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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Ham, but my grandfather (W8IGY) was, and I credit him for letting me know a larger, more technical community existed "out there" than what was apparent from the small rural town I grew up in the pre-internet days.

Ham radio's time has come and gone, but I still treasure the memories of listening to him talk to people all over the world.

MFJ shutting down is likely one of the final nails in the coffin, but I'll be sad to see it go.

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> Ham radio's time has come and gone, but I still treasure the memories of listening to him talk to people all over the world.

Those people all over the world are still there. Every day. The airwaves are full. Yesterday I was handed off between a dozen Italians working contacts in the US.

I have to hand it to European hams. They don't leave anything on the table at all. Some of the gear they fabricate is world class stuff. I just bought this amazingly well made feedline choke from a French ham on Ebay. I've made these myself and know exactly how hard it is to make them that well. RigExpert out of Ukraine is something as well: they just took over the higher end portable analyzer market.

How does one get started?

It's different for everyone. For me, ten years ago, I got interested in quadcopters back when making them yourself was the norm. There is a lot of radio involved, especially at long range. That sent me down the rabbit hole.

There is a kindly person on YouTube you might watch: KB9VBR. He operates out of US parks. A lot. Vast numbers of contacts for that sort of operation. He sells antennas on EBay as well.

Go to arrl.org and join up. Read both their magazines every month. Locate your local ham group and start going to their meetings. They will help you to quickly get a license.

What happens next depends on your interests. The choices are vast and interesting.

If you can find a HamFest in your area (they tend to pick up around the summer months) that's a great place to start and maybe meet a local Ham. If you know someone with a license you can operate at their station and under their call sign with their supervision and pick up a lot of the protocols and what the restrictions on popular bands are.

Picking up a Technical License or General License exam prep book is a good way to learn a lot of the radio and electronics technology too.

Check out software defined radio. If you find it interesting, being a ham might appeal to you.

If you want to get licensed I found HamStudy's[1] learning method the most efficient use of my time and was able to breeze through Technician and General class. Their "Find a Session"[2] page makes it easy and inexpensive to take the test(s) remotely too.

[1]: https://hamstudy.org

[2]: https://hamstudy.org/sessions

A lot of people will tell you to study for the technician exam, take the test, and buy a Baofeng handheld radio. The end result of that is usually that the new licensee keys up a local repeater a few times, doesn't find a community they want to be a part of, and the radio collects dust.

Instead, I suggest finding local ham clubs and seeking out experience with different parts of the hobby. Find people who chase DX (long distance contacts) on shortwave. Find the contesters, people who compete to see who can make the most contacts meeting some condition in a given period of time. Find the parks/summits on the air people, who go to parks and summits to set up portable stations and make contacts. Find the fox hunters, people who compete to find hidden radio beacons. Find the people with VHF/UHF rovers, vans with bit directional antennas mounted. Find people who communicate with satellites. Find people who bounce signals off the moon.

If your experience with any of that excites you for more, study for your license and dive in. I'd highly recommend getting your general class license instead of technician. It's not all that much harder to get and it opens up the shortwave bands.

As someone who listens but doesn't transmit, some of the most fun is actually chasing shortwave pirates around 6.950 MHz. There are a lot of fun radio shows that people put on, and I guess the FCC doesn't seem to care too much what happens below 40m. It might take some of the fun out of it, but it would be really cool to see some of that legalized as a form of amateur non-commercial music broadcast.

Is there something like Messier objects for radio?

I imagine some kind of numbered, curated list of radio achievements that would be a mini-lesson on gear needed, antennae, frequencies covered, theory and what the goal is.

Or maybe they're more like Scout badges.

Anyway, I have drifted in and out of a fascination with radio. When I drift toward it I often find I am quickly in over my head — or rudderless.

> I imagine some kind of numbered, curated list of radio achievements

Yes, this is widespread. The ARRL in the US tracks such achievements. A simple example that comes to mind is Worked All States[1]. But that's just one: there are contests, events, records, etc. If you want to put your callsign on a list somewhere there are lots of opportunities.

Just having a callsign in the first place is the start of it. Those are usually assigned by whatever national government you live under. And they typically have grades: Technician, General and Extra in the US, for example.

[1] http://www.arrl.org/was

Some clubs have awards you can work toward, ARRL has a bunch [1]. SKCC [2] and NAQCC [3] have some for folks who like to work Morse code/CW. I'm sure that whatever aspect of ham radio folks are into, there is wallpaper you can earn while doing it.

[1] https://www.arrl.org/AWARDS [2]https://skccgroup.com/ [3] http://naqcc.info/challenges_rules.html

There is a wide range. In the US, the ARRL (arrl.org) handles the majority. There are awards for “worked all states”, “worked all continents”, and so on. There are various contests every weekend. There is “Parks On The Air”. It’s called radiosport these days. You could join the ARRL and hook up with a local group for guidance - the addresses are on the website.

Countless things to go after. Some straightforward, some esoteric, some ridiculously challenging, like making contact with 100+ 1x2 degree grid squares via 1.2GHz Earth-Moon-Earth ("moonbounce") -- that will take some effort, I guarantee.

My thing is HF contesting. Scratch building antennas is also a kick.

If you are interested in radio, find a club. They will help you get oriented.

Respectfully, this isn't true at all. We just do different stuff these days. We experiment with meshes, lora, digital modes (sometimes with internet backhaul, sometimes not), and other things like that. I just built a 5w 440 repeater small enough to mount in my VTOL and fly overhead for two hours.

Ham isn't dead, it just looks different than it did for our grandfathers.

100% When I went to defcon in 2013, I saw all these kids covered in piercings and ink, studying for their exams. They grew up in a wireless world, except it wasn't about DX, it was all local stuff, low power and multi protocol. The tragedy of the ARRL was being too hardware oriented and not getting on board with open source, until it was too late.

Isn't the ARRL kind of outmoded these days though? Before the internet they were the US clearing house of all quality ham publishing and a great deal of organization. They had a big role to fill. Today, however, that communication flows independently on the internet.

I'm writing as an ARRL member that renews every three years. But I spend way more time learning from forums (groups.io, QRZ, blogs, etc.) and YouTube than anything the ARRL is doing.

> Ham radio's time has come and gone,

It is still very much alive.

There is a major world wide event called CQ WW dx contest in which on the order of 30,000 hams participate.

There are three morse code events each week, one on each of Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Wednesday event has four separate one-hour sessions. If you tune in on one of these onto 20 meters, you will a whole mass of signals.

My local club, the North Shore Radio Club gives massive help to the Chicago Marathon, with on the order of 200 hams helping out with emergency traffic. Imagine a crowded event in a major city--the cell network becomes absolutely overloaded. Their help with traffic about medical events has doubtless saved lives.

The advent of the new digital modes invented by Joe Taylor (yes, that one, the Nobel Prize winner) embodied in the program WSJTX is massively active. This is a low-signal mode used on HF, LF and VHF/UHF. It significantly helps moonbounce communication.

Perhaps the most social of events is Field Day in which hams all over North America go to (generally) an outdoor location and set up stations to exercise emergency communications and use emergency power setup. You can check the ARRL web site in June to find one near you.

A recent activity is Parks On The Air where hams go to parks to set up temporary stations and pass out contacts to folks all over the world.

So Ham Radio is far from dead.

I'm a ham.

I communicated with someone 8,000 miles away from me (Midwest US to South Africa) by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere from an antenna I built myself using as much power as a light bulb.

The hobby is definitely dying, but it still provides some awesome moments. Tons of nerds here would find it time well spent.

Incandescent or LED?

Probably the former but possibly the latter. Sometimes "conditions" are such that a tiny amount of power will go a very long way. Right now, near the peak of the solar cycle, 4 watt CB radios are sometimes heard thousands of miles away.

It might be possible those CBs heard that far away are actually 4 watts - but it's much more likely they're illegally boosting their output.

Still, you're totally right that in ideal conditions propagation can be astounding.

Incandescent :)

It was FT8, which is a weak signal data mode. Very often you can make contacts hundreds of miles away using less than 20 watts.

However, I was probably using between 40-100 watts for that contact - you can't get much further apart on earth than we were!

I've done both. If you and your remote station have good antennas, a low local noise floor, and the right atmospheric conditions, a little power can take you to the other side of the planet.

I regularly contact Europe from the Chicago area with a very modest antenna using five watts

My WSPR beacon is routinely heard at a research base in Antarctica.

Every time I see DP0GVN in my list of received WSPR transmissions on WSPRnet.org, I smile about bothering the penguins.

>Ham radio’s time has come and gone

I dunno about that. There are more licensed hams today in the US than there ever have been. And as a proportion of the US population, the number of hams is close to an all-time high.

https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/stats/index.html

I also serve as a Volunteer Examiner (ham who helps administer license exams), and the group with which I volunteer administers remote licensing exams to multiple people on a daily basis. So, anecdotally, I do think there are still plenty of folks out there getting into the hobby.

>Ham radio's time has come and gone,

To me this is more a sign that western manufacturing's time has come and gone.

The ham world is buzzing as of late with how cheap, Chinese manufacturers are taking the market by storm from incumbent manufacturers on both sides (US and Japan) of the pacific. It's both grim and bittersweet because the hams admit their quality is good enough while being so much cheaper and easier to acquire.

Source: Dad is ham, overhear conversations of such from his comms and in radio shops; catalogs from HRO and the like are now half Chinese.

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