Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio? | Hacker News Reader

Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?

kb6nu.com

168 pointsaustinallegro106 comments

Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.

From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. With the advent of Amazon and cheap electronics anybody can now get into it without tinkering at all. Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.

Your mistake may be doing things you find uninteresting with it.

There are experimental protocols and PHYs... you just don't (generally) find them on the VHF repeaters, which, I agree are super boring.

I'd love to do more local / device networking, but I feel that's basically a solved problem. I can plug zigbee modules in all day and make serial packets bounce anywhere.

Hackers are sparse geographically. It's not like my friend down the street would plug in his radio and we'd share packets. And if we did, why not use the internet?

HAM has been a bit of a letdown to me, too. I had higher / hackier hopes for it.

> that's basically a solved problem. ... why not use the internet?

Pretty close to everything you can do with radio signals is "solved", just like almost everything you can do with computers is solved.

But these problems have been solved by other people. Not you. What are your motivations for hacking at all? It's probably not because you're in entirely novel territory.

> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.

my experience, too. I did EW in the military and it was interesting-ish. decided to, a couple years back, get the license and play around, see if I could connect with some of the local Elmers -- and it was laaaaaaame.

by comparison, other meetup groups like for drones, linux, or other nerdy-as-hell topics was still pretty lively. I went to some LUGs in Australia that were a straight-up blast, Linux trivia night in bars, etc.

but ham was a snoozefest, and outside of doing some illegal-ass shit that the FCC would absolutely hammer me for, I can't think of anything cool to do with the license.

In California, you can get a license plate with your call sign. That's kind of cool, right? Maybe moreso if you have a punny vanity call sign.

I think this is true for many states, however I personally am not interested since callsigns are easily looked up online. I don't really want to be driving around with a giant sign on my car telling every random passer-by who I am.

I do sometimes wonder if the privacy of amateur radio operator info should be reconsidered - having my name and home address plastered all over the internet just because I have an amateur radio license is rather annoying.

I went with a PO box to add a layer, but yeah, ham does provide ample identity surface area.

With all due respect, if you can't think of anything to do with a ham radio license then that shows some lack of imagination. Just because most of the users on voice are boring ass old fucks doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the amateur radio world or that you yourself can't be a tinkerer and come up with your own experiments and contributions to the space.

It's a bit like saying the internet is stupid because of all the social media and you can't think of anything else to do on the internet.

I'm sorry but you are just wrong. Radio is about communicating, and if the only people to communicate with are boring, then what can you really do? And ham radio has way less reach than the Internet, and requires a license, so the pool of people is way, way smaller. You can't compare the two.

> if the only people to communicate with are boring

I keep reading this refrain in this thread. Which, when you think about it, means it can't possibly be true. There seem to be more than enough people who think everyone else in ham radio is a bunch of grumpy old farts, so how come this evidently large-enough group people are never on the air to balance it?

Or is it just more fashionable to complain than to actually get involved (with good faith) in the community?

Because they only briefly flirt with ham radio? When you account for time on air rather than total number of connectors, it’s probably still all boring people.

Correct, this is the problem. See my other comment here about the difficulty of just getting on a repeater. If you get past that initial obstacle and get on a repeater, just to find that it's not interesting, you don't stay long.

I have a HAM license, I got encouraged by friends from our local Hackerspace to get it. Since getting it, I used my right to TX maybe twice. Those friends, they're not boring. I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.

My brain simply cannot wrap itself around it. I'd dare say, the boring farts are boring farts because being a boring fart is literally all you're allowed to. Can't have a longer conversation about anything interesting, because the frequencies are for general use, not expert discussion on $thing. Half of interesting topics are legally or culturally prohibited. Can't do anything actually fun with the radio, either, as that too is illegal.

What is there to do on air? CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring. Other than that, fox hunting and chewing rags. I can't see anything else to do there. General chit-chat and whining about equipment and the weather seems to be the common ground, but that is exactly how you become a boring old fart.

EDIT: sure, I'm allowed to build and operate my own transceiver. But why would I, if hardly anything interesting to do with it is covered by the license? SDRs are way more fun anyway.

i have rag-chewed on both HF and repeaters (and simplex VHF/UHF) for hours at a time. It's fun, but to me the hobby was a lot more interesting when there were other people using fldigi and such. everyone now is using JT's software and i find automated stuff like that "boring" to participate in, in the general sense. It is extremely useful and powerful as a tool to help detect "skip", the ability and positioning of your antenna, the efficiency of your choking and transmission lines (run wspr at 200mW, say).

With that said you can do all of that with fldigi or RTTY or even just using the morse function on most radios thanks to online sdr receivers. but talking to oneself is also "boring" after a bit.

If anyone has a ticket but doesn't really "get" the hobby, go to a field day. The official ARRL field day just passed june 12th or something, but there is a quasi-official winter field day in a few months, It's a 3 day thing, if you want it to be, but noon on saturday till noon on sunday the goal is to make as many confirmed contacts on any bands you can using whatever modes you want. The scoring isn't simple "1 contact = 1 point", you get more points if you're off-grid, or low power, or "outdoors", for instance.

If you've ever been the person that "fixed the LAN" at a LAN party, you might just get a kick out of the entire thing, and it's usually bankrolled by a local club, so if they have a decent number of members you even get good food and a great location.

Our club gets the Sheriff's dept command post truck every field day, and half the people operate out of it, and the other half out of a building somewhere nearby (the rules say all of your antennas and transmitters that score have to be within an explicit radius).

> I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.

Did you ask them? I'm primarily a casual contester and POTA hunter. Most non-amateurs (and quite a few amateurs) find that boring.

> CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but does an activity have to impress a peer (or any) group to not be boring? Amateur radio as a whole is unimpressive to many (most?) people, but why should that stop you?

Ham radio is about whatever you want it to be. It can be about designing and building your own radio then seeing if you can make a contact with it. Same can be said about designing and building your own antennas.

It can be about designing your own digital protocol or software to decode other published digital modes. It can be about attempting to make a contact at the lowest power output with the lowest noise floor at the farthest distance possible for any given situation.

None of these things really require talking to anyone about anything. All that's required is someone to respond with their callsign, location and signal report. 99% of what I've done with ham radio over the last 20 years is mostly just that. Tinkering with radios, antennas, and different digital modes, not sitting and chatting with people.

Maybe you find that all boring too, which is fine, but the hobby is what you make it.

They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.

What can you do with a license? Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.

I agree it is largely boring, particularly on the local bands where it's basically a local discord of people talking about traffic.

But if you get your General license you can play with HF and get geeky with antennas, try to make contact with people on low power (qrp) on protocols like JS8.

I was able to make contacts from Texas to South America and Canada, and even Europe I think, on 10w with a crummy EFHW antenna, a wire slung over a tree at 45 degrees.

As far as more geeky protocol hacking, I haven't gotten into it.

I've played with a cheap Chinese clone sdr receiver and LNA and filter and have received FT8 calls from Indonesia and Australia on a length of scrap wire I hung up in my loft here in London UK. Calls from all over Europe and from USA are pretty trivial to pick up.

I would be interested in getting licensed to TX, but then to apply that practically I'd need to invest also in 100s - 1000s of £££ of gear rather than a mere 10s. And then once I've done that ... I think the novelty would be mostly gone if I'm honest. I don't think the practical expense seems worth it.

The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.

Exacly. I've myself been looking around HAMs from networking point of view. I am networker and I would love to get hands on some digital radio.. at least 128Kbps, ideally 1024Kbps stuff where I can slap all the protocol to build network on top of it and then IP. But nope, cannot find anything interesting with decent ranges and cheap enough to buy for tinkering. It seems to be a nische that noone cares to claim.

I know about HSMM, but they are using normal WiFi AP and just slap custom software on top of it and use HAM frequencies. Not bad idea...

They communities are also awfully closed. I tried to find some IRC servers for HAM/network related stuff and no luck really. Found one channel, but they are mostly US people out there (TZ issue for me).

Another issue is that encryption is not allowed on amateur radio, so most internet applications are a no-go.

That's somewhat of an unenforceable policy. Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.

And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.

> Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.

Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions.

What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used.

You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.

There aren't many radios in the higher frequency bands that can be used for networking. That is why people repurpose existing hardware.

BTW, amateurs are limited in what they can use radio for. Replacing existing communication systems is not allowed, efffectively meaning that can't have non-ham users. The systems I know about are for ham-only communication, like linking repeater sites.

Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.

I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).

This is worth a look as works over packet radio.

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

Also:

https://discord.gg/Ay7tj7w4

Thanks for info, but I do NOT need network stack. I have my own, I can build my own. I need decent hardware, because I lack knowledge and skills here. Also, its not an interesting stuff to me to play with DSPs and all that stuff really.

What you want to do isn't really what the HAMs want you to be doing anyway.

128-1024 Kbps generally means a ridiculously large bandwidth compared to what most HAM channels allow unless you're really close to your recipient and can use a very wide QAM modulation, in which case your equipment is going to be $$. Your best bet is to stick to the ISM bands, which is where WiFi is anyway.

HF is ~300baud (it matters that it's baud, because "what's a symbol, really") The faster you send information, the more bandwidth it takes, even if it's morse code. A slow, 6-10 word per minute transmission may be 1-3hz wide, but a skilled operator, even with a clean transmitter will take 30+hz to do 60+WPM. i don't remember the exact number but basically any reference will explain it.

so 1024kbps with the sort of technology that exists in the space right now is basically larger than the spectrum available to us in any band in HF. 128kbit transmitted is probably larger than the spectrum available (you can't transmit past the band edges per license, even if it's "splatter") on all of the HF bands, too.

With multi-level modulation, baud is only half of the story, and the other half is SNR. 300 baud at QAM-4096 is 1.2 Mbps, but you have to have extremely good SNR to use QAM-4096.

SNR + bandwidth goes into a calculation of the Shannon limit of a channel.

A colleague of mine (networker and ham radio) engineered a small devices based on LoRa to connect over SSH to network gears consoles during a campus network migration.

There's NPR (new packet radio) on the 430 MHz band, never tried myself but it looks interesting. See for example https://hackaday.io/project/164092-npr-new-packet-radio. It can transport IP and goes up to 500 kbps.

Yeah! I know about NPR.. cool project :)

It's a good thing that you don't need the community to do interesting things with radio signals, just an interest in doing so. Chatting with other people is just a nice side effect of working with signals sent over RF.

And when it comes to doing interesting things with technology, there are many other communities to collaborate with; someone might even build their own community of people who also want to chat over RF.

I was talking about commercial activity. Flouting the rules on that would be a bad idea. We need to change the rules, not flout them.

The core idea "individual accountability and exclusionary property rights are complementary mechanisms for sharing spectrum" is probably eternal, but HAM mindshare is sill stuck in the days when building kit and studying for a license was worth it to access the glorious nerd forum in the Earth's Ionosphere, and the internet flat out replaced that. HAM could reinvent itself as an on-ramp for ambitious young'uns with big ideas to challenge stodgy incumbent telecom if it wanted to, but right now it's coasting on the social groups that were formed back when its value proposition made sense and it will stay on a downward trajectory until it fixes this.

Telecom and its problems are bigger than ever. This is HAM's key back into the land of value-prop-positive activities. If you plug a broadband antenna into a spectrum analyzer and wave it around, you see that almost all of the action is crammed into the lightly-licensed "trash containment" bands. That's interesting. We probably have the fixed vs flexible allocation wrong. Does 10% of the traffic need 90% of the spectrum? Probably not, now that technology has advanced past fixed-band dumb endpoints. We need to slowly unwind that. 6G was a good start, but the ISM rules mean that we are going to get slightly faster wifi, not some wild and wacky mesh network thing that tries to offer "internet sans video" for $5/mo or whatever.

Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum. Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.

Are you saying that the ham bands should be opened up for commercial exploitation? Because if so, I recommend cracking open a radio history book and reading up on the reasons why those bands were intentionally set aside for non-commercial use by the FCC in the very beginning.

Also, HAM is not an acronym.

> Although not an acronym, it is often written as "HAM" in capital letters.

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

See also: the many uses of "HAM" throughout this thread.

Yeah, and it turns out that talking to other nerds around the world kind of sucks a lot of the time.

I mainly make contacts with digital modes, and the whole point to bounce radio waves off ionosphere and record contacts with faraway people. The digital mode is better signal than voice, and don't have to talk to anyone.

Do actual conversations normally happen in digital modes (whether CW or one of the ones that need a computer)? I got my technician license years ago and quit for the reasons others have listed above but have considered getting back into it for digital HF, but I've gotten the impression that people mostly just exchange callsigns and signal reports then move on to the next contact. I'm basically looking for old internet chatroom vibes but over radio.

Most people use FT8 for doing contacts because it works with low signal and does the exchange, just have to click on the other person.

There is JS8Call which uses same technology for doing chats. There are older digital modes for chatting but my understanding is that they used less these days; PSK31 is only one heard about being used.

> The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now.

That's funny because it makes intuitive sense, but I'd argue the opposite.

As the internet has become more accessible and the world of HAM has remained fairly obscure (with some financial barrier to entry and government KYC sometimes), you're far more likely to encounter interesting and enthusiastic fellow nerds with HAM if you get into it.

Similar problem for me. It seems like most folks near me do a lot of contesting which I have neither the time nor the interest to do.

Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives.

That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend:

2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz) VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters) HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters

That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air.

Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).

Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?

I went deep into this earlier in the year, here are a few resources I found helpful:

- https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_sy... has a good overview of how to hit the ISS (and other sats)

- https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib is the software stack you probably want to play with

> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc.

https://m17project.org/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://freedv.org/

These are a few projects that I personally think embody this well.

>It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum

Yup and the grouchy boomers who LARP as emergency preparedness personnel.

My experiences with amateur radio people have been universally negative, and in my opinion the death of ham radio is squarely the fault of its participants.

Interesting. My experiences with amateur radio people on the air have been largely positive.

But on the internet, there seem to be only two groups:

1. Old hams: New hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby!

2. New hams: Old hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby!

Funny enough, I ran across a ham radio magazine from the 1920's and found letters to the editor that said the exact same things. A hundred years ago, the same old flame war rages on.

The standard refrain of "it's always been like this" is a great way to avoid confronting the very real problems facing amateur radio.

But despite your insinuation I'm not a "new ham". After a few brushes with the ham community in my area I very quickly decided I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

My experience with ham radio has also been positive. I've been a ham for about 14 years now, and I can't recall any bad experiences. Most of the contacts are barely more than signal reports, but any conversations I've had have been at least cordial.

I can't speak for bityard, but I think that pointing out that there have always been complaints is just saying that there are always unhappy people regardless of the state of the hobby. Most people don't talk about something if there's no problem. The people that speak up are unhappy with something. That can make it seem like the problems are common, even if they are rare. That's my take on it anyway.

For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.

Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.

It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.

Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.

Yep! The New Mexico Mega-Link repeater network is still up and running.

http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg

There’s also a great APRS repeater network:

http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs

With APRS you can send/recv text messages from pretty much anywhere in NM

That’s great to hear, and thanks for the link to the map.

Uhm yeah talking with people is optional and only required to check how well they receive you when you set antenna up.

Buying off the shelf everything is not fun. Buy radio and try to build an antenna from metal wire or whatever else. Then try to see if old farts can hear your calls.

It is much more like fishing it is supposed to be boring unless you are really interested in the topic.

Yes there is Chinese vendor that you can buy antennas that will work much better than whatever you cobble up by hand but yeah YOU are the one to make it fun for yourself not old farts in your propagation range.

You're barking up the wrong tree! Get into HF digital modes: the lowest hanging fruit is WSJTX, but there's so much beyond that if you want to tinker.

I can honestly say I've never plugged a mic into my transceiver, and I probably never will. And I have 500+ confirmed contacts across 40+ countries. Phone is boring :)

This, been a ham for 20 years, have never been on the mic. Digital modes are where its at and where all the fun tinkering is. Plus there's so many small radio kits you can also build if you want to tinker that way, not to mention antenna building which is an entire hobby in itself.

Get your General license and get on HF and have fun. Be the change you want to see. There's more to ham radio than just decrepit Boomers talking about their gout and diabetes. It's like saying there's nothing interesting to do on the internet because of social media.

This sounds great. I just got my tech license and have just been messing with the UV-5R radios. The chatter on the local repeaters isn’t boring either.

But I was drawn to ham radio because I am tired of the internet today. I want to get that feeling back like the early internet.

Early internet with bizarre protocols like gopher and finger. You had to know your way around and everyone else put in the effort too. Just a great time in history to connect with someone across the world

HF digital mode sounds like a blast

Then you will enjoy the digital modes because there are so many different ones that all use different tech to accomplish different tasks. Some are extremely popular (like FT8, which is BY FAR the most popular thing on ham radio, even more than voice), down to very obscure experimental digital modes that very few people use but half the fun is trying to use them and see who else may be out there trying to do the same.

The FCC also just increased the bandwidth limit on HF so I expect a ton of new experimental modes to start popping up in short order.

A few weeks ago I heard the following exchange.

Canadian: Is this frequency in use?

...Silence...

Canadian: Cqcqcqcqcq...

MM: THIS FREQUENCY IS RESERVED FOR MARITIME MOBILE EMERGENCY TRAFFIC!

Me: What is the nature of the emergency? Can I be of assistance?

MM: no emergency, just you know, in case there's an emergency please stay off

A cultured Canadian: kindly fuck off.

MM: hey now you can't swear on the radio FCCs gonna jumpya...

Canadian: proceeds to make several contacts over the protests of MM lid calling out FCC profanity regulation numbers.

Yes, the MM "net" is known to just be a bunch of lids looking to pick fights with strangers for their own entertainment. They've been doing it forever.

Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of 14.300

> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.

Is this enforced by the HAMs? I didn't think it'd be possible to claim ownership of a slice of the amateur spectrum. Is it just a public shaming?

Generally, it is not possible to claim ownership of a frequency or band. However, repeaters are one very narrow exception to this. The owner of a repeater can say who is and is not allowed to use the repeater. This is just a guess on my part, but I assume this came about back when repeaters were much more complicated to set up and run. (E.g. there were repeaters that operated only on battery, or were owned by an individual to talk with his friends and family in a mountainous region, or had weird technical limitations.)

Repeaters which are open for use by anyone with a license are called "open" repeaters and those which have some kind of requirement or permission are called "closed." Closed repeaters are actually pretty rare these days, most repeater owners are more than happy to have anyone use their repeater as long as they are not intentionally being a nuisance.

Thanks for taking the time to explain

additionally, VHF repeaters generally are horizon + 10% sort of range, and there is a committee to help with frequency allocations to avoid interference between systems that are close together. So really, the "slice of the band" is regional, the same way (broadcast) FM stations are.

> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.

I was hoping to see some innovation after the FCC lifted the baud rate restrictions[1], but so far nothing seems to have changed.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf

> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring.

Well, that "recently" there in that sentence is likely the root of your problem. You've barely scratched the surface, run into a dickbag or two (which exist in EVERY community) and then decided to stereotype the whole culture. You have no idea how wide and deep the hobby is, and probably won't as long as you hold onto your false generalizations.

> It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to

And might I ask, who are you to judge what other people talk about on the radio? If you don't like what other people are talking about, spin the dial. Or go to another repeater/frequency and call CQ so you can talk about whatever interests you. Be the change you want to see in the world.

> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.

I live in a metro area and have over 40 repeaters programmed into my radio. Most of the repeaters are owned by various clubs. I have never ONCE heard anyone get a stern finger wagging for using a repeater for a club they aren't a member of. Around here at least, the attitude is, the more the merrier.

> From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering.

It still is, you just didn't look hard enough. The past couple of years have seen interesting long-range weak-signal digital modes, mesh networking using commodity hardware, hackable handheld radios, and bunches of independent QRP kits. LEO satellite repeaters, POTA, SOTA, Field Day, designing antennas with cheap $50 antenna analyzers, these are just the things that I find interesting. I could go on forever.

There is more to explore in ham radio than you can fit in a lifetime. If you find it boring, that is not ham radio's fault.

I got mine and have used it a handful of times, mainly helping my friend test his radios. it's all radio tests or talking about your radio. it is incredibly boring and I like boring technical stuff. SDR is where all the fun radio stuff is.

I suspect most tinkering is happening around digital modes these days. I got my amateur radio license four years ago and I have zero interest in talking with (other) old dudes where they're driving. I currently enjoy the hobby by watching the ISS flyover schedule and transmitting to the amateur radio repeater on the space station. It's fun! It's even more fun during the early evening highly visible passes. In those cases, I don't even have to look at a chart in an app to know where to point, I can just aim the antenna at the very bright dot zooming by in the sky. (Fun to see those visible passes anyway, even without a radio license.)

I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth.

This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.

APRS also works on 30 meter band, which means HF, which means "hemisphere without trying very hard" distances. Obviously the radios are not $30, but really if one cares about the hobby one should not splatter so much.

It will also work if there's a (nearly?) statewide internet/cellphone/landline outage due to natural disasters. The $30 radio would too (if you can get in to an APRS repeater, or the space station, or whatever), but i'd rather have HF in an emergency of that scale, and VHF/UHF for day-to-day use. I forget the (VHF) APRS frequency offhand but you can find out if there's a digipeater or even a regular store and evenutally forward repeater in your area by tuning to that frequency and see if you hear the same station replying whenever any other station sends a message - it's usually pretty obvious.

also https://aprs.fi/ if anyone wants to see what else it can do. I built a slack bot after map reducing all of the weather nodes aprs.fi knows about to "least distance from zip and/or city/state", then hitting the public web and beautiful souping the weather information from aprs.fi for that particular weather station.

This sounds really cool.

Do you receive messages back too?

Where do you check the ISS schedule?

I am interested in amateur radio bit have almost zero experience. I do have a cheap SDR and recently bought a handheld quansheng radio.

All I've done with thr SDR is monitor airplane info and all I've really done with the handheld is listen to the pilots approach broadcasts.

You can volunteer for comms at stage rallies, we always need volunteer hams. My first stage rally experience, over 10yrs ago now, was sitting around the campfire in the Mendocino forest with a bunch of hams the night before the event. They had good whisky, too. :)

Feel free to email me, email in profile.

It sounds like you listened to rag chewers on 75 and came up with a knee-jerk impression that ham radio is boring.

Ham radio is far more than what you observed. I advise that you check out some of the following before you give up on it:

- QEX magazine

- MSK144 meteor scatter and similar modes

- CW Ops, CW radiosport

- FlexRadio, SmartSDR, PowerSDR

- The QDX transceiver, QRP Labs, etc.

There is a tremendously active community of experimenters and people doing really interesting things. It takes a little bit of digging to find it. Much of it is on email lists rather than traditional discussion forums.

Just renewed my license for the first time. That means I've had it 10 years. Problems for me:

It's either really hard or really expensive to do basic stuff. Want to get on a repeater and chat? Great, a $20 baofeng radio can do it, but you have to get on the Internet to find the repeater frequency, offset, and tones, and then figure out how to program those into the radio. That either involves tedious button pushing on the radio, or getting a special cable, getting Chirp figured out and working with your laptop and radio and cable, and then figuring out the weird Chirp UI. You finally do all that, and then realize (as others have pointed out) that the conversations on the repeaters are lame.

And then the radio is portable, but you can't charge it with a USB cable like everything else, or put in regular AA batteries. You take it camping and it dies after a day.

Again, this is the most basic ham radio thing to do, lowest level of license required. It's not fun hacking, it's just annoying and discouraging.

The alternative radios to baofeng are literally 10 times the price or more, and it's not clear to me that they make any of that any easier. Gear for HF (longer range) is a hundred times the price or more. I haven't even wanted to go there.

Why isn't there a handheld radio that runs android and has a USB C data/charging port? Connecting to nearby repeaters based on GPS location could be automatic! You'd have all the young hams talking on the repeaters and things would start happening. That would be a radio that would actually be worth a license and a few hundred dollars

Buy a Quansheng uv-k5 radio. Is similar to Baofeng, but have a wider bandwidth coverage and you can charge with USB-C cable.

i think i have a UV-something, but in general quansheng are far superior to baofeng vis a vis reliability, clarity and volume, and durability. When i'm in a machine room working on a repeater i want to be able to hear the radio, even if it falls 16'. on the antenna.

THe only radio i own that's built more like a tank than my oldest quansheng is a motorola from the late 90s (VHF, NFM)

I just checked it out. It seems it only solves one of the problems I listed. You can charge it with USB-C (not program it or anything else, just charge it).

The USB-C charging is listed as 'for emergencies only'. I believe the battery is dual-cell and the USB-C port only charges one side which can damage the cell iirc.

It is a really fun, very cheap radio. Use egzumer's firmware and play around with it if you want. Just don't transmit out of the band it's spec'd for from factory. It will spray all over the place.

See:

https://rfinder.shop/product/rfinder-m6-dual-band-dmr-4g-lte...

And another one:

https://tait-radio.com/comjot-cj-1/

Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.

And it's such a broad hobby: you can make contacts just like your granddad on MF/HF CW today, and then on monster microwave arrays doing Earth-Moon-Earth with modern digital encodings tomorrow. You only need the one license.

> Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.

Can you share some of the broad categories of things you’ve learnt?

Not OP but some areas my ham ticket has helped me explore: - Antenna design - RF propagation - bandwidth - data rate - environmental effects - laws and regulations - encrypted comms - RF power vs antenna gain - connector types and quality - emergency comms

And that's just with my basic tech license.

I'm glad to see that he mentions GNU Radio in his slides. It's amazing what you can do with it. I built a VOR receiver a few years ago.

I'll migrate it to the new QT based display sometime this fall.

How hard was to create a VOR receiver with GNUradio? I really like the idea, but I found GNUradio very difficult to learn (and I have a master degree in Telecommunication Engineering). The basic things are easy, but when things becoming complex I am getting lost immediately. My side project, still unfinished since years, is to create a WSPR decoder in GNUradio

It took me a day of futzing around, and then a drive out to Chicago Heights and around the block where the VOR transmitter is. I manually tweaked the timing to adjust for the different delays in the detector chains.

I do agree. amateur radio, can be so useful for hacking on custom protocols, and transferring data. It does not all have to be talking on the radio if that doe snot interest you. I also feel like a new generation is blooming.

I actually have a little ambition but maybe one day if I have energy I'll pursue an amateur radio art installation of sorts. The space seems ripe for this sort of energy.

Tell me more

What always surprises me on the ham world is the huge number of possibilities. Beside having voice QSO in HF or VHF, there are many other options: QRP and SOTA/POTA, digital modes, DYI antennas and radios, SDR, EME, identifying unknown and misterious signal, etc.

What I don't like about the communities is that is mostly composed by grey hairs guy that are not really opened to change.

I've barely done any contesting or public safety or really any rag chewing, but I got my Extra for digital RF synthesis experiments and digital modes just in case I want to do something in those extra bits of the bands.

Lowfer people don't need licensed under a certain power and QRSS grabbers are an astoundingly neat thing for everyone licensed or not.

i'd never heard of this before... i'm allowed to transmit in the 600 meter band, this might actually be something interesting to do with that ability.

Meanwhile the RSGB won’t even let you take the foundation license test on linux, because they want to spy on potential members.

What does that mean? They want to use a cheat-discouraging browser?

You can do it in a virtual machine, and people frequently do. The software can't detect nor escape it.

Unrelated (seriously), there's also OARC, the online amateur radio club. It's on discord (boo, proprietary), but it's got some of the most exciting projects and a really young crowd. I'd highly recommend it.

https://www.oarc.uk/

They want someone to invigilate the exam. That is reasonable, particularly since it appears as though in-person exams are still available.

I'm not sure what the situation is in GB but, in Canada, the question bank (and answers) were publicly available from the licensing body when I took my exam. Under such circumstances, it would be trivial to cheat. (It was also quite handy. I made an online test generator for the club I belonged to so people could take practice exams to figure out when they were ready.)

I haven't seen much innovation in the HAM spectrum, but I do some fun stuff done with Lora, and mesh networks by flashing routers with custom version of OpenWRT.

Honestly I think the problem with the HAM spectrum is that it doesn't allow for (much) encryption and so much digital transmissions are hampered.

I read that licenses were some kind of security measure to prevent foreign spies from communicating using the radio back in world war 2.

What's the point of even having licenses in the modern day? If you have to go through red tape to get started, it's little wonder usage is declining.

it's like $12 and taking a 30 question test, administered by local hams. I don't really consider that "red tape"

usage is declining because radios are expensive because usage is declining. It's more fun to text and drive than talk on a walkie-talkie, smokey.

Because you don’t get free rein on the bands - there are frequency allocations, etiquette, power and mode limitations, safety to learn, etc.

Yes! RF is fun for hackers. Go get licensed. 73 de KQ4RLZ.

Of course hackers need to know how radio works. They need to know how to break into WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular comms, take over drones, break into RF-controlled industrial networks, spoof GPS, read RFID devices from a distance...

None of that is in the ham bands. Few hams have enough RF knowledge to do any of that. Hams are mostly still at CQ DX, CQ DX...

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