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Comment by asow92 | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to see a lot more interest in shortwave radio and radio in general recently. Is it just me being out of the loop or is anyone else noticing this?

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My speculation is that being surrounded by ubiquitous wireless technologies, some people are going to be curious about the nuts and bolts of it all and want to understand how it works. A second factor is that things like RTL-SDR that allow exploring interesting signals for about the cost of two decent burritos makes it very low friction to get started. I hope the interest continues to grow.

Maybe it has to do with the start of solar cycle 25? Expect to see improving HF propagation over the next 3-5 years. It's an exciting time for radio nerds.

I've read that we're at sar minima until the most 2040s, so I'm not holding my breath for better propagation anytime soon.

Bit of a nitpick, but the standard APRS frequency in North America is 144.390MHz, well above the "shortwave" bands (granted, it's still "radio in general").

Yeah... I hear shortwave and amateur radio (aka ham radio) used interchangeably all the time - but it isn't correct.

a lot of folks (me included) have no idea what the differences are :)

Shortwave refers to a band of frequencies with particular characteristics. Ham refers to radio bands allocated to amateur radio. There are shortwave frequencies that hams can’t operate on and there are frequencies outside of shortwave that amateurs can operate on.

"Shortwave" just refers to a range of frequencies (which, counter intuitively, are on the longer end of the wavelength spectrum). It's generally used to refer to the 3-30 MHz range.

Ham (amateur) radio is a pretty wide range of radio activities performed by folks who have passed an exam and received a license to transmit using various modes on various frequencies (there are a few different licensing levels that grant different privileges). Activities include everything from talking to other hams in your local area using a VHF/UHF handheld radio (often via a repeater), to long range voice or "morse code" communication over hundreds (or thousands) of miles using the "shortwave" bands, to very long range (and very low bandwidth) modes like FT8 (Ever wanted to send 12 bytes to someone on the other side of the world? With FT8, you can!)

Data on shortwave is really cool. You can get super long distances bouncing off the ionosphere or even meteor scatter trails.

SDR. Easy to interface radios with computers so like every other thing you hook computers up to, it rockets the state of the art forward.

Might be because there is now inexpensive gear available, eg Baofeng?

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