DIY never went away, it's just the accessibility of it that did.
Also, give youngsters some access to old tech as well. I don't have a ham license, but by experience could possibly repair a damaged analog radio after an accident, then send a distress SOS call by using a screwdriver to close two contacts. It's forgotten practice, still there's one probability over a billion times that it could turn out useful.
I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment.
Just my two cents.
There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down.
As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
HF and the bottom half of VHF is where you start needing more (expensive) equipment and the antenna setup begins to really dominate performance.
The other problem is that you'll go through all of the expense for a turnkey radio, get on the bands and all you hear people talking about is their radio setup.
I'm welcome to being corrected, however my understanding is that I'd need a full license to legally broadcast on those bands.
You're likely aware that you can get CB/MURS/FRS type radios without a license, but that wouldn't help that much. It would be nice to have a small slice of each ham band that would be available to non-licensed folks, but the hardware would be tricky, you'd have high physical capability (and cost) but it would have to be locked down to basically a 'slice selector', speaker and microphone...basically what you get with FRS radios.
Neat idea though!
And avoid all the test questions about amplifiers, and antenna configuration, etc.
The other month in Canada we had a huge outage of 3-4 cellular service providers and home internet issues due to a MPLS failure. Being work from home due to COVID I had no idea how to determine if this was a local level event, or a larger event. I turned on my trusty AM/FM/LW/SW radio. However in the fashion of today's radio landscape they're all multicast of national programming etc. Nothing about a huge outage.
Had I a license there are a few HAM guys I know 60 minutes down the road and it would have been a decent check to see the severity of the outage.
But hey, you may be entertained by hearing old farts complain about immigrants!
I agree, that today it likely is a monoculture of older people who really like radio equipment.
Having an EE background definitely helps with the advanced exam though
Hope it goes well for your son!
What really got me hooked is the fact that modern information infrastructure is so massive, expensive, and pervasive, and we just take it for granted.
Ham radio lets you replicate some functional aspects of modern communication with literally nothing but $50 worth of parts and a long wire. No cell towers, no fiber, no undersea cables, no comcast, no google, no facebook, no internet servers/protocols/routers/hardware/etc...
It's amazing how much of this you can just collapse into a hobby project.
[0]: https://shop.motorolasolutions.com/t800-two-way-radios/produ...
I think the future of HAM is finding practical uses for it that the average joe can take advantage of. Hikers, campers etc can buy a $40 radio on amazon now and have a great backup for when they are out of cell service.
I know that the CB band was originally intended to be licensed, but they gave up on that once it became wildly popular in the 1970s, and it sounds like those FRS products are basically designed to avoid the user having to acquire a license.
In that sort of situation, the Ham community is basically an incubator of communications products, 90% of which will remain niche or fail and 1% of which will be tweaked slightly and sold to non-Hams.
He may be out there with a family and community of his own, living it up, but the person you liked is gone, and it’s not just okay but perfectly normal to mourn that loss.
With a basic license you can run a 250W transmitter. With an advanced license you can run a 1kW transmitter. You have access to allocations pretty much across the entire spectrum[1]:
* LF: ~136kHz
* MF: ~476kHz, 1.8-2MHz
* HF: 3.5MHz-4.0MHz, 7.0-7.3MHz, 10.1-10.15MHz, 14.0-14.35MHz, 18.068-18.168MHz, 21-21.45MHz, 24.89-24.99MHz, 28.0-29.7MHz
* VHF: 50-54MHz, 144-148MHz, 219-220MHz, 222-225MHz
* UHF: 420-450MHz, 902-928MHz, 1240-1300MHz, 2300-2310MHz, 2390-2450MHz
* SHF: 3.3-3.5GHz, 5.650-5.925GHz, 10.0-10.5GHz, 24.0-24.25GHz
* EHF: 47.0-47.2GHz, 75.5-81.0GHz, 122.5-123.0GHz, 134-141GHz, 241-250GHz
It's basically an experimenter's license for radio.
You can use it to talk to some old guys, participate in emergency preparedness stuff, work communications as a public service for events... but at it's core it's really just a license to use a huge chunk of radio spectrum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_alloca...
https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/
if anyone cares to read it.
This has often had a bit of a creepy vibe to me. Not a sexually creepy vibe, more like the Church targetting children to instill a set of beliefs about the world before they develop critical thinking skill. More like "adults won't want to do it our way, they'll try and introduce all these new digital modes; we need to get to them while they're young to "instill the correct values"" creepy.
Apart from that it has a "treating women as objects" vibe to it; imagine The Simpsons' Comicbook guy saying "we need more women in here", or Google saying "we want more women employed here", Or Peter Thiel and his "I want young people's blood"[1] ideas. Instead of wanting people with radio skills or technical skills or organizational skills, instead of valuing people's humanity and ability, only (non-sexually) fetishising one desirable attribute - age or gender or skin colour or malleability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning life inexperience) or excitability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning pre-cynical age).
And apart from those ways, it's predatory in the sense of Facebook building its software to focus on how to extract information from you, instead of focusing on what you want. "We want more (youth/women/people of colour), nevermind what they want". You want more children interested, why should the children give a damn? In the way that incels aren't entitled to a woman's attention just because they want a girlfriend, amateur radio isn't entitled to young people just because it's ageing out.
You want to expand amateur radio, no problem with that. Be interesting. Welcome whoever is interested. You want to spend more time with kids? Get out of the shed and volunteer at a school or play Fortnite, somewhere they are, and support what they are interested in. Don't be the "parent" saying they only have value to the extent that they mould themselves to the life shape you want them to have, they already have personalities, they are people not club-number-filler.
(I'm neither young, nor a ham, but I've seen it as a sentiment over the years in RadCom the magazine for the Radio Society of Great Britain, not just in this blogpost, and other places which I won't try to name and shame, but this isn't just a rant from one line in one blog post).
[1] allegedly.
In 1940-~1990 you could talk to people internationally, places you could never go on holiday, watching valves give way to integrated circuits, lead acid batteries turning to NiCad, improving signal sensitivity, reliability, portability, take part in the hobby developing around the mass availability of personal cars for things like assisting at sports events, or disaster assistance and relaying emergency messages, competitions like radio contact from hilltops, taking part in the developing space industry - satellites!
Now you can't build advanced radios from scratch in your shed, they're massively complicated microcontrollers. There's no need to build your own power supplies, cheap and efficient and reliable ones are abundant. There's no need to build your own radios, for the same reason. And the internet exists; chatrooms where you can talk to random people around the world are abundant, internet broadcasts of airport control towers and such are available, smartphones make portable contact nearly ubiquitous. Exploring new things is fine, but when you can find hundreds of YouTube videos showing you that it really is explored pretty thoroughly by now, that damps the allure.
So yes, HAM is DYING because outdated legislation is denying me same goodness in my mobile 6Watt radio.
It's also generally very illegal as a hobbyist to build and operate your own transmitter, except with an amateur radio licence. If you're more interested in how the phone works and building your own, than just using it, that's what amateur radio is for.
so what channel spacing do you use on your ham radio?
and im saying, my phone in my pocket is more powerful and more capable then any ham radio equipment on the market.
my phone can realtime decode 50 streams of packet radio, and im not even using integrated DSP processor inside my ARM SOC
packet radio is invention of 199x, we have DOS programs on pentium4 machines to decode almost all of the modes (GMSK, Olivia etc)
so where is invention, where is some improvement on these 25+ YEAR OLD technologies used by HAMs?
You're railing against a small thing I'm not even engaged in. Your phone is not more powerful than something like the USRP, for example, and that's quite popular among hams these days.