I've been a ham for over fifty years. The problem with a lack of young hams starts at the local level. When I took my novice test at 14 the guy who was giving it became my lifelong friend or in ham speak my Elmer. I started a high school club (still going strong) and all its members were friends with this guy.
He strongly encouraged me to join the local club and I did. Not only did I meet other teenage hams but I made friends with older hams who taught me stuff and were happy to be supportive.
Contrast that with today, the club is still around but its moribund. I reached out when they were having problems keeping their repeater on the local university tower. I was told my help wasn't wanted.
I reached out again when the local marker space wanted to do a joint event. I'm a life member of the group but I was rebuffed. I can only imagine the 14 year old me taking one look at this cliquish group of older guys and being discouraged about the hobby.
I've run a programming group for twenty years. Sometimes the members get on me for having introductory type meetings. But I'm always reaching out to the greater community and trying to get new members. That's how you grow, if you don't do it you die. There's plenty in the ham radio hobby to attract young people, but if the local community turns them off they quickly chose to do something else.
I'm a newish ham and got my license a couple of years ago. One thing that may not be obvious to long-time hams is how alienating the testing experience can be. Many of us learn online or through printed resources, and our first time meeting the local club is test day. The test process leaves a lot to be desired.
For example, my local area only has exams once per quarter. The time frame is 9 AM - noon on a weekend day, theoretically you can start any time. So I show up at 10 and quickly fill out the 30 question multiple choice technician exam. No problems so far! But then I have to sit and wait over an hour for 3 different examiners to get to my exam and grade it one after the other. I don't know why this rule about grading in triplicate exists, but it meant that despite finishing my exam maybe 90 minutes before the session ended, I was told there wouldn't be enough time for me to take the general exam and get it graded that day. Meaning I had to get up at 8 AM and travel to a neighboring city on the next exam date to get my general license.
The whole thing just feels unnecessarily bureaucratic and alienating, particularly for a hobby. It was less of a hassle last time I went to the DMV.
I got my license during the pandemic, the class and testing were all done remotely. I've never physically met anyone else that has a license (to the best of my knowledge - maybe I walked by someone in a store).
It's unfortunate that that was your experience. The VE experience does vary a lot from one region or group to another. I know there are VE groups that absolutely do better than this even with the conventional paper approach, make it a priority to do things efficiently, and make sure people can sit for all the exams they need/want during any given session. Also, for what it's worth, the entire study and exam process has been undergoing a lot of transformation, especially in response to the pandemic. I expect to see changes in this process, including expansion of online test opportunities, in coming years.
I'm from the generation that had to go to the local FCC office to advance from novice. You copied code in a glass room with echo's that made things challenging. The FCC guys always seemed gruff and non-smiling like they didn't particularly enjoy the task. Some hams had to travel hundreds of miles to reach a local FCC office.
I would imagine the volunteer examiner program would be much easier. But it sounds like it could be made much better. However to an extent the FCC is still driving the rules. Governments are by their very nature bureaucratic.
My grandfather was a HAM radio operator (KB2SX) and ran at least one ham radio group.
My experience with him was that he'd go on nightly, or semi-nightly, and meet virtually with other HAM radio operators.
He wanted me to take a HAM test, but by the time I was at an age that would have been appropriate, there were other technologies emerging such as BBSes, online service providers (Compuserv, Prodigy and AOL), and then later the Internet.
These technologies were so exciting to me, and I am sure that had they existed when my grandfather had started out, he would have used them instead of HAM radio, as for him it was about the socializing and connection.
For those younger than me (43), I imagine that HAM radio has an appeal as a retro technology, but not much else. One can't even transmit encrypted data across it legally, limiting even basic data transmission technology.
This isn't so say that there isn't a part of me that's nostalgic for sitting on my grandfather's lap watching him tune the dials and adjust the glowing meters, but even for someone as middle aged as me, HAM radio was more of a nostalgia technology.
You're also right about the younger folks finding many HAM operators to be curmudgeony. They're protective and can be somewhat elitist, with a high degree of friction (time, energy and cost) to even begin in the hobby, a smart kid who wants to tinker can find more welcoming hobbies.
Heck... telephony technologies are now considered retro! Many kids today have grown up without a landline in their home.
Here's the paradox: radio communications play a much more significant role in our lives today, yet there is far less interest in experimenting with this modern (not retro) technology. Even those who are interested in electronics and who experiment with radio in a manner similar to radio amateurs in the past are unlikely to build wide area networks or experiment with new modes.
We are the same age and we have seen the same progression of technology. I would argue that some of it is analagous to amateur radio. BBSes and some aspects of the Internet are very much in the spirit of ham radio. These are technologies that people used for communications and where people experimented as amateurs rather than as professionals. Just as radio amateurs created their own networks of repeaters, people setup networks of BBSes (e.g. relaying between BBSes or wiring LANs).
I think that amateur radio faultered when it became more like online service providers or the modern web: people continued to use what was there, but it stagnated since few were experimenting and few were interested in creating infrastructure.
I also see that attitude leaking into our online world. Consider something like Gemini. Some people experiment with it (as either developers or for communicating with others), which is very much in the spirit of ham radio. Yet there are also numerous naysayers, those who see their fancy new rigs (or web browsers) as being the only true measure of progress even though they can only partake in that world as the modern version of a ragchewer.
Yep, what's wild to me is there's actually a non-insignifiant overlap between radio and networks(ex: aloha from RF links in Hawaii ended up heavily influencing Ethernet and most of your cable modems use a variation of coding scheme(QAM) that is also widely used in more modern radio protocols).
Except that digital depends on... analog radio. I honestly wish there was better ecosystem for SSB 2M or robust SDR platforms. You have a host of digital modes on HF but most of the 2M/70CM radios/chips are FM/FSK.
> For those younger than me (43), I imagine that HAM radio has an appeal as a retro technology
Under 43 here as well as someone involved in the retro scene. HAM stuff was never a retro for me, however I have consider looking into it when I developed an interest in RF based computer networks (my interest originated with modern tech). As someone who undereducated as fuck it seems like a decent way to build some of the base knowledge that I don’t have. I just haven’t got around to looking into it much.
> Heck... telephony technologies are now considered retro!
heh my most recent retro deep dive has been into ISDN.
I actually tried to get a landline. Only thing available was a a DOCSIS modem for encapsulating VoIP traffic.
>I actually tried to get a landline. Only thing available was a a DOCSIS modem for encapsulating VoIP traffic.
And yet, the landlines still exist, fully built out right to the homes they serve. They're owned by (in theory) the US public which paid to construct that entire network. Because of the years of use and the need for universal service, it's still the most extensive network infrastructure that exists in the US, period.
But access to them has been closed off by corporations who don't want competition and don't have a problem paying to get the laws in the US changed to suit their profits.
They don't sell ordinary copper land lines themselves any more because selling such a cheap product would compete with their higher priced "low end" offerings.
They don't let anyone else use the POTS network because that would also compete with them. You can transmit a lot of data over a plain old pair of copper wires point to point, can't have anyone but the phone companies doing that because it would "cause problems" for the POTS network.
They've claimed monopolies almost everywhere, subsidies from the government and tax breaks from the states in exchange for providing "internet access" to places that don't have good connections, like rural areas.
There's no one else the country can ask to do that sort of thing because they fight against allowing anyone else access to the network, yet whenever they're asked to produce, they claim they need to be given more money. Wait a few years and repeat, over and over.
Telecommunications companies in the US are some of the most corrupt organizations that exist. It's astonishing that people ignore them as long as they have good cell signal.
> Do you consider ISDN separate from telephony or part of it?
It’s kinda of weird. I consider it telephony for sure (half of the TE’s I have are phones and a lot of equipment is T1/E1 equipment for PRI lines) but I also consider it under early computer data networks as it could carry X.25, Frame Relay and other types of traffic. It predates my time using computers a bit, but I believe it was also used for internet connections as uncommon as it was here.
Probably a measurable portion of dial up Internet when compuserve started selling access to their dial plant to ISPs. I worked at a place in the 90s that used compuserve x.25 to get ppp access to our network. It was completely unprotected, all you needed to know was the six character node name and you were in.
Never got too far into X 25, I spent a couple nights after work cruising the network and finding all sorts of stuff that looked like it was on the same level of security.
Problem same. It is not the technology it is the restriction. You use a common pool of radio which is shared. Regulation and rules of engagement abounded.
Still it is better than just radio station as ham is 2 way (and n way based on 2 way). It is a bit decentralised. But read last paragraph. Totalitarian state would not like it.)
To me, the encryption things is a big issue. In 1950, transmitting for the world to hear seems reasonable. In 2021, virtually anyone with a few grand could record literally everything transmitted on the 160, 80, 40, 30, and 20 meter bands and archive it for all eternity.
Do I want my casual conversations going into some historical record?
Probably not.
Testing is also a bother. I support testing, mind you, but so much of this is memorizing factoids. "What segment of the 20-meter band is most often used for digital transmissions (avoiding the DX propagation beacons)? (A) 14.000 - 14.050 MHz (B) 14.070 - 14.112 MHz (C) 14.150 - 14.225 MHz (D) 14.275 - 14.350 MHz."
At least we finally got rid of Morse Code.
And aside from that, the authorized modes of transmission aren't that interesting anymore. I'd enjoy experimenting with things like spread spectrum, or similar types of innovative things. Building an SSB radio in 2021 seems archaic.
I think these things are changing, though I hope the changes come sooner than I suspect they actually will. I know there is ongoing discussion about how to bring rules more in line with modern practice and tech, such as the explosion of interest in digital operation over the past decade or so. I doubt this will reach to authorization of fully encrypted casual comms, though some form of encryption isn't out of the question when you get into the emergency comms piece of amateur radio, which is restricted from passing certain health and welfare information over the essentially "open line" of ham radio.
A lot of this is closely related. Encryption and spread spectrum are sort of tied. Ideally, spread spectrum looks like noise. My carrier isn't a sine wave, but something which looks a lot like a one-time pad. If I'm allowed to experiment with modern transmission, security goes up, at least beyond the level of a casual listener.
I also think you could maintain the spirit of ham radio with encryption. It kind of depends on how it's done. If I establish an encrypted connection to a stranger on the waves, and I'm using the connection to peddle commercial goods, if I do it enough times, someone will report me.
There's also the issue of security when interacting with anything digital. I don't mind remotely controlling equipment in the clear, perhaps, but I do mind if strangers can commandeer it. Signing is good enough for that, but encryption is better. A lot of things I'd like to do -- if I were experimenting with radio -- I don't want hacked.
> I imagine that HAM radio has an appeal as a retro technology
HAM as in radio operators clubs, sure. But SDR and other adjacent ideas are doing relatively well with younger people. Especially with rtl-sdr providing a really cheap entry point.
But the whole official HAM environment and exams? Meh... I made some antennas to catch local device broadcasts and satellite transmissions, but I'm not interested in the classic stuff.
At 20 I was interested in HAM radio. I went to a meeting at my university. Meetings were entirely five retired engineers talking the whole time, that was boring. There was one other student, who was the president. When I asked questions about radio and RF, they recommended I go to the library to look for books. I felt that I really didn’t need to spend an hour of my time to have them tell me that. I went to one other meeting, but I had school and work taking up my time and realized attending was not worth my time. I hope the community has improved since then, because it was not inviting to young people when I wanted to get involved.
Same experience here. I thought about getting into it about 7-8 years ago, but the local group was a clique of 70 year old retirees who all knew each other, complaining about their taxes and social security, and sharing their -- unfortunately stereotypical -- uh, political views that would be considered NSFW at most offices. Not exactly welcoming.
Yup, there's also a big problem with gatekeeping and what's "true" ham radio.
I wish it was different since you can do things with ham radio that are not possible without a license but then I look at the state of something like APRS that is still stuck in the '80s and it's depressing. The M17 project may change that and FT8 is starting to make inroads but I feel like the attitude you mention above keeps out people who would be taking it to new places and domains.
I think you are searching for explanations in the social realm while the truth is all to obvious.
Ham used to be about making connections with the guy sitting on the other end of the globe. That's a 100 times solved problem, much more reliably and with much less effort than ham could ever provide.
The second thing is ham is about making your own stuff. An AM/FM rig? With SSB? Your own amplifier? That used to be cool long ago when equipment was expensive. Today the equipment is all DSP, software defined. Little chance to lay your hands on, unless you come up with a new SDR like the chinese ATS25 or a malachite rival.
Ham is not dead, it just has a much reduced user base because of how things turned out to be.
Hmm - I got into Ham radio nearly 20 years ago as a teenager who loved making electronics. I couldn’t afford to buy the expensive things at the time, now I could probably buy a high-end high power rig and not really feel any financial hit.
But I haven’t because it’s still cool to make all those things, and I’m still struggling to get them to work, but am learning and feeling so amazingly satisfied when they do.
Also, you sort of can make all kinds of amazing SDR things yourself with even modest microcontrollers and DDS ICs. It’s just a hobby like any other, people still spend massive amounts of money and time on classic cars - they’ll never compete with or better a new Hyundai or something to get from A to B, but that’s missing the point.
This is my experience too. I'm a relatively young ham, and have found older hams have no interest in engaging with anyone other than their buddies. It's bizarre and sad.
There is an unreasonably large number of bigoted, racist, and generally rude "old guy" hams. I've been wondering about this for a while.
I got my novice license when the community was as you describe (helpful, welcoming of everyone) and then got my extra class in the 'modern' age. I have been told that SDRs are not "real" radios (as an example). I get the people who feel inadequate because technology has moved quickly and they don't understand it, but the rage they have at people who do is really quite surprising to me.
One theory I have is that these curmudgeons have 'run out' people who just got tired of hearing them on the air.
That said, in probably 20 years or so it is going to be great because they are all going to be dead and hopefully they will have taken their attitude with them.
I hear about this a lot and am pretty sure it is true in many places but it's not that way everywhere. Just last night the mostly old folks on the local net were excited that someone was joining through some sort of gateway for digital modes. But I certainly know the gatekeeper types you're referring too and they exist in many hobbies that grew into popularity during earlier eras. I've heard in some places the younger crowd has formed their own clubs that focus more on digital modes, which is one way around the gatekeepers, but still sad because the hobby is at its heart about sharing experience, which they have decades of.
Was a ham and active at 20. Me and a few friends did lots of events. Nothing but really old people.
Tried to get into it 20 years later. I was Still the youngest person by 20-30 years.
At this rate I figure in 25 years I will get into it again.
I got my son interested in short wave by first exposing him to North Korea’s English broadcast. Now he DX’s for all kinds of stuff on web SDRs. It’s a start.
I think this is something to do with the generational reaffirmation of youth since the WWII kicked off a later 20th century imbalance of the proportion of young people in the world.
Now that the number of youngsters is simply twice or more than before and the chances of meeting up with and engaging with seniors diminished by other factors such as wealth creating retirement conurbations and the dissolution of multi generational households, young people just aren't comfortable with older folk any more. I have noticed this anecdotally of course personally rather pointedly immediately after I grew a beard that happens to be white despite my age being a tiny 50 something. The sudden and unmistakable difference in the way I experienced society has been revealing and at times even rather worrying.
Perhaps it's a matter of what area you live in. Since I've grown a gray beard, I've found almost everyone, including younger people, treat me with a level of deference and respect that they didn't before.
Multi generation household or live close by has been a thing even in city. At least in Uk I observed. The current Fb being old guy media precisely lived in this space. How many kids solely on fb for their peers.
The trouble with HAM radio is that it isn't that useful anymore. We have amazing cell coverage, wireless broadband just about everywhere and the ability to socialize online.
Ham used to be incredibly useful for global communications, rural areas with no phone service, and a way for people to stay socially connected in remote (or not remote) locations. This isn't needed in the vast majority of cases now.
That has led to most hams active on the airwaves being an older demographic. And the way they try to recruit others into the hobby is obsolete because the need just isn't there. It's a 100% academic exercise, rather than a way to connect with anyone around the world.
There is a newer aspect to ham which is modern digital radio, but most old timers have no knowledge or interest in that. There's a subculture that exists that does amazing work in that space, but it's disconnected from the old-timers that represent the face of ham radio. You'll find this subculture at DEF CON and similar events.
Even the things about ham that are still useful, like the marine net on 14.3Mhz which we used in the 90s for transoceanic sailing is about to become obsolete with affordable internet in the mid-pacific or mid-atlantic becoming a reality. And polar bases are about to get polar orbit Starlink satellites for broadband.
So the hobby really needs to transform it it's going to survive. But the old guard and new world are so disconnected, destruction and recreation may be a better way to think about it.
My wife and I are both ham Extras and we run a cybersecurity company. She's KF1J and I'm WT1J. We're passionate about the hobby, but both see the writing on the wall. Ham right now is a solution looking for a problem.
Do you hike? Even around the most popular areas in the USA (Yosemite, YellowStone, Tahoe, and many other national parks) it's pretty easy to get out of cell range. Similar with major highways, 5 in california is pretty good, but it's easy to not have a signal on 80 or 70 as you cross the country.
I lost my dog and decided to track her, and all the systems I could find (up to $1,000) were either cellular or pretty much line of site. Ham APRS was AMAZINGLY better than anything commercial I could find. It does direct connections for decent range, but also there's surprisingly good APRS coverage using existing repeaters in the areas I hike in. http://aprs.fi allows global tracking if an APRS widget world wide, and trackers that fit in a dog collar are common and don't carry a monthly subscription fee.
I'm a Ham radio operator and when I hike I bring a Garmin InReach Mini. I might bring a portable too but just for fun, not with any expectations in terms of emergencies.
It's a much better tool for the job. And unlike personal locator beacons it can also handle short personal messages.
And it's far from $1000 (around $300 and the service from $15 monthly) and really portable. For real emergencies a PLB is arguably better (and doesn't require a paid subscription) but you have to be conscious to activate it. The Garmin can send regular breadcrumbs without triggering an emergency so they will at least know where you were headed. If you are conscious it also allows you to communicate with the rescue operators.
Ham radio is great but not meant to be reliable. It's about experimentation with technology and the sport of making long distance connections. It's not about a reliable rescue service even though it is very useful in emergencies.
Heh, sure, but are you going to teach your dog how to use the InReach Mini? I had a previous Garmin, worked reasonably ... if there was a cell signal. The battery died, Garmin wouldn't sell me a new one, and the replacement unit increased the monthly cost by 3x.
With APRS I can find my dog, no monthly, and in large outdoor areas APRS has MUCH better coverage than cell.
I do. And I live on Orcas Island, so lets use that as an example. We have repeaters on Mt Constitution which is 2300 ft. I live right next to it and I'm in shadow for repeater coverage. When we hike the lakes in the area, we also can't see the repeater, or each other thanks to topography. HF gear is too bulky to take with - even the QRP gear, and who has time to throw an antenna over a tree.
Trust me, I want to believe. But the only practical use that my wife (KF1J) and me (WT1J) have for our ham gear is in the rare case where I'm on the boat far away from her and out of cell coverage and need to check in via the HF bands. I'm almost never away from cell coverage. For transoceanic stuff, that is still a common case, but it will soon be better served by portable global internet.
Yeah, but I hike with people who aren't HAMs. So, a GMRS/FRS set of HT radios is sooooo easy. Even has worked surprisingly well between cars in canyons along I-70 with no line of sight.
Heh, try a 2M radio with a mag mount antenna on the roof. Even without repeaters I've been impressed with the range.
The amateur radio tech license is really easy, I'd say about half is common sense along the lines of do no harm, just an evening or two of studying to get enough of the 30 ish multiple choice questions to pass.
Can you elaborate on these trackers, how they work, and where to purchase? I've been looking for the past couple years for something like this I think.
You can buy similar in board form, popular among the high altitude balloon communities.
I use one on my dog's collar and my 2m radio will show me an arrow and distance to the dog. As a bonus I can call family/friend and have them check the world wide APRS map to see if the dog has gone near a repeater.
It's also handy to check the weather, there's quite a few weather stations about and in the mountains the local forecast can be unreliable and a weather station that's MUCH closer than the nearest city can provide handy info on quickly changing weather conditions.
The one area where it's still relevant is disaster response, but even that is questionable.
Here in Portland, the city puts a lot of effort into emergency preparedness and getting people trained on radio, but the vast majority of people involved are 55+. I have my doubts about how effective it will be in an actual emergency.
I tend to think the effort would be better spent on hardening the existing cell networks, and being ready to deploy public safety LTE, cells-on-wheels or similar. Mass produced consumer tech should enable economies of scale for cell phones that aren't there for ham radios. Full internet isn't actually needed, even just a few independent cells would perform a lot better than the walkie talkies that the CERT teams use.
Same here in King and Snohomish counties last time I checked. The SAR teams have been using repeaters. I agree re better cell coverage for that use case, which would include data that could make SAR teams way more effective by e.g. tracking search team coverage in real-time on a single view shared by the entire response.
A lot of ham culture is around emergency comms, and every now and then it's useful. But a single portable starlink dish absolutely destroys what ham can do. It would allow for e.g. 50 people on a local wifi network all taking comms requests from people in an impacted area, and sharing the same digital 100Mbps link to get those comms requests out. Can even be self serve. Ham requires an operator occupying dedicated spectrum, serving one customer at a time.
>The one area where it's still relevant is disaster response, but even that is questionable.
I mean it's more than questionable, it's tending towards the ridiculous with no well-formed concept of operations. Even in large scale disasters, virtually the only real usage of ham radio has been for 'welfare' traffic ("tell Bob at 212-555-1212 that Alice got out before the fire reached her house").
Cellular providers now have COWs and COLTs for reinforcing networks where the fixed infrastructure has been affected. Iridium phones are easily available. Inmarsat BGAN terminals with high-speed data fit into a messenger bag.
HF radio may be the only game in town if the really-big-one comes (HEMP / similar scenario) but it's just not relevant to either command-and-control or tactical operations in most disaster response scenarios.
I think you're overestimating the resiliency of cellular networks.
After the Katrina hurricane, the FCC mandated that cell sites have at least 8 hours of backup power (which isn't a lot when power can be out for days or weeks), but the industry sued and got the rule replaced with 'self-regulation', with the predictable result:
According to the latest report by the FCC, about 28.1 percent of the cell sites in the area impacted by Ida are offline, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without service. Another 354,699 residents in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama remain without landline phone, cable, or broadband service.
The FCC report shows that as of 11 a.m. Monday, 52% of 2,759 cellular sites across 31 Louisiana parishes were offline as a result of Hurricane Ida. The majority of the downed towers — nearly 65% — were offline due to a lack of power, a problem that could persist for weeks in some parts of the state. In some cases, cell sites are down due to multiple issues, such as power outages, damage to the network or damage to the site itself.
CoWs can help in a small disaster or providing service at a shelter, but when thousands of cell sites are offline, there's still going to be a lot of people cut off from communication.
An important piece of modern (4G/5G) cell network design is that cells can have overlapping coverage to provide extra capacity in an area. The top level statistic that 52% of sites were down does not necessarily mean that 52% of the area was out of coverage at that time. It would be very expensive to heavily reinforce every small cell in every neighborhood for a large scale disaster, but would make sense to reinforce enough macro sites with wide area coverage to maintain low bandwidth emergency communications (voice+text) across the entire region.
Sure, but $600 sat phones with $100/month (for 60 minutes) plans and $5000 high speed satellite terminals are still out of reach of many people -- the people that can least afford to flee to safety after a disaster. So hams still have a role in coordinating local communication to help communications get outside of the disaster zone.
Is ham radio any better on this front? Equipment is bulky and expensive, often requires a large antenna which might be problematic in apartments, requires specific skill (a satellite phone usually "just works") and requires a license before you can legally transmit (granted, in an emergency nobody cares, but I don't know many people who would be happy to spend money on a setup that they wouldn't even be legally allowed to use).
Sure, hand held radios start at $30 and at $75-$100 can be pretty nice. State wide repeater networks are pretty common, there's pretty nice ones in Colorado and California that I've used, I'm sure there's many others. Sure an external antenna $30-$200 can really help if you are in a car, house, or even an apartment if you have a patio.
So sure you can blow many $1000s on it, but depending on the hardware and demands you can talk to large repeater network for $60 ish on 2M, and with a bit more skill and testing/certification (A general license) talk to people world wide for a few $100.
Here's a quad band radio great for digital modes like js8call to allow keyboard to keyboard chat over long distances for $80:
https://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html
The point of ham radio in disasters is not for everyone to have a ham radio (that sounds like a disaster itself), but to have hams coordinate and forward communications. So they could, for example, sit at a community shelter and forward welfare messages to someplace that does have a sat phone (or long distance HF link) to send messages out of the area.
Though ham radios are no longer bulky nor expensive - I can hit a repeater 10 miles away from a handheld about as big as half a deck of cards with a 12" antenna.
This is in the context of coordinating a disaster response. Just because most people couldn't make a call doesn't mean rescue workers didn't have a signal from a mobile cell tower with a satellite link.
Sure, rescue workers had some connectivity. But typically in a disaster the rescue workers are overwhelmed and a large part of the community is out of communications. A ham per neighborhood can really help get the word out, even for simple stuff like there will be a water truck at the local highschool tomorrow at 2-4pm.
>Are programs to organize volunteers to help with radio communications a bad idea?
Of course not, but those volunteers have a very limited role to play in disaster response.
I think a lot of these guys fantasize about being the sole link in and out of a stricken community, coordinating helicopter airlifts and stuff. The reality is much more mundane.
I always assumed that my role as a ham in an disaster would moslty be doing welfare reports (i.e. "tell my mom in Idaho that I'm ok"), and maybe guiding people to local resources like shelters, medical aid, etc. It might be mundane, but that's the kind of things the real first responders aren't going to have time for.
Agreed. Not the stuff of action movies, but welfare checks, coordinating with the community what resources are available, where they are, and what times they are available. Think food, water, etc. But if the rescue workers can accommodate helping a smaller percentage of the population hams can help identify folks in dire need.
Digital modes, winmail and similar have been heavily used for getting medication to those in need, mostly because some meds need refrigeration and the power grid doesn't have to be down for long for everything refrigerated to go bad.
economies of scale like the little Baefung (spelling) handheld that you can buy on amazon for 30 dollars and you can listen and talk on ham, GMRS, FRS and Marine bands to name a few?
Economies of scale like the dozens of radios that are within feet of my body right now. Economies of scale like smartphones so cheap that almost every single person over the age of 10 has one, including homeless people. Economies of scale like even if my main phone breaks, I can still power on and use the old one in my drawer from 2014, which is just as compatible with LTE as my new one.
Also, economy of scale like a single charging standard (USB) with plentiful cheap battery packs and solar panels; almost all having USB A available to plug into. The baofeng only charges through circular plug and dock; you can only charge if you have a battery pack or power source big enough to do mains-style AC power. Not all radios are like this, but it is extremely common. Best I found affordably is a raddiodity R2 (apparently illegal in USA, oops) walki talkie, which has docks that plug in via USB.
Depends on what 'useful' means. When I got my novice ticket as a teen after learning Morse from a paper-tape machine, it was the start of a long, enjoyable technical learning curve. That's what I talked to other hams about, that's what I read QST for.
I experimented with the bands and propagation (day, night, sunspot), tried different antennas and feedlines, different modes. I listened to the old-timer groups rag-chewing on 80 meters; mostly gear-talk. I listened to the utes to figure out how they worked, what they were for. When I got a computer, I had to learn to use interrupts to do baudot <=> ASCII conversion.
FM, repeaters, DXing, contest country-counting, QRP ... all enjoyable as experiments. Hamming began with experimenters, and will continue with them. Beats watching your favorite films chopped up to sell you shit, or listening to FM-autopatch all afternoon.
Was at a meeting and people need going on about mobile hams being the only form of communications for a couple of weeks for small towns hit by hurricanes in Florida This was just a few years ago.
Basically a dude in a minivan shows up. Puts up a 50 cable. And he is it.
Lots of stories about how someone needed insulin and he would end up connecting to a random HAm in New York, who would email the right people and a few hours later Insulin arrived.
Mostly it was about how to prep a vehicle to have a weeks water , power and other supplies.
Was super cool.
GMRS has been growing a good bit, at least in the off-road community. It’s a step up from CB but much less involved than HAM. It’s certainly more limited, but generally more than sufficient for most. Even better, when I go out with my immediate family+ for various outdoor activities they are covered under my license.
I’ll keep my HAM license active, but I rarely use it anymore.
You don't need to get too far out into rural areas to find places without "amazing cell coverage", and indeed no cell coverage at all. And anyone that's lived through a disaster (whether hurricane, blizzard, or regional power outage) can tel you that the cell phone network is just not that resilient.
Maybe low earth orbit satellites will make satellite communications ubiquitous through cell phones, but we're not there yet. (The iPhone 13 was rumored to have satellite capability, it did not, but it sounds like it's technologically possible so we could see it in the not too distant future)
Side note: We use Hughes Satellite internet when camping in BLM land and it works great. The only down-side is that the dish is almost 1 meter and takes up my entire truck bed. It takes 15 mins to point at the bird, which isn't a biggie. But the propagation delay is a killer. Around 900ms.
Yeah, if I spent significant time outside of cell range, I'd probably carry a real satellite phone or maybe one of the satellite communicators that let you send txt messages. Right now I just carry a personal locator beacon in case of emergency.
I've been on the wait list for StarLink for 6 months, like you, I'm still hoping for the RV dish.
That is true, but I will say that I had surprising amounts of coverage via Verizon ~5 years ago when I was offroading. I'd generally have to be up high, but most of my trails had enough coverage that I could check in with my wife or provide emergency communication within around 10 minutes drive of much of the trails I was on. Google Fi, on the other hand, has dramatically less coverage in those situations.
I ended up getting one of those ReqQLink locator beacons, that has no monthly charge, after my son was running around like crazy during a off roading lunch break, and came too close to cracking his head on a rock.
> There's a subculture that exists that does amazing work in that space, but it's disconnected from the old-timers that represent the face of ham radio. You'll find this subculture at DEF CON and similar events.
>The trouble with HAM radio is that it isn't that useful anymore. We have amazing cell coverage, wireless broadband just about everywhere and the ability to socialize online.
All insanely prone to failure. Power outage is enough, as cell towers don't have backup or only a very short amount. They also don't work without the backbone infrastructure.
There's plenty of alternatives to amateur bands for backup communications. ZigBee and LoRA networks/repeaters, amateur WiFi in ISM, Starlink, GSM radios, modems over POTS lines, etc. Ham really is a solution looking for a problem. I was very interested in Ham and in college spent some time in the Ham club but even then, before LTE everywhere and smartphones, it was obvious that GSM could eat Ham's lunch. These days with smartphones I don't even bother. I have a GMRS setup I keep at home to tackle some dead spots in our area or to talk to my partner when I'm working in the garage (and as a backup in case of power outages), which works good enough for our purposes.
Ham these days really is a solution looking for a problem. Probably its biggest advantage these days is how easy it is to get cheap, used ham equipment compared to some of the alternatives.
> There's plenty of alternatives to amateur bands for backup communications. ZigBee and LoRA networks/repeaters, amateur WiFi in ISM, Starlink, GSM radios, modems over POTS lines, etc.
In an actualy emergency, there really isn't an alternative. Ham is remarkable in that you can communicate around the world from a 100% self-contained system. You and the other party just need your own equipment and power (generator, etc) and there is no dependency on anything else. Every other solution has multiple (sometimes dozens if not hundreds) of third parties in the dependency chain, if any one of them is down, there's no communication channel.
It doesn't take too much for such emergencies to happen. Hurricane Maria in 2017 knocked out essentially all communications in Puerto Rico for a long time (many months in more remote unreachable areas, a week or more even in the city).
Satellite phones work, if you have one and an active plan. But that's so expensive approximately nobody does. Ham though, works standalone, free.
Repeaters fail too. And the solar cycle has been at a low for the past few years for HF, but if you can wait until 2025, it's going to be amazing!! ;-)
Apologies for such a noob, basic question, but doesn’t Ham radio equipment also rely on the same power that normal personal electronics use? I guess I don’t know why Ham radio is immune from power outages.
I think the parent's point is that there's a lot of cellular infrastructure that needs power (and connectivity) for cellular communication to work. Point-to-point radio only needs power at either end, and when your radio runs on 13.8VDC, there are many convenient sources available.
Sort of. Most ham radio equipment bigger than a handheld (ham's call them HTs) use 12V DC. So in a hurricane you could literally rip a battery out of a car and power your radio for a few hours, maybe even days if you are careful. This leads to wide compatibility for power sources across a large majority of ham radio equipment.
12V DC is easy to build yourself and is a world wide standard for many things, including amateur radio. There's tons of videos on how to build a 12v battery pack out of commodity batteries for whatever chemistry you are interested in, (LIPO, lead acid, and lithium are common).
It's also popular target for portable solar arrays. You could buy something the size of a picnic blanket and rolls up. Add the solar that outputs 12 dc to a build a 12v battery pack (18650s and 21600s are common) and be able to be on the radio for hours a day, even in pretty challenging conditions.
Generally running a ham radio off of whatever you can find around is much easier than normal equipment because most consumer electronics expect AC (which is harder from batteries, requiring an inverter) of a certain voltage (depending on use case and country) or they have a power cube that has a custom voltage and amperage requirements that changes for each piece of consumer equipment.
USB is helping in this area, it's increasingly common and finding battery packs or solar cells that output USB compatible power is getting easier. But even today there's many logistical challenges, things like connectors (Microusb, mini-usb, usb-c), smarts (usb master, usb client, usb2go, etc), power limitations (different cables and power cubes have different max power), physical connector issues (like say Apple's phones), and various non standard additions to get more than 5V @ 1 amp over a "USB" cable. Wireless charging for phones is a morass of compatibility issues and the "USB" supplies for the chargers often use proprietary signaling, and despite the usb connector use non standard protocols and voltages.
USB is generally more fragile and less flexible than 12v DC. It's much easier for instance to run 4 radios off a single 12V supply than it is to run 4 usb devices off a single USB power source. USB is also trickier, you need for instance some smarts to connect a USB device to a car's 12v battery, granted those parts are common.
Ham equipment also seems quite large and bulky, based off every stock photo I’ve seen online, so I’m not quite sure how useful it’d be in a situation like an earthquake where you’d have to evacuate a building and take your possessions out by hand.
Hand hands that are half as tall as your phone and 2-3x as thick are common. As our units designed to be installed in cars. Both can connect direct to other radios (usually on 2M or 70cm bands) or to repeaters (which are quite common).
Having the closest few dozen repeaters programmed in is common, that way you can have a few for the closest dozen or so metro areas and often includes a state wide repeater network. Having access to these networks can provide a wealth of information from a device is easily hand held, can be worn on a belt, and still works even when the cell towers die. As texas learned, even just a cold spell can have significant impact on the power grid, which of course the cellular network depends on.
If you are having severe weather, fire, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc the ham radio networks typically get really active, people working hard to spread useful information. Often have friends/family/connections to local fire fighters, doctors, nurses, etc that have a really good idea of what's actually going on and how the local services are responding to those challenges. Might want to try listening in on a local emergency net (you can listen to amateur radio legally in the USA without a license).
When comparing what the local TV station broadcasts (and sends out over social media) to the local hams, I've found the ham based info to be significantly more accurate and timely. The news station seems to be focusing on the drama of it all.
Unboxing starlink was a transformative experience for me. It was a weird feeling literally getting internet in a box without cable, copper or DSL or even a rural dish pointed at a local tower where you have to worry about obstacles. I plopped the dish on the dirt and it just frikkin worked. It was at that moment I realized how that technology will absolutely transform global society. I'm from Africa and now do philanthropy in rural areas out there, and it's going to take a minute, but it's going to absolutely transform regions like that.
Traceroute over starlink, see if you can figure out where your uplink station is, and how far it is from you. From what I can tell the range is much more than cellular, but not all that much as far as worrying about hurricanes, large fires, and major power grid problems.
>There's a subculture that exists that does amazing work in that space, but it's disconnected from the old-timers that represent the face of ham radio. You'll find this subculture at DEF CON and similar events.
Is that subculture congregating anywhere on the internet?
I find amateur radio interesting but I have zero interest in rag chewing about the weather or Donald Trump with a bunch of retirees.
Amateur Radio has a chance to become massively popular through a resurgence of interest in mesh networking but unfortunately laws are not evolving fast enough for this to become possible. Right now it's illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air [0] which basically kills everything like. The areas where people are becoming increasingly active in radio are things like NYC Mesh which can only utilize a very small segment of the bands (and not even the ones hams use!) for running their networks.
I'd love for an IP over Mesh network to become popular. Doing IRC and reinventing a lot of the early internet in a distributed manor would be very fun.
[0] - Unless it is for the control of a satellite.
But then it's no longer Amateur Radio, it'll just be another unlicensed spectrum like the Wifi spectrum since there's no way to know who is using it or what data is going over it.
There may be value for this to the public, but it's not the same as Amateur Radio.
That’s fundamentally what’s at question here: is amateur radio literally just non-professionals toying with RF, or is it some collection of rituals like HF ragchewing and SKCC? It seems that the ARRL has decided it’s the latter while everyone under 40 years old has decided it’s the former.
As a general class operator under 40 I wish it was the latter.
Marconi and the other greats in the history of radio were people messing around in an unregulatedish space. The only place you find those kinds of hams anymore is in THz operators who do some crazy shit.
Usually when you come up with an obvious solution around a problem that no one else has thought of, it's because it's not a solution.
The actual rule would prohibit this since it prohibits: messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning
And I think a "random word service" would also violate: nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules
It can be if it's not available for commercial use. The WiFi spectrum is for commercial use. The ham spectrums could still require a license and could only be used for hobbyists. We'd need a way to verify who the sender is via unencrypted comms, but the rest could be encrypted. Maybe a standard header every 5 mins.
How do you know whether Joe Blow H6F5KY is sending out personal messages to his wife from work, or broadcasting orders to his fleet of delivery drivers?
At low scale it's not a problem and at large scale it can't be hidden.
What would the nightmare scenario look like? Drama? The community gits gud at MIMO, to work around the abuse, and HFDF, to track it down and police it? I'd watch that movie. Hell, I'd play that game, sign me up!
If all else fails, what about new legislation involving cryptographic signatures and bandwidth quotas? What if those spawn a secondary market where people take the HAM test just to rent out their callsign for crypto tokens? Would that be a bad thing or spawn a crazy collectively-owned disintermediation of telcos? Would the world really be such a bad place if instead of paying $60 to ATT I could pay $30 to some teenagers who memorized RF facts long enough to pass a test?
I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.
>I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.
Pretty much sums it up. Locally the people who are in charge of the clubs which ultimately advised the government were in their 50s to 90s (yes that's a 9). The people doing anything more interesting than talking on on those channels are all under 40.
Ham radio is meant for experimentation, not (just) talking to your friends. These people remind me of Bell in the 70s forbidding you from connecting anything that's not a phone to the telephone network.
Different bands have different physical properties.
One of the points of amateur radio is experimentation. Right now the old boys clubs that all ham radio organizations have turned into to have decided that packet networking isn't real ham radio and you shouldn't be able to do it on "their" spectrum.
Apart from talking to satellites, packets and encryption are fine there for some reason.
The UK band plans seem pretty progressive, explicitly allocating spectrum for digital modes, though it is admittedly still the poor relation to rag chewing:
(If you’re not familiar with the UK structure, OfCom is the FCC-like government regulator, while RSGB is the de facto ruling body / club-of-clubs run by amateurs for amateurs.)
Exactly, amateur radio needs to be bandwidth for testing and experimentation not building out long term projects on it - basically just assume someone else is going start using the same frequencies.
Also, my understanding is that the encryption rule isn't really enforced but still prevents mass abuse. Plus if the entire stream is encrypted then you can always claim to be transmitting random data as a public good for random number generation.
This restriction comes up quite a lot in discussions about "modernizing" ham radio. I predict that if encryption was universally allowed, the ham bands would quickly become saturated with encrypted channels as hobbyists and not-hobbyists start using the bands for their personal communications networks.
The two main problems with allowing encryption are that
1. The HF bands often have worldwide propagation with very low power levels, which turns local interference into national or international interference, and
2. With encrypted communications it would be impossible to enforce other amateur radio laws, such as forbidding commercial uses.
I think that allowing encryption on dedicated slices of the UHF bands would be a more realistic approach.
I think the biggest reason not to allow encrypted data is the second point you mentioned. The bands will begin being used for purposes other than what the rules of ham radio allow.
There are some individuals apart of groups who would definitely use encryption on the ham bands as a means to have communications taking place that are not allowed by the rules. The biggest one would be communications with a connection to politics. Met plenty of these types who are jealous of the ham band and scorn the rules because of that, so they keep themselves on CB and FMRS.
Also like you mentioned, it is now free radio space for commercial entities to try to use.
There's a difference between modernization and monetization. Commercial traffic can remain banned. License requirements remain in place. And we can have a standard way to transmit digital callsign before an encrypted packet. There are volunteers right now who do a great job of policing the use of ham bands, and FCC does actually initiate enforcement actions including 5 figure fines.
If the transmission consists of <CALLSIGN><ENCRYPTED PAYLOAD> then there is no way to determine if the payload is commercial in nature. One particular example is business owners using amateur radio spectrum for business communications. Or some wise-guy using amateur spectrum for his high frequency trading to beat the speed of copper.
1. HFT firms have definitely tried to perform HFT communication on HF bands before, see [1].
2. IIRC there have been some undecipherable transmissions in ham HF bands that were suspected to be associated with HFT, but I can't find a source right now.
3. While you don't have any additional latency from routers and serialization delays in the path across the pond, you need to keep in mind that long-range HF communications rely on bouncing the signal on the F1/F2 layers of the ionosphere (an atmospheric layer with lots of charged particles/ions that act as a mirror to HF signals). If you're comparing HF transmission with a hypothetical straight-line fiber connection (assuming it the propagation speed in the fiber is comparable to the atmospheric propagation speed [2]), the fiber connection would win.
Additionally, bandwidth is an extremely scarce resource in HF bands (compared to cellular networks or other common VHF/UHF systems). There's a reason people still use CW (morse code) or even PSK31 [3] instead of SSB (voice) [4] in HF bands: You need around 500 Hz for CW signals, around 3000 Hz for SSB signals. PSK31 only needs 31.25 Hz. My point is: While you might beat latency of fiber connections and routers along the path, the throughput is going to be quite low for HF transmission.
[2] Since you mentioned copper: Copper can be quite a bit slower than fiber depending on cable type, since the propagation speed of signals in copper cables depends on the velocity factor. Wikipedia gives a few examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor
[3] PSK31 stands for Phase Shift Keying at 31 Bd. The short explanation is that PSK31 is a bandwidth-optimized text transmission mode.
[4] SSB stands for Single Sideband. The short explanation is that SSB is a bandwidth-optimized AM voice mode.
While a massive restriction, you can prevent interference (but not eavesdropping!) by signing your payloads. Maybe it's because ham radio and privacy aware people is a venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but it feels like perfect being the enemy of good.
Completely different threat model. I want to send messages to my friend that are private, and it would be awesome if we could do it p2p on a mesh net that doesn't require any centralized infrastructure.
Modification of those messages isn't something I'm worried about. It's not perfectionism, it's a different use case.
Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.
And if that's the use case you want, you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure I disagree either. I certainly think the community aspect is less important today due to the internet, but it's probably still crucial.
Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.
When I flung packets across the bay with a friend, we used cell phones to figure out antenna positioning and alignment. violating the spirit of the intention of these rules, imo, but hard to say
> Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.
Makes sense. And my cohort comes from an era when we can talk to anyone, anywhere, but the channels are controlled and watched. The ability to communicate isn't special anymore, but the ability to communicate independently and privately is. We don't want communication, we want known-good (dare I say, safe?) communication channels.
Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.
Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.
The whole idea of long range is that my geographical area isn't a limiting factor. I'd be on a 20kbps VPN LAN with the 200 other people in the world who have similar technical backgrounds - especially if we were running this over shortwave.
And that's just the beginning, before people put in the effort to make it more accessible.
TCP/IP isn't the point, it's the encryption that lets me send encrypted, secure emails to my friends over a network that only wideband jamming or a natural disaster can take down.
Not to mention the amazing software we could build in a distributed P2P way now that we have a massive amount if research into things like CRDTs and consensus algorithms.
We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.
Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together
My question is whether this kind of regulated openness is more worthy of the spectrum assigned to hams than some alternative scheme might be. It's certainly not a very efficient use of spectrum.
>Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.
Maybe on paper. Where I live it seems to be about old grouchy white guys gatekeeping and LARPing that they would be of any value in a natural disaster.
This is what I came here to say. The encryption prohibition destroys the biggest use case I can see, which is long distance mesh networks. Those networks would represent a leap forward for both HAM radio and for the development of a resilient, grassroots, worldwide communication system.
There’s limited bandwidth available. I definitely think it’s worth experimenting, but my expectation would be that any bands that allow for encryption would quickly be saturated with traffic.
There is absolutely no need for encryption to get mesh working.
I think there is another agenda: There has always been political pressure to open the ham bands for commercial use. And the one thing that has kept the commercials out is being able to inspect their packets, eg the ban on encryption.
It seems that the push for encryption is a barely hidden campaign by commercial entities.
If anything, I'd guess it's closer to being the other way around. Encryption allows us to pull in about 40 years of research in packet radio and protocols that run on top of it; that plus the HAM bands is an internet that no government entity can control, or even locate geographically (without a ton of in-person effort).
I imagine that prospect is frightening to a lot of 3-letter agencies.
> There is absolutely no need for encryption to get mesh working.
The internet learned the hard way that encryption is very important, even for casual use. I'm not sending emails -- even, especially, to my friends -- that aren't encrypted.
It’s not growing like the Internet, but there isn’t space like the Internet. It’s fixed real estate that can only have so many people on at one time. If you cruise the HF bands in the evening there’s lots of chatter going on, there’s no room for 1000 times as many people.
Yes it could grow faster, yes it could be much much much more welcoming to new people. The industry could support it with cheaper hardware and technology that allows for more tinkering. But if we want make wholesale changes to the regulations, like allowing encryption, it’s going to have to be very well thought out.
> But if we want make wholesale changes to the regulations, like allowing encryption, it’s going to have to be very well thought out.
I'm all for working out a really good way to allow encryption. But it sure seems like the pervasive reaction to encryption is just resistance; and that makes me pessimistic.
Sure there's resistance. Imagine being a ranger that's been tending the same national park location for the past 30 years. One day some people come in from the DNR and say they are hearing complaints about no cell signal so they are going to build a road and clear out two acres of land to drop in a tower.
Sure it will help the park appeal to a broader community and drive up visibility and maybe increase overall revenue...but...ugh.
Decent analogy, but classic ham radio isn't a 'natural state' that's being encroached upon. It's just an older technology. I think a better comparison would be if the park had no cell signal, but did have an old pager network set up.
It works, but...ugh.
The pagers used to be extremely valuable...before better tech was invented. Very few people have a use for the outdated tech anymore. Cell phones let us do far more.
I imagine there might be other mechanisms for limiting abuse - e.g., limit the traffic that any given call sign can generate. The call signs can help ensure it's non-commercial. Plus, don't people like doing fox hunts?
> a resilient, grassroots, worldwide communication system
With the tsunamis, the impending climate collapse and social unrest this should be seen as a need rather than a hobby.
Governments allocated huge chunks of the spectrum for commercial use (and pocketed lobby money) while keeping HAM radio unusable and public use spectrum tiny.
The main reason for this is historic, though there is probably some desire to maintain the restriction to ensure the amateur bands are used by amateurs.
While encryption itself is old, its widespread civilian use is relatively recent. There was a time when one could easily pick up receivers to listen into everything from telephone conversations (cordless and cellular), to commercial bands, to the police. Encryption was largely seen as a thing used by the military and intelligence organizations.
There were other reasons for encryption being of limited use. The cost of hardware to encrypt (and decrypt) signals was a factor. The relatively limited role of radio communications due to reliability also played a role. While most of us are only familiar with the end-user facing aspects of computers, the digital revolution played a more important role in communications. It has changed everything from how we share the spectrum to making communications more reliable. It has also opened up higher frequency bands in a cost effective manner. While enabling new applications, many of which involve more the transmission of more sensitive information, it has also made it easier to intercept communications and enabled the bulk collection of data. In other words, we view encryption as a necessity today when we didn't in the past because it is a necessity today when it wasn't in the past.
That being said, I don't think that encryption is necessary for most aspects of amateur radio.
The license conditions are there to keep the airwaves open. By convention, Amateur Radio is pretty much used as a way to meet new people around the county / world. It’s set up as a public commons, and encrypted traffic goes against that spirit.
There is nigh on constant pressure from government regulators to take back the spectrum. One of the best political arguments the Hams have for maintaining amateur radio is that it is a common public space, like a park, or a town square.
The worry is that if encryption were commonplace then you end up with a public park filled with anonymous men in hooded sweatshirts and ski masks, whispering to each other. The park gets closed.
It’s not illegal per se. You must have a license (and therefore a callsign, your identity) to operate legally, and you lose your license if you are caught using encryption.
It's illegal to encrypt amateur radio transmissions. Other transmission modes may allow it depending on regulations for that particular use. For wifi, it's absolutely allowed.
The bandwidth is not only extremely limited, it’s shared over an enormous range. When you key the mic on a good 80m transmitter, you’re claiming that little slice of spectrum for a million+ square miles.
I think a lot of the new applications of digital modes would avoid conflict by starting off up in the 5 to 10 GHz range and work its way down.
If encryption was legal the commercial sector would take over and fill all available bandwidth. The lack of encryption is what keeps it amateur and not commercial.
Not going to happen. Amateur radio is very centrally about non-commercial use cases, with the encryption ban ensuring that's actually the case and trivially detected if not. Mesh networks for use by everybody for any purpose are a (valuable!) very different thing, living in differently regulated bands.
People keep repeating that, but it's not actually true. There are no bands available for long range (50-100 miles between hops), decentralized, encrypted, mesh networks that are cheap enough for random people to connect to.
You're probably thinking of random wifi meshnets that only work in densely populated cities. That's very different, and the limitations of those networks is exactly why HAM radio meshnets are so attractive.
There's no ham bands where you're going to build a 50-100 mile range mesh network.
Most of the HF ham bands have kilohertz of bandwidth. These are the bands where you'll get propagation over the horizon. The better ham digital modes get ones of kilobits of data in good conditions. To get that sort of throughput you need good antennas on both ends and a fair amount of output power.
It's enough power to give someone bad RF burns and antennas large enough to require sturdy masts. The antennas alone will violate most HOAs. The output power requires some knowledge to be safe.
None of the equipment required for HF is cheap or easy that some rando can throw some up to participate in a mesh network.
Encryption on amateur bands is a non-starter. There's no practical difference between your fantasy encrypted HF mesh network and RF noise. That means there's no practical difference between you using such a network to chat with your buddies, businesses flooding the air with commercial traffic, and noise.
HF can affect huge areas due to propagation. If a business uses a HF mesh network for commercial traffic in the next town over from you, they can basically shut out you from using it. It also potentially shut me out in the next state over.
HF mesh networking is not very practical to begin with and the tiny slice of HF hams have it's just laughable.
I think you assumed I was imagining high-bandwidth, but I was just thinking that even 80s dialup with BBS's or plaintext (encrypted) email would be useful, if it was long range and decentralized. That's absolutely possible with the HAM bands, especially shortwave.
> That's absolutely possible with the HAM bands, especially shortwave.
Such things already exist (Winlink, SailMail, etc) but you don't like them because there's no encryption and they don't have buzzwords like mesh in the names.
You seem to think encrypted transmissions on ham bands will let you play secret agent. All encryption will do is increase the noise floor on HF to the point its unusable by anyone. HF is already a noisy band but a bunch of people playing secret agent will swamp the bands over huge areas.
It's funny that you seem to think since I want decentralized long range encrypted mesh nets, I must be an idiot that doesn't know what I'm talking about. Or is it simply because I disagree with you?
I meant more structural, based on your mention of NYC Mesh: high-speed, carrying all-purpose (including commercial) traffic for random users. You are not getting that by allowing encryption on ham bands, that's fundamentally something different (and regulation world-wide would never allow that under "amateur radio"). What you want for that is expanded spectrum/power/easier permits for long-distance links, e.g. in the 60 Ghz band or even in WiFi bands.
Edit: or in reverse, what kind of current ham radio use would you want to use more openly? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your scenario.
Edit2: E.g. the closest thing maybe is hamnet. Which is literally IP networking, unencrypted, on modified Ubiquiti or Mikrotik WLAN gear so it uses ham bands right next to its usual frequencies and more power. As soon as you take the amateur radio restrictions out, it's just long-distance wifi links, which already have a clear space what they are regulations-wise, the regulations just don't permit as much for it.
You don’t actually need encryption for thing like IP networks and IRC.
I believe you are even allowed to use digital signatures, you just can’t encrypt the payloads. I would argue a digital signature is not “messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning”
So yeah, you can’t use it as your ISP but you can do quite a lot. The problem is finding enough other people in your area to set up nodes.
I don't know what is going on in the ham radio space, but it does seem like there are a lot of potentially interesting applications.
Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.
I think it would be very popular even with just a clear text internet over ham radio. You would probably even need additional restrictions to keep it from being overrun - like maybe only dedicated "ham radio internet" web sites would be allowed, as opposed to being just access to the (standard) internet.
>Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.
You can't have traffic that is ssl, ssh, or any other encrypted protocol. Stop and think how useful a network you can have without that, no emails, no websites, no authenticated connections between computers.
The only things we have left are http, telnet and anonymous ftp.
Welcome to the 80s Arpanet, but anyone can modify your packets undetectably.
Keep in mind the bandwidth is pretty limited. Even a single page view takes a fair amount of data these days.
However, signed packets do not violate the HAM rules, and is pretty common. People controlling systems (like repeaters) can ssh to them, with encryption disabled (there are patches), but still using signatures to avoid worries about packet modifications.
js8call for instance can do "mesh" networking, but the bandwidth is a few 10s of bytes per minute. But you can send messages through multiple hops to allow things like getting messages through to people you can't directly contact.
I get your point that a node in the network can transfer a different packet. But I think people will have to be more creative with the protocol. For example, other nodes can hear both your transmission and next hop and can detect the packet was changed. I'm not sure you could make it 100% reliably, but the network could be self policing. Hopefully it would be one of those things that doesn't work in theory, only in practice. (And if not, then the rules would have to be updated.)
I actually think this is an excellent point and a good path forward. There's a LOT of spectrum available for this, and the HF bands could be particularly interesting. Right now we have large swaths of the bands used by contesters and rag chewers. That could be used for useful TCP/IP experimentation by hobbyists, which is what the hobby was intended to be.
Each of those rag chewers is a scientist doing experiments. He or she must build a station suitable to be heard. Which antenna works best in their own case? What about feedline? This is not a simple task, especially for the ragchewer class where you want to be clearly heard.
Reposting from a previous Ham Radio comment thread [1]
One factor that I bring up whenever the “ham radio is dying” discussion happen is the FCC public database and safety/doxxing, specifically for marginalized communities such as Trans individuals and Black folks. It, itself, is creating a safety concern in modern society for people that may want to join the hobby but fear doxxing and harassment.
If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup.
The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.
This is a real problem, and the FCC will deny any anonymization requests (I know, I’ve tried). The fact you can easily get so much information about someone so easily from ULS makes me extremely wary about sharing my callsign anywhere like the internet. I can only imagine how much this must suck for vulnerable populations.
This is definitely somewhere that the FCC could stand to modernize. Clearly the FCC needs your contact information - but is it necessary to share your current address _and_ all address history with the world to anybody that asks for it?
Not holding my breath for any progress to be made here, though.
As radio is a decentralized, peer-to-peer communication system there is little incentive for the govt to make it better/easier. In fact the incentives run the other way.
Is revoking your callsign and retaking the exam to get a different callsign a viable way to erase your address/identity history? Sadly it doesn't solve the problem that your new callsign still doxxes your new location/identity from that point forward.
Purging history never was the answer to changing your name or gender. It’s not practical, not pragmatic, and not under one’s control. Just like with many restrictions, the answer is social/legal contracts and not technical prohibition.
They answer that in their third paragraph. Due to the public nature of the info in the FCC's ham license registration database, I assume, and not wanting everyone on the internet to know their real name and current home address in case someone wants to harass them.
I don't except for Ham Radio related things (Ham forums, Twitter that's only for Ham, etc..), so I'm fairly silo'd on my social media presence with regards to that.
I'd be more free with putting it in my Github, HN Profile, Reddit, and other places if it didn't fully dox me.
I'm 37 and got my ham radio license when I was 15. Ham radio captured my imagination in a way nothing has before or since, and led pretty directly to my career as a hardware and software engineer.
In some ways I feel lucky that I encountered it when the internet was still young. The internet was there with tons of resources to learn about it, but not so ubiquitous as to have killed the magic of getting on my radio and talking to someone across the country or world.
I'm primarily a CW (Morse Code) operator, and would so hate to see it die out as an art form, hobby, and useful technology. That said, I'm also well aware that the hobby is evolving and needs to evolve to survive, as it always has. I think accessibility of SDR and increasingly advanced digital modes is a great thing.
If you're reading HN, you're probably the kind of person that would find stuff to enjoy in ham radio. It's a huge hobby, and about much much more than "talking to people".
> If you're reading HN, you're probably the kind of person that would find stuff to enjoy in ham radio
Agreed. Plus if you want to just explore the ham world without going the license route, there's an abundance of cheep software-defined radio dongles (rx only) you can hook up and listen in with. There's a lot of weird and cool stuff on the air that'll keep you occupied for hours.
Heh, yes, the SDR dongles are quite fun to play with. You could be a beacon receiver (to help map propagation), track airplanes near you (and contribute to the nationwide map), listen to transmissions (voice or images) from satellites, be a RX only APRS i-gate (to improve APRS coverage), etc.
Of course the options multiply once you get a license and transmit.
I got my license when I was around 37 and was already very familiar with the internet. So the long distance communications part of Amateur Radio was less interesting to me, I was more interested in shorter range VHF/UHF disaster communications. And still am, I still participate in diaster drills and the occasional special event (running, biking, etc) support.
I’m N0SSC, unfortunately the pretty face on this article. It is really nice to see my thoughts from my old “Millennials are killing ham radio” [0] being amplified by IEEE spectrum.
This thread is a good confirmation (bias?) of the issues facing the hobby (and the service) in the modern era. But still, I - 29 year old millennial - still think it’s an immeasurably fun and worthwhile hobby. I’m a co-founder of Youth on the Air [1], an IARU Region 2 (North/South America) spin-off of Youngsters on the Air [2], which is an initiative to connect young hams together and generally promote youth in the amateur radio and the art and science of radio and wireless.
So many believe that ham radio is no longer relevant in the 21st century, because of cell phones and ubiquitous internet, and a lot of us hams have one or two common refrains to rebut that:
1. what happens when all else fails? Ham radio!(preparedness and emergency communications)
2. it was hams who created the technology and trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure that make those things work
I take different approach that might be more welcome on this forum - ham radio is a wireless technology and radio science sandbox that is not only a really fun ultra-multifaceted hobby, but it’s also a prime extracurricular opportunity for young people (relative to the average amateur radio operator - a 55 year old white American).
I’d wax eloquent on the relevance of ham radio and how we can both bring the hobby back into mainstream but I’m with my family enjoying a long weekend after way too many hours of work, so hit me up [3].
Well generally when all else fails you want to talk more to local people. The ones that can help with the basics like food, shelter, water, meds, etc.
Family radios (FRS) are as easy to use as the old school walky talkies. They are also cheap, pairs are sold in the $30-$100 range. Sprinkle a few of those around the neighbors.
Sure a 2M HT isn't as user friendly, but a local ham can talk to the neighbors (in person or FRS) and then coordinate the other local people over 2M (often repeaters are on solar+battery). Said ham might even participate in emergency nets and have contacts inside various emergency organizations. Could likely figure out when water trucks are stopping by, food deliveries, expected projections for returning power, even help get prescription meds delivered.
Sure if it's bad enough HF might be needed. But even 2M + FRS can be a huge help to an impacted community.
The real advantage of HAM radio is that you own all the associated infrastructure. Everything you need to send a message across the planet can be packed up and carried with you. The same cannot be said of the satellite - though it's certainly a easier option in most cases.
> And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it.
> many are interested in the capacity for public service, such as providing communications in the wake of a disaster (...) having grown up with technology and having seen the impact of climate change, Michel says. They see how fragile cellphone infrastructure can be.
They provided an argument for the preservation of the spectrum in their own text. Amateur Radio gives communities a means of long distance communication when all other infrastructure fails. That redundancy and resilience are precious and worthy of preserving.
Well sure! But given that it’s so important why reserve it for amateurs? Why isn’t a spectrum dedicated for use by police, fire, emergency response, and local governments who would be required to have the equipment on site and at least one person on staff trained to use it?
And then if you’re not within some reasonable distance to a HAM operator then you as a civilian can apply for a license so you have a way to reach emergency services.
Like this seems like a self defeating argument that HAM is crucial for emergency situations because if I agreed with you the logical thing to do would be to take it away.
> Why isn’t a spectrum dedicated for use by police, fire, emergency response, and local governments
There is, hams use a small fraction of the available frequencies and the FCC manages all frequencies in the USA to help commercial and non-commercial users share the available frequencies.
So taxis, commercial trucks, FRS radios, radar, fire, police, ambulance, marine radios, cell phones, CB radios, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, time sync services, etc all have allocations managed by the FCC. Similar organizations exist in most (all?) countries.
Starlink needs a commercial contract with a company that may choose to terminate your service or be dictated to do so.
Starlink contracts specify a cell region in which you're receiver can work.
If you fall out with a benevolent or not so benevolent government or you are running away from disaster region or war zone all of these solutions fall apart pretty quickly.
I will repeat my own quote, Amateur Radio gives communities a means of long distance communication when all other infrastructure fails.
> If you fall out with a benevolent or not so benevolent government or you are running away from disaster region or war zone all of these solutions fall apart pretty quickly.
That use case would be suicidal without encryption. I'll repeat my quote also - HAM radio has a future, but it needs to adapt.
It's actually a pretty common use case, if employed properly. For example, I've heard that the Cuban expat community in Florida and their cohort still in-country will use HF radio to pass information. During the recent protests there was reports of the Cuban government employing signal jamming on frequencies associated with this. It gets harder to DF a signal if you use directional antennas and low power, short transmissions. Digital protocols help a lot with this. If you have a communications schedule with the receiving end and perhaps have exchanged one time pads, then setting up a temporary station at a pre-set time to transmit a message then book it, it'll be quite hard for anyone to catch you. And, of course, if you fall into this use case then laws concerning encryption are probably of lesser concern to you.
Not necessarily, there are a lot of variables. If someone is a fugitive of a government and is using ham radio while also being stationary, sure. I think most HAMs are aware they can track signals that are stationary quiet well. After all, the cats who get caught breaking the rules are usually doing it daily for months. Think of the occasional crazy old bat who decides to do a pirate radio station. But so long as the individual is on the move it becomes more difficult. That is also supposing a government from a federal down to local level are monitoring all ham frequencies 24/7.
Now if we are talking like a rebellious faction within a country, well they are technically breaking all other rules of the nation anyways, so no-encryption HAM rules suddenly becomes the line in the sand they draw as to not cross?
That's a pretty far-out use case, if you even specified one. The utility of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net is pretty broad in comparison.
I'm all for the idea of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net. I've read a fair number of papers proposing and analyzing different approaches to make this happen.
Unfortunately, unlike the internet, or a local mesh network the total collective bandwidth isn't there. If it worked people would try to do full duplex audio with loved ones, file sharing, monitoring GPS coordinates of fleets of vehicles, internet gateways, and a zillion other bandwidth intensive things.
Bandwidth is so low, that even sending bytes is rare, encoding that average a few bits per character are common. Such encodings try to minimize the bits by using less bits for more common english characters, so they often are measured in words per minute instead of bits or bytes.
There was exist various hybrid solutions like APRS (which can use ham + internet), winmail (ham + internet email), various digital radio protocols (ham to tower, which has an internet connection). But a pure radio mesh net just doesn't seem practical.
Done enough research into this that I'm familiar with the stuff you're describing. I remember looking into those packet radio protocols, and honestly, they seemed kinda rudimentary, especially (IIRC) the error correction algos. Seems like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in that area.
> I'm all for the idea of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net. I've read a fair number of papers proposing and analyzing different approaches to make this happen.
What do you think the fundamental value of a meshnet would be? For my part, seems like an (encrypted) text-only system with high latency (15 minutes per paragraph, even) and a range of hundreds of miles between hops, would be preferable to something capable of streaming HD video that was restricted to hops of only a few hundred feet.
I think that's a fair comparison of what the physics can handle, and I think that if the former existed, there'd be a lot of people using it.
Edit: looks like I edited out from under you. Sorry, didn't think you'd see it so quick.
The bandwidth is so low it's a bit mind boggling. On a particular frequency you might well be broadcasting/interfering with a fair chunk of the united states and only managing 4.6 bits/sec. If it's 3 hops then divide that by 3. I just don't see any kind of metadata tracking of peers, requests, mesh status, etc being reasonable at that low bandwidth.
Sure, could a few people handle email like setups, sure. But even a small bump in popularity and it would be saturated and everything would break and nobody could use that frequency.
Once you adapt fully to that bandwidth I think you'd end up with things much like what we already have like winmail and js8call.
I'm not convinced there aren't ways to make it feasible. It would certainly select for high-value messages, and there'd have to be systems for avoiding DDOS-style attacks.
I remember doing a back of the napkin protocol for such a network, and assuming that most messages were tweet-sized and took 5 minutes to send. I get it, though I think you're describing a worst-case scenario. Bunps in popularity would just extend the latency. I think there's ways to overcome the problems and exploit the unique advantages.
The thing with things like JS8call is that it's still like using a postcard instead of a letter. I don't use postcards because I wouldn't put anything more than a superficiality on them.
Heh, well, a single tweet (280 char max) would take 486 seconds 8 minutes. Assuming you wanted just to send it a single hop in the USA. If you wanted three hops it would take 24 minutes and during that time significant chunks of the USA could not send tweets for 8 minutes at a time.
Imagine:
1:00pm SF transmits east of the sierras for 8 minutes.
1:08pm Someone east of the sierras transmits to someone east of the rockies
1:16pm Someone east of rockies transmits to someone on the coast
1:24pm Someone on the east cost receives a tweet
Keep in mind that from 1:00 to 1:16pm that nobody west of the rockies could tweet on the same frequency. So the effective tweets/hour would be something like a few per hour per frequency.
And it's not just latency that is added, if the demand exceeds the bandwidth available you'd never catch up.
Or to think of it another way, the USA over some theoretical mesh over HF couldn't keep up with this thread.
Unencrypted communications are better than none. You can arrange for an escape without mentioning a street address, social security number, or full name. Becoming a ham includes the knowledge to keep yourself from being easily tracked. Ham (at least in the USA) does have the idea that anything goes if you are trying to save someone's life.
The primary reason I got my license wasn't to talk--something I do very infrequently--but rather I was interested in the technlogy behind shared locations tracking, but without infrastructure requirements. (think all the phone apps that show the location of your friends or family, but without needing a cell provider or cloud server.) The tech is called APRS and usually works at 1200 baud on 2 meter radio, and runs on top of AX.25 packet radio. It grew up more or less at the same time as consumer GPS in the late 90's (though I think it was first specified in the late 80s.
The article delicately hits on one of the biggest things potentially holding amateur radio back in the US (can't speak to other locations)--specifically that there is a strong and vocal contingent in the AR community that is negative, dismissive, and sometimes downright rude to newcomers. My age is somewhere in the middle--younger than most hams I've met, and probably older tham most people here. Fortunately, locally, most of the hams I've met have been very friendly and helpful, but online there is a lot of venom.
Part of it is political--people frequently conflate two interests, say AR and politics, and assume everyone else has the same two conflated interested. While I don't like to discuss politics with people, I'm not interestedin going to a AR meeting or event, and having to spent the whole time hearing people discuss politics. Part is cultural--AR is like a clique where a lot of people who've been in it for 50 years are resistant to people with different uses joining. It was a very long time before people stopped looking down on "no-code" hams--i.e. people who took their licensing exam after the FCC removed the morse code test. I also remember reding an official article on one of the most popular ham forums (not a trash post, but a published article) trashing "maker fairs" because it made him think of "homemaker", and that demeaned what he did.
Again, locally, I've never encountered this kind of attitude, but it is common enough online that I simply don't interact with other hams online. Its not whats interesting to me anyway--I got into it to get offline (I travel in places in my state that are over 100 miles from a cell signal, so infrastructure-free location tracking is great.) But I can see those attitudes poisoning interest from people younger tham me who socialize online and will think that this is the hobby, and walk away because they don't want to be a part of it. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope there are better resources online than what I saw a few years ago when I looked.
I feel like HAM Radio just can't compete for the minds of young people. There are just so many amazing things to play with these days. If I were a teen again, I probably wouldn't even bother with getting my HAM license because I'd be so busy programming and designing with microcontrollers, WiFi, LTE, lasers, genetic engineering, etc, etc...
HAM Radio feels almost like a solved problem these days. Sure, there is room for advancement but to do anything interesting starts to require quite a strong background in communications theory.
I feel like people aren't really taking note of how much power is in the hands of individuals these days. We may find ourselves caught off guard by the creation of a biohacker in the next decade or so.
If you're interested in playing with radio, HAM equipment/bands aren't even the easiest/cheapest/most fun.
You can buy breakout boards for all sorts of protocols and such (most in 2.4Ghz) on Adafruit et. al. for a few bucks, and hook them up and play with them with a RPi, Arduino, etc. to you heart's content. Without a license.
Basic HAM gear is, for the most part, expensive (with the exception of cheap VHF hand helds), limited, big, heavy, bulky, and/or typically nowhere near cutting edge.
Dunno, depends on your interest. Sure you can pay $1000s on a nice rig, but you can also build a small radio that fits in a altoids tin for a few $10s.
The above are far from the cheapest, and smallest. There's quite a few solutions under $100 and smaller than a deck of cards, just depends on what you want.
Personally I wouldn't consider any of those particular expensive, big, heavy, or bulky.
Yes and no. But the broad implications are an issue. I've been a licensed ham for over a decade and dropping money on a nice HF radio and antenna is something I have not had the luxury of. Luckily now there are things like QrpLab kits and the Bitx, which do make it way more affordable, but they also require time, patience and willing to learn at least a little electronics. Which comes back around that for quiet a few people, cost is a barrier. I know plenty of people who would love to play with antennas, but have no interest in soldering components and they are not in a position to drop $700 bucks on a yeasu.
Amateur radio is a different beast. A full license permits 400 Watts!
Not that you need it if you are building an Adafruit weather station for your garden. That is to say — and and I say this with the utmost respect to my fellow license holders — actually doing something useful with the spectrum.
A lot of amateur radio culture is more about building your own equipment from scratch and then trying not to cook / kill yourself with it. It’s like an open access drag strip for home made muscle cars, as opposed to testing your hand built recumbent bike on the public streets.
Well the trick is, amateur radio is hard. If you want a community to help when there's a storm, earthquake, hurricane, power grid failure, large fire, etc you need them to practice regularly. Ideally with no external funding.
Hams are often civic minded, so they will help out in bike races, horse races, and similar events ... especially if they are out of reach of cell towers, which is quite common even in central california.
So if you want something to fall back on when the local cell tower and internet provider is down, you need to have something the community finds worth while to participate in when there's not an emergency. So it might seem like a useless hobby when there's internet and no emergency, but that's just the training for them to have the needed skills in an emergency.
The problem with amateur radio is that when it came into being, it was a way for amateurs to interact with something highly technical and innovative.
Now, due to the laws about what you can actually transmit, it seems like a way of being nostalgic about the past.
A 21st century version of ham radio is an unlicensed, amateur, long range "IOT" devices, but that's illegal. Basically a 21st century version of ham radio is LoRa.
I'm a ham radio operator as well. There's still areas that are highly technical and innovative.
SDR is continuing to progress, antenna design, digital modes, talking to satellites, design/launching of satellites, etc. I find it kind of crazy that a Pi+SDR could track any airplane nearby and contribute to a global map of plane tracking, all for $100 ish.
One cool project I saw was using starlink sats and a SDR to figure out your physical location, just like GPS. Seems innovative to me.
One thing I've been following is js8call. It allows for keyboard to keyboard communications at 20dB or so BELOW the noise floor (-24dB theoretical), so you can reach a fair chunk of the planet on just a few watts. Even some real world conditions where your transmission gets to destination via more than one path (i.e. east and west). This also allows things like multi-hop communications, store and forward, and other tricks to make the most of poor propagation conditions. Seems almost science fiction.
Sure, adoption of some new technologies is crazy slow, like USB instead of serial connections. But things do seem to be improving, it's becoming more common to put a smarts inside a radio instead of externally connected. This allows for cheaper, smaller, but still advanced communications. Like say setting up a radio, battery, and solar panel to help with propagation for an entire continent for just $200 or so, without having to bolt on a raspberry Pi.
So sure, you can buy a nice rig+antenna, learn nothing except what the license test requires, and just use it as a fancy voice chat. But if you want to push the boundaries there's quite a few areas to explore.
Maintaining a global amateur radio community is exactly the kind of living museum of pre-telephony communications that we would miss an awful lot if it were pushed out in favour of something more modern.
Sure but that's very different than the original spirit of the hobby. Not a lot of young people are going to be interested in maintaining a living museum of what their grandparents thought was cool technology in the 1980s.
I think making the tests to get licenses easier was a mistake. One of the things that intrigued me about getting my license back in the day was the Morse code requirement. I enjoyed climbing the ladder, and I was proud when I passed the 20wpm test to get the Extra license.
I think young people like things like that: a challenge, followed by some kind of symbol of your achievement.
It took me almost a decade to become licensed because I couldn't find any tests that weren't at 9am on a sunday, an hour drive away. Maybe that seems like a low bar, because it is!
But, I got into ham radio to do interesting things, and not communicate. After all, why bother with making sure you have line of sight to a repeater when you can just fire off a text message? I'm much more interested in telemetry, instrumentation, and remote control.
I dont think dropping the CW requirements were a bad move, as you mentioned it can be difficult to make a trip to a testing session. When I got my general ticket, I was stationed down in San Diego, which does have a pretty big HAM presence. Even then, it was still that hour and a half drive to a testing session.
I had long been interested electronics, and the study required to get my ham license really expanded my education and knowledge in this area. I’m no EE or anything but I eventually learned enough to be competent with creating simple projects or following a schematic to build something on my own from scratch. I never moved past a lowly technician license (mainly because of a lack of time and interest around learning Morse code) but I still found it immensely rewarding.
The big barrier originally for really getting into the hobby was the cost of equipment. Even newer second hand equipment could cost hundreds of dollars. Now a barrier for me is HOA restrictions that prevent me from setting up antennas and not wanting to deal with interference complaints from my neighbors.
With how cheap radios are these days maybe it’s time to get a couple handhelds to mess with again.
You could try getting into SDR. RTL-SDR is cheap but receive-only and has pathetic bandwidth (around 2.4 MHz), and more expensive dongles have better bandwidth and/or transmit (with a license). I got bored of 2.4 MHz reception pretty quickly though.
Ham radio is a hobby around what communication was like back in the day. There used to be no Internet, long-distance telephony was in its infancy, and radio (whether "ham" or official) was literally the only way to communicate in real-time at a distance, and those radios were relatively crude, required lots of knowledge and manual operation because digital logic wasn't advanced enough yet.
Nowadays that is no longer true. Except in very specialized applications, analog radio is not typically used for communication, and digital isn't using manually-operated radios either, it's stacks of dozens of layers that eventually end up transferring IP packets or similar.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but since ham radio no longer represents how the majority of people communicate today, maybe we shouldn't be holding onto the past and instead focus on how people communicate now? Maybe IP networks should be the future "ham radio", and we should have clubs around these things instead (and existing ham clubs should embrace them, instead of siloed things like digital modes over radio which are innovative but near-useless in real-world usage)?
Even in emergency situations (which is one of the arguments for ham radio), a satellite phone/modem will get you online pretty much anywhere in the world and the only barrier is the equipment, which doesn't seem too different from a ham radio where a good set costs decent money and can't easily be built from scratch and especially not in an emergency situation.
Imagine if ham radio involved into what I described above in which case being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.
> being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.
Sadly FCC regulation prohibits hams from relaying messages for non-hams, so you're not allowed to build transmission infrastructure which can be used by the general community outside of licensed operators (though operators can still communicate among themselves during emergency situations to help the community). Perhaps this needs to change; I suppose it keeps ham radio networks focused, but prevents them from gaining mainstream relevance and challenging the Internet and corporate cellular networks.
On the subject of challenging ISPs and cellular networks, how is mesh networking doing these days? I don't think there's any meshnets near where I live though.
I got my General at age 14. I sat in the dark every night in my bedroom, which my grandmother had taken over in her (fatal) illness, to do CW practice.
Nostalgia? Yeah, I'm afraid so. Most of the "conversations" were just reciting what equipment we were using, and how good our signal was for the other side. That stuff IS pretty outdated. There was a blind man down the block who was really into ham radio, and he had Braille on his equipment. He was very helpful to me.
Emergency communications are a valid use case, which the younger generation seems to have recognized. But the thrill of working a station on the other side of the world? Not that much.
I have been a ham for a couple of years now. I currently hold a general class license.
I have found it to be full of interesting things to investigate. I’m loving the hobby. At this time I’d have to say that antenna theory is what interests me most.
I ran a WSPR node as an experiment a while back. I think I had my output power set to only five watts. And yet I was able to see that my signal was received pretty much all over the world.
That really changed my thinking quite a bit, as I recognized what I believe is the intimately connected nature of reality.
The use-case I am interested in - and what would have me licensing and tooling up next week - is an actual qwerty device for using that HAM text mode/feature (APRS, right) ?
There's all kinds of info and notes and discussion about APRS but there isn't a single device for it.
No I am not interested in serial connecting my yaesu to a laptop. I mean a standalone handheld that I can type in a message without T9-style pecking.
I wanted the same thing. When I discovered I could send text messages via APRS to a callsign on my kenwood tm-d710 I felt excitement that was then followed by disappointment in that I had to type my message using a knob selector. I had initially thought you could use the number pad on the microphone to input the message T9 style.
I think someone made a keyboard for the older model but it didn't work with mine
What "actual qwerty device" (the OP's words) is convenient while walking around? I mean, I'm curious what form factor we're talking about here.
Is the OP talking about the cell-phone form factor? The interesting thing there is that people have already abandoned qwerty on cell phones, so there's no real reason to think it's ever going to pop up on a new radio. Perhaps you'd have better luck convincing someone to make an amateur radio with a glass touchscreen.
People haven't abandoned QWERTY on cell phones - we replaced physical keyboards with touch, but the keyboard itself is still there.
Furthermore, there are still smartphones and PDAs made with physical keyboards today, catering to niches where it makes sense. Some examples would be Unihertz Titan and Cosmo Communicator.
> People haven't abandoned QWERTY on cell phones - we replaced physical keyboards with touch, but the keyboard itself is still there.
I think the OP has quit the thread but hopefully you'd agree that it's not normal to refer to a standard iPhone or iPad form factor as an "actual qwerty device," and he probably meant something else entirely.
> Unihertz Titan and Cosmo Communicator
And I bet they sell literally dozens of those. The question is whether Kenwood or whoever would prefer to build something with a physical keyboard or something with a glass screen, if they took an interest in really pursuing what the OP was talking about.
There's a lot of stuff you could do. Being able to dock an iPhone or iPhone SE into a larger radio and use the phone UI to control the radio might work. Trying to replicate all the UI stuff a good phone, tablet, or laptop does on a radio feels like a doomed project for any radio manufacturer to undertake.
I'm not entirely sure what the OP meant, but the scenario as described - "a standalone handheld that I can type in a message without T9-style pecking" - would be served perfectly fine by an on-screen touch keyboard.
And there already are Android-based phones with transceivers! E.g. Unihertz also has one: https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom-xl. So basically it just needs to be something similar, but with APRS.
The only thing that's certain is that articles like this are going to bring people out of the woodwork who are going to say why it's relevant and how it'll never die. Or the opposite.
Until somebody tries to outlaw amateur radio or legislate it to the point it's no fun, there's nothing to worry about. It's like being concerned about the future of concealed carry permits.
I used to have a tech no code license back in the '90s. A group of my friends all had them and we'd use them for coordinating road trips and camping and hiking. It worked ok, but also often just not great for either 2m/440 propagation reasons or just human "I didn't copy you" reasons. Once cell phones became common with texting, we basically stopped using them.
Things like talking on repeaters was boooo-ring IMHO, and autopatch was fun but ultimately not that useful when I had a cell phone on me anyway.
I love HAM for the idea of emergency comms.
But at my 10 year anniversary, I literally didn't feel it was worth renewing, and all I had to do was send in a form and maybe a check...
That Meshtastic LoRA stuff seems fascinating though! Anyone doing anything interesting with that?
Amateur radio is indeed about as practically useful as a miniature steam railway*, but that’s not the point.
It is also about as much fun as a miniature steam railway (imho, lots!) and about as variable in popularity, with a lot of overlap with the same kinds of people: grandpas and grandkids.
I find it thrilling to be able to communicate between countries using two bits of consumer electronics and an ionosphere, although I’ve only ever done it using someone else’s WebSDR. I’m glad a tiny fraction of spectrum is left open to actually do this.
*I like the idea of my local Mechanical Engineering Society having delusions of grandeur about laying new track, post hurricane, to deliver insulin.
I think it's easy to miss how fragile society is. Imagine your power grid goes down (storm, hurricane, even just too cold like in Texas). A day or two later the cell towers start dropping off. This can happen in the USA (like in Texas last winter).
Ham radios have totally been used to help get meds, it's one of the use cases for winmail, it's much more accurate to have an email like service than it is to have two ham radio folks spelling long drug names pheonetically ... twice, to help ensure a life safe drug is correctly identified.
Been a ham for many years. I like Morse, but don't think other modes are bad, just like Morse.
I'm VP of a club that has had a lot of success, particularly at Field Day (we often win the most popular category). I find that young people are not interested in contesting. In particular, we put people on the air and they hear some of the poison, and they are out of there.
One reason a lot of people are older is that it helps to be retired. Who else has time to get on the air at noon if that is what it takes?
I'm curious, many comments here mention all the legal and regulatory permissions-based aspects of getting into the HAM radio network, but what is it, practically, that stops any young person from just buying the right equipment and starting with transmissions on their own? Does anyone even seriously enforce this? Why is it so regulated in the first place if its just partly amateur hobby radio of a sort? Asking as a someone who knows very little about HAM.
all ham transmissions need to be identified on a regular interval with a callsign, assigned by the FCC.
it is trivial to look up a callsign, and see if it exists.
Some one who has experience with both should wrote an article about the comparisons between Ham (especially wrt emergency preparedness) and the Civil Air Patrol. Specifically with the aging users and declining numbers.
CAP is an amazing program. I was in it for awhile. Unfortunately, it is only a major thing in the home school community. My squadron had 30 other kids and myself and one other were the only public school kids. The rest were home school by really religious parents. Nothing directly wrong with that, but it makes it difficult to advertise to a wider group of kids. As I know where I grew up, it was known amongst the home schooling community but not amongst the public school kids. I just happened to stumble across it. Which sucks because it is a really good program that can expose kids to tons of interests with Cyber patriot, the summer academies for things like flying, and all the other programs.
>“Ham radio is really a social hobby...Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on—some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you."
I got a license a couple years ago. There's a decent amount of traffic in my area. Plenty of cool projects to do. The testing experience was pleasant and fairly quick.
No money. 2 weeks. That's what I did. I used a study guide app. (HamRadioExam Tech by Roy Watson) There are many other free options, though. Lots of people like hamstudy.org. I spent 1-2 hours a day for two weeks memorizing all the answers on the test. (All test questions and answers are publicly available from the FCC.) I took a real test offered by a local club when I was reliably acing the practice test.
From what I understand, the setup can be quite expensive for the younger generations, who are struggling financially, compared to your "average HAM operator", who's a 60+ year old white baby-boomer.
When we were the age where interests and hobbies are developed, I didn't know anyone who had anywhere near that amount available to spend at their discretion. At most, some of us could save up money and buy a $50 video game.
To get a radio station, we'd have to save up for a year.
I have a technician's license. My unpopular opinion is that I wish there was something like the HAM bands that requires a license but with less regulation of what you're allowed to do. Sort of a hybrid of part 15 (personal electronics) rules and part 97 (ham) rules: keep the license requirement and (some reasonable fraction of) the permissive transmission power limits of HAM, but with the "use this for whatever you want" permissiveness of wireless ethernet.
For instance, suppose you're allowed to use cryptography, and do commercially useful things, and play music as long as the music is live and you aren't violating anyone's copyright, and use profanity as long as its over an encrypted channel and not in the clear, and so on.
The main rules I'd want enforced are no ads sent in the clear, stations must be identified, and rules around permitted transmit powers and frequencies and not interfering with other users are respected. Maybe also a ban on pre-recorded content sent in the clear.
The usual fear is that the band would be overrun by all kinds of people running their own radio stations or whatever. But if using the band requires a license, then it's not a total free-for-all, and if few people have radios that can even receive in those bands I don't think there's much risk of the band being overrun by radio talk show hosts or something. You can buy a cheap Baofeng radio without a ham license, but the number of people who actually own one in a given town is a very small audience. Why bother when people can access and host content on Youtube for free?
I have no interest in setting up a bunch of engineering equipment to listen to a bunch of 60-70 year olds broadcast their uncensored perspective on things. If you know what I mean. If they want to protect that as "one of the best parts", they are welcome to keep it among themselves for the rest of their days.
The original iteration of Ham is from a bygone era when phone calls and broadcasting was the primary method of information dissemination. I don't have a yearn to go back to those days, personally.
Now amateur, self-built, internet routing outside of constraints like DNS or corporate owned infrastructure? As an augment of the modern internet where we can self host satellite endpoints to a community owned constellation and send files (not just mere morse code), that I could be sold on.
"I have no interest in setting up a bunch of engineering equipment to listen to a bunch of 60-70 year olds broadcast their uncensored perspective on things."
That was my take on it, too. I have one cheap Chinese radio in a box somewhere, but I got rid of all of my decent radios a few years back. I can just imagine what our local repeater devolved into during the Trump years. :/
The once-a-month meeting at the Village Inn was filled with laments about how there were no young people involved, but the repeater was filled with conversation that no young people would possibly want to be a party to.
I've discovered that it's unpopuler to point this out, but a big problem with amateur radio as a hobby is the current hobbyists involved.
I'm a ham mostly for disaster comms, I only occasionally participate in the monthly nets and almost never engage in random chitchat.
But I do join the annual disaster drills as well as try to help out with special events (like long distance runs or bike rides), but those aren't as numerous as they used to be because a lot of the cellular dead zones are covered, so race volunteers just need a cell phone.
He strongly encouraged me to join the local club and I did. Not only did I meet other teenage hams but I made friends with older hams who taught me stuff and were happy to be supportive.
Contrast that with today, the club is still around but its moribund. I reached out when they were having problems keeping their repeater on the local university tower. I was told my help wasn't wanted.
I reached out again when the local marker space wanted to do a joint event. I'm a life member of the group but I was rebuffed. I can only imagine the 14 year old me taking one look at this cliquish group of older guys and being discouraged about the hobby.
I've run a programming group for twenty years. Sometimes the members get on me for having introductory type meetings. But I'm always reaching out to the greater community and trying to get new members. That's how you grow, if you don't do it you die. There's plenty in the ham radio hobby to attract young people, but if the local community turns them off they quickly chose to do something else.