How ham radio endures
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My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was issued the handle OM118.
The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for 30-minute slots.
Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least, please God.
A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras, we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."
1. Madras is now called Chennai.
Although many local first responders are not on this net, the USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from a large disaster area.
[1] https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/programs/shared-resourc...
[2] https://ema.arrl.org/wp-content/uploads/files/SHARES_Spectru...
Having been in the WNC hurricane area, I have a newfound interest in this stuff.
Here's a typical modern portable ham radio.[1] (Not a recommendation, just an example) This one does both HF and VHF, so you can reach both SHARES and locals. Here are some simple wire antenna kits.[2] If you have both of those items, and some kind of power (a car battery), you can contact various US emergency services, radio hams, preppers, and whatnot, even if infrastructure is down for hundreds of miles around. A small solar panel to charge the thing would be a good idea. All this is probably about US$1500.
Any isolated town should have something like that, and some people who know how to use it. Town halls, volunteer fire departments, sheriff's offices, etc. are good locations to keep it.
Preppers seem to be more into VHF handhelds such as the Baofeng UV-5R. That's about US$80. Less range, can't reach SHARES, but can reach a few miles, depending on terrain. Useful if you're two miles from the main road.
Here's a prepper view.[3] He uses a Slinky as an antenna.
Once you have the ability to communicate at all, the problem is finding someone useful to talk to in an emergency. There's no addressing, just frequencies. On HF there's so much range that most of the people you can reach are not in a position to do much. The whole point of SHARES is that there are a few frequencies where someone is regularly listening. During a disaster, they're probably dealing with bigger problems than yours, so calling up Homeland Security HQ as an individual may not be helpful for anything not immediately life-threatening.
If you're near a coast, you can usually reach the Coast Guard on a marine VHF channel. They're a first responder set up to take radio calls.[4] If the emergency requires a boat, call them. Marine Channel 16 VHF-FM (156.8 MHz). The Coast Guard gets involved with major floods, they maintain good communications with other emergency services, and they know almost everybody with a boat.
[1] https://www.icomamerica.com/lineup/products/IC-705
[2] https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/wire-antennas
https://www.aa5tb.com/dipole.html
Picking that length of wire results in the lowest impedance (kind of analogous to friction) at the radio for pushing signal out to the antenna, but various lengths work with more or less efficiency, and you don't have to send the signal from the middle either if you have appropriate inductors and capacitors to adjust the impedance (it's just the simplest way).
As with most things on the internet these days, it seems the best content is in the form of YouTube videos, so amusingly, this is the best written information I came across after some quick searching:
You'd have a length of coax cable going to the centre point of the antenna, so pair of 15m wires extending from each side.
Getting your amateur radio license covers this in more detail.
Dave Casler has a bunch of useful videos on things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-6sJHk9hU
(I know you know this, but just adding in. Ham is fun! I like doing park & camping deployments)
https://qrper.com/2024/10/helene-aftermath-update-power-to-t...
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
Essentially the difference between being book smart vs. street wise.
Training is critical, but even then you can still fail, which is why layers of backups are great.
For a lot of us, skill might never be as reliable as other layers, but it's generally different from other layers making it less likely to fail at the same time because of the same cause.
Crew Resource Management has a lot of great insights.
Just to clarify: the law in the US (47 CFR § 97.403) says that you can use amateur radio frequencies without a license, or unlicensed frequencies, for: "essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available". That's much narrower than just "in an emergency".
And if you try to use ham radio equipment without knowing what you're doing, there's a risk that you'll interfere with other amateur or non-amateur users who are coordinating their own emergency response.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Though just buying a Baofeng can lead to similar results, as it's not that amazing at reception. In my testing I've only been able to get a good signal within a few hundred meters, which might not be enough to hit an area repeater except in ideal conditions.
Either way, having the knowledge and practice going into an emergency is much more helpful than just the equipment!
I’m not sure where you live, but I’ve never lived in a house or apartment where I could hit a local 2m repeater without driving or getting up on a roof.
I also have an 80 watt 2m radio in my truck, and will turn it on when I’m doing long trips. Very rare to encounter anyone else (simplex), let alone be able to chat for more than a very short period of time.
OTOH, while I never got in to it, there is spectrum available to Technician licensees (assuming you're in the US) on 6m and 10m. You're not likely to get NVIS propagation there and hit more local folk that you couldn't hit w/ LOS, but that might get contacts where nothing's available on 2m/70cm, for not too much more initial equipment cost (again, assuming US and an HN user, where moving from $40 to say, $400 isn't completely out of the question).
So yeah most of the area is rural and there's probably not much out there without big gear. But most of the population lives within 30 miles of a 12-storey building.
When I got my ham license (DE K2KD) at age ~11, the idea of picking up a microphone or tapping on a morse key or using a computer with RTTY to talk to someone on the other side of the world was mind-blowing. "Mom, I'm talking to someone in Australia! I'm talking to someone in Nigeria!".
Now we block entire IP ranges because they send too much spam or because we think the traffic from an entire country has a high fraud rate.
Easy come easy go. Sigh.
I'm reminded of various "free" rock concerts of my youth, which were often disasters -- too many people, half of them stoned or otherwise out of control, etc. -- things I quickly learned I would pay to avoid. Things that are too easy attract people I don't want to interact with.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
It’s the only time I’ve used my General class privileges.
WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
https://www.amateurradio.com/codec2-open-source-vocoder-proj...
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
N3RTW
N7YHF
apologies, I'm ignorant when it comes to HAM but have always been interested in it: what does DX'ing and contesting mean? I'm assuming DX = talking to other HAMs, but I can't figure out what contesting would be.
Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.
Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.
https://aprs.fi/ is a site that displays a bunch of devices online.
Some people have APRS radios in their cars so they can see exactly where it is for example.
FT8 - a weak signal mode that lets you make contacts around the world with not much power. From Canada, I've made contacts with Japan and Romania on 10W of power.
Satellites - the ISS has a repeater, so you can make VHF/UHF contacts with people in a huge footprint.
The sw code (morse) portion was eliminated back in the 2000s.
In those cases amateur radio will be only useful for saying goodbye to all of your frequent QSOs before the tidal wave hits your location in Denver.
I've been a licensed ham for 30 years. I'm also a realist.
(No affiliation with them; I'm working with a Ph.D. student studying this question.)
I'd say that one advantage of ham is that you can operate it on much lower power equipment still - there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet, although we're starting to get close with cell phones with emergency satellite messaging. But starlink has a bandwidth advantage if you need to send photos or tunnel cell. Different capabilities - it's good to have both!
AC3ME
The FCC just gave emergency authorization for Starlink to enable direct-to-satellite service for T-Mobile customers in western North Carolina. It's my understanding that this is what Starlink was planning on releasing but they are doing a live beta right now.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/fcc-lets-starlin...
Amateur Radio operators are a unique cliquey bunch with practices not easily understood by those who aren't inculcated into the culture.
I'd prefer the term experimental radio operator or such. I say that as someone who once held an amateur ticket (for quite some decades) which I got whilst I was still at school.
You're right. When I used to participate in amateur radio as a teenager, those who were not involved—usually irritated wives and girlfriends—were apt to often repeat things like 'get off that radio and help me with the dishes', or 'they're always wasting time talking unintelligible gibberish', and in my mother's case 'stop mucking about and do your homework'. I remember the taunts and criticisms well.
Listen to this YouTube audio of comedian Tony Hancock's Radio Ham. He wasn't an amateur but he summarized the prevailing attitude of many back then: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=stmSok14-IU
However, in recent years amateur radio operators have had their revenge—and it's come by the ton! With the advent of the internet Amateurs can now correctly point to not millions but billions of totally-addicted smartphone and internet users who waste endless hours texting, or talking/posting on social media—Facebook, WhatsApp, X, etc.—mostly inconsequential nonsense and drivel, or dealing in fake news that's damaging the social fabric of society. (BTW, I've no social media accounts, HN's my limit.)
Right, the very thing past generations accused amateurs of doing is now not only done by billions of people but also for millions of them their involvement is far in excess of anything amateurs would have done pre-internet. As you would be aware, smartphone, social media and internet addiction has become a serious social problem.
As an ex-amateur I'll put this on the record. Amateurs by virtue of their technical abilities in radio/electronics—skills that must meet a set minimum standard of proficiency as mandated by regulations/law by both governments and the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—are granted access to very valuable spectrum space. An Amateur radio license, which is only obtained after passing an examination, gives Amateurs exclusive access to many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In effect, Amateurs have had and still have exclusive communications channels that allow them to communicate to any part of the world whenever they feel like it so long as they do so within the terms of their license, which, in brief, boils down to not causing interference or disrupting other communication users/services.
Even in this internet age this is a privilege that not even internet and social media users can boast about for they're always under the control—the fickle beck and call—of ISPs and Big Tech and the requirement that internet protocols and network hardware remain functional. On the other hand amateurs are always in full control of their stations (that's the edict set out in the terms of their licenses). It's why for over a century Amateurs have been called upon in emergencies whenever normal communications fail.
As mentioned, my dislike of names Ham Radio and Amateur do not do justice to this longstanding and valuable service, they do not reflect the true extent of the pool of talent that exists within its members. Also, amateurs are a cliquish bunch with a language and etiquette of their own and that has very distinct advantages. For instance, decades ago I used to work in the prototype laboratory of one of RCA's divisions that manufactured telecommunications, radio and TV broadcast equipment and my boss, a brilliant electronics engineer and radio amateur who also helped establish the division, employed me over other applicants because I was a radio amateur. His experience was that when employing people with equal qualifications then selecting the one that also has an amateur ticket made the best sense, as often they had a diehard interest in electronics from a very young age and thus had a much better intrinsic/core understanding of the subject. I've frequently seen this scenario played out over the years.
You ask 'Why would young people choose Amateur Radio as an interest when there are so many new STEM-type things to do (programming, 3D printing, etc.).'
I'll answer that but I'll begin by saying Amateur Radio still has a strong following and many enthusiastic followers, but I'd agree that per capita it doesn’t attract the numbers it did in the pre-internet days (especially youngsters—and it needs new blood). There are several reasons for this:
Until around 1970 those interested in electronics and who wanted it as a hobby at home had few options, that usually came down to repairing/building radios (sometimes TVs), and or Hi-Fi amplifiers. There were others, but that was mainly it. Thus, many youngsters gravitated to amateur radio, it was a sort of natural progression. For instance, the first radios I built were crystal sets, on one I picked up an amateur radio operator (by profession a grocery store manager) who lived about four miles away who I befriended, he taught me a lot. That led to me to passing my amateur ticket exam at age 14 and eventually to my career in electronics.
By the early 1980s microprocessors became the rage, back then I had an advanced S100 system with a 8085/8086 combo, it also had a Z80 board, I had to program in Assembler to get its BIOS functioning. This 'new' electronics diluted the pool of those with an interest in electronics. Also, around that time the hype around computers was phenomenal. Amateur radio got drowned in the noise. Then a decade or so later the internet and later still other distractions, social media, access to online media etc. It wasn't only amateur radio that suffered declining numbers, also the 'new' tech had hijacked interest away from many other hobbies.
So to your point about why one would choose Amateur Radio when there are so many others available. To answer that one has to ask what is it that drives a person's interest and what environment was he/she exposed to that nurtured that interest at an early age. If one has an interest in physics, that is how things really work then one has to get to grips with the hardware at its most fundamental level. One not only has to understand how semiconductors work but also resistors, capacitors and so, not only that but one must be fully fluent about how they operate. On the other hand, lounge-lizard programmers are glued to their screens programming in high-level languages, C et al, and often they don't know one end of a soldering iron from another. An amateur who doesn't get his hands dirty from hardware or the occasional belt from a high voltage anode isn't worthy of the name.
Many of us who are interested in the physics side of radio had to become good programmers whether we liked it or not. For that, engineering at uni made me learn Fortran, and later various Assemblers, Lisp and C and a smattering of others. One of my amateur friends was so good at machine code that he could just scan pages of a hex dump then make a comment such as 'I'll just change value at hex addr 'ABCD' from 'xx' to 'yy', that'll save me having to change R53 from 270kΩ to 330kΩ (I never had that level of patience). It's this inherent hands-on feel for electronics at its most fundamental grassroots level that often gives Amateurs the edge. You'd be surprised how many influential people in tech have an amateur ticket filed away somewhere even if they never mention it. And you'll often find that their interest began when they were kids. It goes with the territory.
I'm sorry that Amateur Radio has been somewhat lost in the noise, the fact is that it has many facets some of which are highly technical and many youngsters are unaware of it. I'd venture that Amateur Radio is still of importance, unfortunately, this post long so I'm unable to develop a supporting argument, I'll just give an illustration instead.
Your smartphone is by far the most advanced and sophisticated technology that you now own (years ago, I used to say that about television sets). Here's some rhetorical questions for which no answers are required. How much do you actually know about the working of your smartphone? You may have a rough idea of the goings-on at OSI levels from say levels 4 to 7, perhaps even 3. but what about levels 1 and 2? Well, let me say that to have a reasonable working understanding of those levels/hardware you need to know some quantum mechanics (at least at its practical level such as how quantum tunneling works). If you don't then you can't design the semiconductors to run the device. Such understanding is crucial in both the microprocessors and the extremely low noise amplifiers that are used in the phone's RF stages, especially the GPS receiver. Also, one needs an understanding of electrical principles including Maxwell's equations, then there's thermodynamics—one has to understand how thermal noise occurs in low noise amplifiers, the WiFi, mobile and GPS receivers. One must implicitly understand the relationship between bandwidth and noise—the thermal noise equation†, and so on. I'll bet many who think they understand the workings of a smartphone have never heard of said equation let alone having ever derived it from first principles.
What's this to do with Amateur radio? Well, the history of AR (and comms generally) is littered with the struggle to make HW perform better and various forms of noise are the enemy, amateurs instinctively understand this struggle, and you'll often find that engineers who work with noise in RF circuits have Amateur Radio backgrounds, again it often comes with the territory.
AR comes in many levels. And many of those who natter on air with seemingly little to say frequently have a deep understanding of the above topics. Whilst this understanding is usually honed fine during tertiary education you'll often find the roots of their understanding began with Amateur Radio. AR is what one makes of it, it's a hobby with a truly vast array of diverse technical aspects, and with it comes the enjoyable camaraderie of fellow amateurs.
† V(noise)=(4kTRΔf)^0.5, https://www.qsl.net/va3iul/Noise/Understanding%20Noise%20Fig...
At some point there was a split between the ham radio and opensource scene. There are still some connections, but the majority is gone. It's IMHO pretty much a question of mentality ("No license? Underling").
A lot of software/hardware there isn't opensource but badly written shareware and the entire thing seems to be stuck in the past. Have a look at this VARA stuff.. that list endlessy can be continued.
logging software has enjoyed some fatcats for a while for sure tho
I think it would be nice to have a radio but it just seems like too much effort for too little reward.
- the exam is cheap and easy as long as you study for a week (high-schoolers did it in the past)
- in some countries, you don’t need to pay yearly fee to keep your ID thing (which is also cheap)
- the effort doesn’t seem very hard
Last but not least and it’s the most important for me: you can talk around the whole world without needing a phone maker or an ISP or any other kind of company filtering what and how you can talk as long as you respect global human rules. It’s like the last freedom that we have here since the newsgroups of the 80s/90s. You can send a global message without having to rely on a weird protocol sent through a black box (phone) relayed by an ISP. It’s the rawest form of global messaging out there.
There are exams, sure. But the entry level one(s) are typically not that bad. Something a high-school grad could do in an afternoon.
Fortune? Most exams now are free, although there are some clubs that charge a token fee (~$10 USD or so). Radios from China are cheap and cost around $25.
Sure, the hobby can get really expensive, but it doesn't have to be.
And "standard phrase" is not even accurate. Typically, people "ragchew" on repeaters with the Tech license, but that is not it either. Digital modes, RC/Model airplane control, satellite coms, APRS (GPS tracking), etc.