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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Someone help me understand what is the exciting thing about HAM cause this article doesn't do anything for that.

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.

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It's a gigantic hobby that touches a lot of different nerdy things.

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!

AFAIK bouncing off clouds isn't a thing. :-) But lots of other types of bouncing for sure: the ionosphere, ionized trails from meteorites, the edge between air masses of different temperatures, mountains, the moon, satellites, repeaters....

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?!

>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.

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.

Ham radio is all about governments getting in the way. You can't do anything without asking a government's permission, and that permission gets revoked if you try to hide what you're doing by encrypting something. Also, don't even think about broadcasting without giving your license number, which is tied to your real name and address in a public database.

> there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc.

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.

Ham radio is still essential to weather spotting in Kansas. Cell service is very spotty, especially service good enough to send images.

It's pretty much the only way for a person to legally build a radio and operate it. Everything you're talking about has to do with using communications equipment, not creating anything.

How many hams create their own gear, as opposed to buying components and hooking them up?

Over half the ones I'm friends with have built a radio, but I have no idea if my friends are representative of the community as a whole. Also, it depends on what you mean: I bet a very strong majority have built their own antennas, but building radios is certainly not as common.

Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I enjoy being a ham (it's not an acronym, BTW). I get to tinker and constantly stretch my knowledge and technical skills.

I've always hated the "HAM" moniker and have always been pedantic about referring to it as "amateur radio."

It might help if you don't all-caps shout it...

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