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Comment by jalino23 | Hacker News Reader

I recently just discovered how radio is everywhere in our lives and I wanted to experiment and learn it. but as I dove deeper I learned that its illegal to emit your own radiowave. so I gave up cause I'm scared to do something illegal unknowingly but it succs because I really wanted to learn how nasa talks to mars rovers with radio by getting by getting my hands dirty.

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Fear be gone!

I took the plunge got the license started learning radio. turns out everything I have wanted to do so far which is listen and learn I never needed the license for in the first place.

The amateur license is to transmit.

You can receive anything anytime anywhere in fact you are anyway since we are continually bathed in an electromagnetic soup you may as well decode bits of it.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) dramatically lowers the barrier to seeing chunky bits in this electromagnetic soup.

I first got a rtl-sdr (usb dongle) for under $10.

Now I am having a blast building Quadrifilar Helical Antennas from plumbing supplies to get the pictures NOAA satellites are sending when they are over head. (no license needed)

I encourage anyone with even a passing interest to to consider starting with "read only" and not even worry about talking the transmitting tests till you figure out if that what you want.

thank you so much! ill get back learning radio again!

I encourage you to learn more. There are frequencies where anyone can transmit small amounts of power (they are the unlicensed bands) and they are available in every country. Many countries also have an amateur radio organization which are people like you who are interested in radio and want to learn more. Opportunities are available to use your radio to assist in disasters and other emergency situations, and of course it can lead to a career in working with a commercial broadcasting company.

thank you so much for the encouragement! ill get back to learning radio! so interesting

Get into amateur radio, then get a license basically you just need to know what the limits are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio

Just get an amateur radio license and there are plenty of bands to legally transmit.

thank you so much! I came across this term while researching but didnt realize it's exactly what I need to experiment and learn radio! thank you very much

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