Email.radio – Free Email Domain for Licensed Ham Radio Operators

I don't mean to be crass, but a ~2 year old HN account with no discernible attachment to a real-world identity, and 38 karma, means nothing.

What is their callsign? It is public record.

Well, not a ham operator myself, but one of my friends (a Swede, living parttime in Denmark, married to a Dutch woman) is one, and has an IT business in which he (also) delivers websites. So I guess, anecdotally, not all ham operators are 10-15 years behind. (Actually, he even operates from e.g. his car, operating either his Sweden or his Denmark radio through his ‘microphone connected to it’ using a ‘very long cable running through the internet’. Not really old school there.)

I am unfamiliar with how radio telescopes work, do you transmit as well as receive on them? If you transmit, I assume you send your callsign as well every 10 minutes? Do you run into issues staying below 1500W/200W PEP?

I'm happy to be pleasantly proven otherwise, wishing you best of luck.

Kudos on POP3 support. I never liked IMAP as I've always preferred to keep my emails between the server and client stored independently. Call me old fashioned, albeit in a different vector from hams.

It still connects your online identity with a physical address associated with you in some way. That's a lot more info than an email address alone ought to supply.

Understood, but you have to think of this before you register your callsign because they publish the history of addresses that have been used. So it's too late for someone like me, who has already used his home address. The PO box would be the most private, at whatever cost that is. I would definitely not want to use my work address (which is what many people recommend), because anyone receiving an email from me would know my name and employer.

I haven’t planned to keep it in /root. It ran as a separate user, but in that directory. Plus that thing only contains the homepage and the form, not emails, accounts, attachments, etc. That’s also ran as a separate user (as mailcow is dockerised)

One year of ARRL is more expensive than 10 years of a ham radio license.

It's such a broad hobby that there isn't really a least common denominator. The easiest way to get into it is probably voice chat on VHF — a cheap Baofeng brand handheld radio and a license will get you on the air and you can decide if you want to spend a few hundred USD on a better radio.

But these days, a lot of stuff can be done using cellular+internet that used to be the domain of hams. Voice comms can be fun (the local repeater nets kept me sane during pandemic isolation) but they're not exotic any more. The other corners of the hobby are kind of esoteric. It's hard to say what might interest you.

Not a ham myself, but my father is. With that context, as far as I understand:

* Minimum equipment necessary is as simple as a walkie talkie, though if you want to have an actual "radio station" per se you need an antenna and a transceiver and the wiring to hook it all up. Note that a ham license concerns transmitting radio signals, if all you want to do is just receive ham radio signals you don't need a license.

* Ham radio exists for anything that falls under communications. Communications during an emergency is an oft cited use case, but if you just want to talk shit with your ham friend across the continent or even the world one random Tuesday evening that's perfectly fine too.

* The fun aspects of ham radio lie in the electrical engineering aspect and the communication aspect. You need to have proper understanding of all things electricity to fully understand and appreciate what goes into transmitting radio waves, and that might be something you find fun. If you find the idea of talking to someone just because you can fun, that's also something ham radio can satisfy.

Ham Radio is incredibly diverse, and different people get different things out of it.

Many people get a basic license and use a handheld radio to talk to people in their area through a "repeater" (basically a big range extender) on VHF/UHF frequencies (~140MHz or ~440MHz) - that'll give you several miles of range to chat with locals.

You can go further and get a mobile or home base station with a fancy antenna to get more range, while still essentially doing the same thing.

A lot of people have fun with "DXing" (distance communications). There are a few different approaches to DXing. Most people set up a home or mobile base station with a big (but can be very cheap, just a wire) antenna for use on lower frequency bands ("HF"; from a couple MHz to a couple dozen), which can have much higher range than VHF/UHF. There are some people that use atmospheric conditions to get higher range on VHF/UHF though.

Some others connect their radio (handheld or base station) to their computer to set up long range computer networks.

There are endless other uses, but a common thread is that they're quite technical and it's very personality driven. If you're a computer enthusiast, you might enjoy mesh networks, AX.25 (networking protocol), or FT-8 (extremely durable protocol for low power long range DXing). If you like building things, building your own radios and antennae can be fun. And if you just like talking to similarly nerdy people, you can grab a handheld and get chatting.

I personally am looking to get into DXing with FT-8 soon - I want to put together a mobile setup that runs completely offline. FT-8 requires a synchronized clock (within 1s accuracy) so I want to get a laptop set up with GPS time. Then, I've gotta find a radio I can rig up to the laptop, probably at a hamfest flea market. The ultimate result of that is that I'll be able to communicate directly with other hams on the other side of the globe (ideally!) from a laptop in my car.

In the Internet age, ham radio isn't really all that practical. It's fun to tinker with though!

There are a number of intros to ham radio, ARRL has https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio but searching for "intro to ham radio" will give you plenty of hits. Also YouTube channels such as hamradiomadesimple, TheSmokinApe, HamRadioCrashCourse, etc. also may be of interest.

As far as activities, the sky isn't even the limit! Sort of a joke there as there are all sorts of radio astronomy / space-related RF, a few are: bouncing signals off meteor trails and aurora, communicating w/ satellites and the ISS, pulling weather imagery straight from NOAA satellites, conducting EME ("earth-moon-earth") communications, the list goes on.

You really don't need huge antennas or anything like that unless you start getting into something very specific and/or high power. Even using the lower frequency band (still called "HF" high frequency), you can use a very small diameter wire that you can temporarily toss up in a tree and talk to people around the world. The length of that wire grows the lower in frequency you are operating but it's still a small light wire you can wind up and toss in a pack.

You can buy a Baofeng UV5R handheld ("HT") for under $20 USD and start listening to people on local repeaters and listen in on weekly "nets" conducted on those repeaters straight away. A repeater is just a powerful station that is ideally somewhere high that rebroadcasts your communication to a wider area than a handheld could do. You'll see some criticism of that radio and other budget radios by some of the more grumpier types but they are a great way to get started for not a lot of money. You can also listen to NOAA radio weather reports with one, which is particularly useful if you are in an emergency situation, power outage, etc. If you get licensed (hamstudy.org is a great resource for this) then you can talk on those repeaters and direct ("simplex") to other local hams.

That Baofeng handheld operates on VHF and UHF bands, specifically the 2 meter band and 70 cm bands (you'll typically see bands listed in meters and millimeters, this is roughly how long the radio wave [wavelength] is for that band - e.g. 2 meter band is 144 MHz to 148 MHz, and a 148 MHz radio wave is 2.053373 meters long) These bands aren't really great for long distance communication. You can make/buy an antenna and make a contact with the astronauts on the ISS though!

Depending on your interests, it's a lot of fun building radios from kits or completely doing it yourself. There's a whole subset of "QRP" (reduced power) communications where people use tiny low power radios and still make contacts around the world. There's an activity called POTA (Parks On The Air) and SOTA (Summits On The Air) where people will set up in a park or on a mountaintop and try and make as many contacts as they can in a period. You'll often see them using small QRP low-power radios.

You can send images and video (SSTV - Slow Scan TV and ATV - Amateur Fast Scan TV) over the air, there are lots of digital modes / packet radio where you can send emails, messages, and a plethora of other activities.

SDR (Software Defined Radio) is fun as well, they are basically USB sticks you can hook up to a computer and receive a wide range of signals. I run one that monitors for ADS-B beacons on nearby aircraft and I feed that to some of the flight tracking sites. You can listen to shortwave broadcasts from other countries and pretty much everything mentioned above (and more!) You can check out some online at http://websdr.org/

If you want to bike, the bare minimum is "any bike". It's too small? Someone else bought a BMX to have a small bike. You find one in the scrap that's rusty? Someone else enjoys cleaning the rust off and tidying up old bikes. You find one with a single working gear? Someone else busy is turning their bike into a single-gear fixie to save weight. Someone recommends you a heavy but solid mountain bike, someone else recommends you a light road bike - they are at odds, how do you choose? You ask what are the daily uses of a bike and people will tell you commuting and grocery shopping and transport, but those aren't the hobby of biking - nobody commutes as a hobby. Hobbies are "playing with the thing" and play is personal. You ask what the point of riding 50 miles in a day is, people might tell you it's for exercise but exercise isn't a hobby - or rather, people whose hobby is exercise are the people who are pedantic and jargon filled about exercise things like VO2max and HIIT schedules and etc. The point of hobbies is that you spend your time doing thing-you-like-doing and if you have a geeky personality that generally means taking an interest in the pedantic intricate details of thing-you-like-doing.

"In ancient Etruscan they actually had a word ending for differentiating between a <grammar jargon> and <a grammar jargon> but it was only used on Holy days in one province and..."

"ok but who cares? where's the fun in that?"

"That is the fun in that!"

"What daily use is it?"

"..."

The job of programming is to build what your employer pays you for, but the hobby of programming is "can I build a trie in my favourite weirdo language so I can understand how tries work?" and "can I get this Arduino to run my code if I'm only willing to power it with this small spare solar panel?" and "can I get JavaScript and WebGL to draw the Julia Fractal with GPU acceleration just to see if I can do it?" and "can I make a playable game in a pure functional language and how will I manage game state to do that?" and there's no daily use for these things, they are wildly different. Yes you can use (language, data structure, algorithm, technology) in your day job, but that's not really the point. In that case it's job training not hobby. The point of them as a hobby isn't to achieve things it's to spend your time doing thing you find interesting. (Yes, some people like achieving things as a hobby and work on OSS tools as if it were their job).

Looking for a daily use of a hobby is looking for the wrong thing, and looking for other people's fun to copy is also looking for the wrong thing. You can't ape other people's fun, because you aren't other people.

My dad volunteers for amateur radio as a method of comms at rural events, but they all bring cellphones because they are better for comms. The radio is an excuse to get out to the event, and the event is an excuse to play with radio. He also takes part in a friendly competition to take portable radio gear up hills and make contact from the top. The radio is a reason to get outside and climb a hill, the competition is a reason to take some radio gear and play with radio. And it's run from the internet and smart phones because they're better for organizing and reliable fast comms.

> "I am mostly curious about what it would be mean to use it actually."

Some people buy a radio and sit in a shed and talk, some people limit themselves to Morse code and try to communicate over noisy channels, some people try to connect to people as far away as possible using limited radio power, some people track the atmosphere conditions and try to bounce radio waves off the upper atmosphere to make long range communications, some people pack portable equipment and climb hills and make radio contact from the top to get points in friendly competitions, some people find old equipment from junk sales and challenge themselves to make it work and connect it up to whatever else they have, some people like to argue about which manufacturer is better and which technology is needed.

The hobby originally (a century ago) was "wtf is radio??" and the bare minimum isn't any specific product or technology, it's an interest in wireless electricity and a thread that interests you to pull on.

I'd be happy to exchange emails or even hop on a zoom with you to talk about ham radio! Let me know. I've given presentations to various groups to demystify it a bit.

For me (relatively young, definitely in the ham radio circles) I like two activities: Summits on the Air and Parks on the Air.

Summits on the Air - take your gear to a mountain summit and attempt to make at least 4 contacts.

Parks on the Air - take your gear to a state/federal/provincial/national park and attempt to make at least 10 contacts.

Check out Ham Radio Crash Course on YouTube. He has a bunch of great stuff for people interested. From there hopefully one of the areas will pique your interest and you can go down the rabbit hole from there.

Amateur radio is a series of narrow regulatory carve-outs of the radio spectrum for the public good, somewhat like a national park. It has existed since the discovery of radio itself. RF is now a mature formal engineering discipline, but the underlying knowledge and practice has also been passed down through amateur channels for generations in an almost guild-like fashion. It is now one of the very few sanctioned ways in which a person interested in radio may put their own electrical components together and see how it works on a workbench.

In the US there are two major distinctions between licenses. The basic Technician class license mainly lets you access VHF and up - these radio waves propagate based on line of sight. The general focus in this area of the spectrum comes from the sheer utility of radio.

Then, the General and Extra class licenses let you operate more fully on shortwave. These are lower frequencies that interact with the ionosphere, giving them the curious property of reaching around the planet. (Extra opens up a little more spectrum, and is recognized by some international treaties allowing you to operate while abroad).

The basic starter equipment for a technician is a handheld or mobile radio. The line-of-sight limitation on VHF is overcome by the use of repeaters. A no-stakes way to sample the activity in your vicinity is to get an RTL-SDR dongle and tune in to the 2 meter and 70 cm amateur bands.

The classic starter kit for a general is an HF radio and homemade dipole. The radio will realistically cost a couple hundred dollars, but the antenna can be just scrap wire and modest coax cable. The size of the antenna is determined by the wavelength at which it operates. The two most common beginner bands are 20M and 40M. A dipole for those wavelengths is about 33' and 66' of wire respectively, but the wire does not have to run in a straight line. You can use a WebSDR to peek in on the activity for free.

My personal interest in all of this is SOTA -- Summits On The Air. It is a radio sport that involves taking portable shortwave transmitters up to mountain peaks. It is equal parts exploration, since many of the peaks in my region lack even trail access; and invention, as the physical realities of mountain climbing necessitate radios and antennas made for the purpose. The actual radio exchange from the peak is simple - who is calling, how well they can hear you, and where they are located, and maybe a pleasantry or two. There is a great deal of camaraderie from the other operators, and you never know whether your next contact will come from San Francisco or coastal France.