I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.
But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.
> What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus unless you’re made of money.
I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out.
Also baofengs are horrible all those regards:
* spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries)
* useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them)
* handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those)
Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.
I'd wager Baofeng is the most common emergency radio. Baofeng or something equivalent is what people in the 3rd world have largely been able to actually afford and there in the rough that's actually what's being used. I recall Baofengish radios being the most commonly spotted ones in the Syrian Civil War.
But it's not an emergency radio, it's a cheap chinese radio that's... well. cheap. That's like buying a $60 android smartphone from aliexpress... and yes, many people in 3rd world countries buy those too.
The frontend is horrible, the filtering is horrible, they get easily overloaded, and they're still not emergency radios. People will die because they will rely on them instead of getting a proper radio for emergencies. Garmin inreach will actually get you help when stuck in the middle of nowhere (because no one will be in simplex range then), and a starlink setup is much better for anything at home, becuase you can actually reach someone who can help that way. Baofengs are just something that earns percentages to youtube "preppers" (many of them not licenced hams either... it's like taking car advice from someone who doesn't even have a drivers licence).
You don’t actually need a license to use the ham bands in a true emergency.
Where I’m at a Baofeng can hit the local repeaters just fine. I handed them out to my family when we had a major multiday communication outage (cellular and internet were down) and set them up to listen to the repeater. I told them if there’s a life threatening emergency they can transmit. It made everyone feel a little safer.
While I personally have a better radio, they are great as cheap backups.
Legally you do, that exception only applies to amateur station, not unlicenced users.
Why not get a gmrs licence instead, and give them gmrs type-accepted radios that they can use and try out and get experienced with even when not in an emergency? It's like buying cheap cars to give to people to drive for the first time in an active emergency... dangerous both to them and to others.
I’m afraid you are misinformed, FCC Part 97.403 allows unrestricted use in a true life threatening emergency. The words “amateur station” may be misleading here, they apply to the equipment not the licensed individual. See this discussion for more information: https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1fyhp9f/lets_...
GMRS may not be an option if there are no repeaters in your area.
No, the equipment is the "apparatus". Only when used by a licenced ("duly authorized") individual for the use of (...), that equipment becomes an amateur station.
For example, a part 90 type-accepted business radio is just a business radio, part 97 has no ruling over it nor the user nor nothing related to that radio. Once a licenced amateur uses it for amateur radio stuff (so that radio is in amateur service), it becomes an amateur station and governed by the rules in part 97.
The regulations are vague, I agree, but it’s generally accepted that emergency use is allowed. I challenge you to find one single example of where someone in a real life threatening emergency is later fined for using the ham bands to get assistance. Besides, better to catch a (highly unlikely) fine than die, especially if there’s no good alternative communication methods in the area and within your family’s price range.
It’s sort of the ultimate “sad ham” position to insist that someone in a real emergency shouldn’t use a radio because they are unlicensed.
They're not vague, everyone who can read can understand them, but people who can't pass a simple exam, that 10yo kids regularly pass, tend to misinterpret them.
No, it's not a "sad ham" position, it's debunking a myth of ham radios being "emergency radios". If you go hiking into some remote area (no cell signal), and you listen to advice like yours, you buy a baofeng. Should you get licenced? Why? That dude on HN says the possible fine doesn't matter. And then you slip, fall down a ditch and break your leg. You take out your radio from the bag and do what exactly? The preprogrammed channels are useless [0], you scream for help, no one hears you. Did you manage to google emergency frequencies? Probably not. But hey, maybe you did! The first google result is 121.500MHz... AM, FM, who knows what that is, you scream for help, and still nothing. What then? You die. There are no emergency frequencies. No one is listening. No one is inside simplex range. You didn't get licenced and didn't test the equipment in advance and you don't know that.. you trusted that guy on HN, and now you're dead with a chinese piece of plastic that's useless. You're in the middle of nowhere and dying.
Some people get licenced, they take their radios into a park and try to do a pota activation, figure out no one hears them at all, and know that their radio is useless in those situations. Preppers watching youtubers and people listening to you don't.
Now, if you listened to a "sad ham", you would've bought a satellite messenger (if your phone doesn't support that already), something like a garmin inreach, you'd send an sos message, with your location, via a satellite to a person paid to read it and contact the proper authorities. You'd get saved. But nope, you bought a baofeng because of that prepper dude on youtube and that "sad-ham caller" on HN.
Youtubers earn percentages of every sold baofeng, they'll shill them as best radios ever, then they'll try to sell your "survival cards" as the best thing ever too [1], it's all you need in an emergency!
A cheap radio is better than nothing, and for many of lesser means those are the two options.
For the record, I don’t think it’s a good idea to go hiking with a radio that you don’t know how to use. Having extra radios that you can pass out to family and neighbors in an emergency (assuming you can quickly teach them the basics) is a good thing.
But cheap radios don't just appear out of nowhere. You have to plan for it and buy it... in that case, get a garmin inreach and you'll be saved, it's the option that works.
If you want to hand out radios, why not hand out FRS/PMR ones? Why the "illegal" ham ones? Why does every (usually american) prepper buy baofengs instead of local blister pack FRS ones from walmart? You can hand those out in non emergency situations too!
The parents could also check their kids phones and ground them if they find them using social networks.
The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.
Needing to have an attested device made by one of two US companies and not even rooted, just to watch a true crime podcast on youtube.
Also, while very hard to implement today, when most people have their digital IDs on their phones, implementing a "real name online" policy will be easy, one software upgrade and you'll need to provide your real identity to every social network or website.
Yes! It's similar to people sharing a simple url within a QR code only. I find it insulting and inconvenient - i can remember or jot down and type in a url - i don't need a smartphone to do that.
In theory you could put a small html/website in a dense QR code, that would be truly offline - it's a similar thing.
There are also the Pico-8 cardridge format, where a game is stenographically embedded in a PNG
https://github.com/l0kod/PX8
It's a simple exam that 10yo kids pass all the time. If someone is complaining about the licencing process, the problem is on that individual, not the system.
Like with roads and cars, radio spectrum is a very limited and very shared resource, and there has to be some regulation, or else some Elon Musk-type person would already take it for themselves for a commercial reason.
It's also self-policed, so that means that hams have to find the problematic entities and hope that authorities with legal power act on those reports.
The devices can also be uncertified (self-certified by a ham technically), so you can cause all sorts of havoc for many other entities, like actual emergency services (a case not long ago in US) or worse.
If you are not able, or for some reason or another don't want to get licenced, there are other ways to communicate, like mentioned meshtastic, which doesn't require a licence on ISM bands, or PMR/FRS radios (or gmrs in us, which does require a licence but you don't have to learn the radio basics for the exam).
Again, like with roads and cars, you expect others there to be mentally capable enough to pass that simple exam and follow the basic rules on the air. If not, they can get a bicycle and argue on the bicycle lane with other cyclists. And the ham exam is much cheaper and easier than a driving exam (in most developed countries at least,
the driving one costs 1keur++ if you finish optimally, whereas over here, a full intro to ham course (a few weeks, usually on zoom) with a printed book and the actual exam costs <100eur, even less with a pdf instead of a book)
The problem isnt the test. In the USA the test is cheap. Books can easily be acquired online.
The problem is hams - the people who are habitually are on amateur radio.
I find them to be incredibly anti-digital, holier than thou, loud about hard-conservative positions, misogynist, racist, and more. And when Ive tried to further the art and science of radio comms, hams are some of the first to talk down what I contributed.
They are people who I dont, and dont want to associate myself with.
Ive also known others that made that assumption when I said I was a ham. Lots of people have had those experiences, and also chosen not to associate with them.
I'm sure this doesnt apply to "all Hams". It does apply to a supermajority in the USA, enough to say that I do not want to be a ham any longer. I already refused to communicate with them, nor associate with them.
Yeah, all that stuff depends where you are located. Up here in Vancouver amateur radio community, any kind of bigoted/discriminatory/exclusionary crap is totally not accepted or tolerated. There are always people experimenting with new things, sharing knowledge/experience, helping each other out. Heck, I built a portable radio pack and made a blog post about it, and my local club included my post (with my permission) in their monthly newsletter. I've also contributed photos to them and attended numerous community events -- always 100% welcoming and there's a strong educational/sharing vibe to all their events. When I hear people complaining about "hams" I'm always thankful to have seen almost none of this stuff locally.
Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion. I can send an ICMP ping to something I know is in Svalbard Norway across the regular Internet and get a reply, but I don't pin a postcard to a cork board on my wall celebrating my amazing technical accomplishment.
Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload.
A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
I really don't understand this line of argument and why you seem to be taking offense at an entire hobby. It's like asking why people who maintain home networking labs spend so much time and effort doing that when they could be putting those skills to better use at companies like Cisco. Or why people assemble computers at all when you can just get one from Best Buy. Why do people waste time with Raspberry Pi when you could do something cool with a real, existing exascale supercomputer?
There are many different niches in the amateur radio hobby. Some people want to buy off the shelf radios and antennas to make contacts over the air. Some people want to experiment with their homebrew designs and see how far their signal reaches. Some people want to experiment with very low power radios. Some people (including a Nobel prize winner!) want to experiment with new digital communication protocols for amateur radio use. And yes, some people want to use amateur radio for emergency communication purposes.
Why is it so wasteful for any of these groups to do what they're doing instead of applying their skills to something "useful"? Why is it any more wasteful than participants in other hobbies? That also ignores the fact that many amateur radio operators _do_ apply themselves to "useful" things: they're electrical engineers, physicists, software engineers, educators, military or emergency personnel, etc.
> Collecting replies like pokemon seems like a real waste of time in my opinion
It's a hobby. "Let people enjoy things". Please remember this: it's a hobby. It's right there in the name: amateur radio. We're not trying to be world-class industry-leading RF engineers.
Neither are the nycmesh people, who seem to have a fair bit of hobby-grade fun in doing what they do in their spare time, but the end result of their hard work provides significantly greater real-world end to end communication systems for people to use... If the purpose of amateur radio is to communicate, DXing and such doesn't really accomplish much real world utility.
No, not everything in the world has to be utilitarian or accomplish a purpose. But amateur radio is continually living in the past, their entire communication paradigm is often based on something akin to circuit-switched networking when the packet based networking world passed them by quite some years ago.
Sure, and walking uphill just do walk downhill is pointless too, and people are also bragging they've gone very far uphill to go very far back downhill,... they could be doing much more useful things instead of climbing mt. everest. Why bother, when you're higher than that (almost) every time you fly in a plane?
But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube.
Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
From personal experience, I'd just say that the number of emcomm-focused hams I've encountered in the hobby has been quite small but even when I have, they are no more or less annoying than anyone else I've met who are involved in emergency management. I guess I don't understand where people get the impression that the whole hobby is focused on emcomms. Do people really think every American amateur radio operator drives a Ford F-450 packed to the gills with antennas and radio equipment?
This + amateur radio is designed to be open, no encryption, anyone can talk with anyone, and if you're "being stupid" (to not use other terms), anyone can tell you so.
The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
You can legally transmit for any emergency, regardless of licensing status. The emergency definition is purposefully left ambiguous so as to apply to many situations. Lost in the woods? Go ahead, transmit; the FCC isn't going to knock on your door if you live. Every HAM should know this already.
This is the correct info. Anyone in an emergency is allowed to use the amateur frequencies. Just got my technician license a couple weeks ago, emergency use is even actually on the test!
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
That rule applies only to amateur stations (it says so right in the text!), not unlicenced individuals. What an amateur station is is defined in the beggining of the document, and yes, that requires the a duly-authroized (licenced) operator.
The last thing you want in an emergency event is some prepper with a baofeng transmitting on a repeaters frequency without a subtone set (because he's too stupid to pass an exam that 10yo kids can pass) effectively jamming it for proper emergency users. The other thing is, that chances are no one will actually hear you, especially on simplex. With tools like garmin inreach, carrying an HT with you instead of something proper and relying on that to save you in a time of need is just stupid.
Ham radio is like driving, you need experience to do it, and even some experienced people still do it badly. Trying to figure out how to drive by reading a car manual while the flood waters are rising is going to be a pretty bad experience.
Well, according to multiple times where people have checked with FCC enforcement folks, the spirit of the ruling covers unlicensed users operating in amateur bands for real emergencies.
The rules are clear here, there is no "spirit" in the law. The problem is, that the myth of somehow being "saved" by having a baofeng with you is spreading and people will die because of that. Hopefully only the baofengers and not others, affected by people who would effectively jam multiple others operating on eg. a repeater.
Ham radios don't just appear, someone has to buy them, buying one without getting a proper licence is just stupid.... but many (especially americans) do so. There is GMRS, there is FRS, people could take those radios, try them out when not in an emergency, but nope... everyone wants that uv-5r for some reason.
Every one of those preppers should get licenced first, go to some hiking trail, some remote..ish pota park and try to do an unspotter POTA activation there... and after failing horribly, they'll rethink their emergency communications. Somehow even licenced hams (about which I assume none actually tried doing an unspotted pota from some hiking trail) support and spread the "just buy a baofeng for emergencies". In reality... they're useless in most cases. If you're somewhere remote, no one will hear you anyway, and if you're stuck at home, having something like a starlink will actually help you reach someone, much better than a radio, especially a handheld 2m/70cm one. You might get some good but useless DX with an HF one, but you won't be setting up an NVIS antenna in a snow storm.
the rules arent clear, which is why 97.403 and 97.405 have been argued nauseam for a VERY long time. It's intentionally vague so that some people cant claim being out of soap as an emergency. But during a real emergency (someone had a heart attack on the floor, you're being chased by an axe murderer, etc) every single representative has said that the spirit of those parts covers the person. I don't disagree that people should get licensed, mostly so they know how and where to operate the radios or god forbid we do have a collapse and do have to fix up our own radios and antennas.
It's not actually vague, if they wanted "everyone" to do that, they'd use "everyone","anyone" or some similar wording, not specifically limit the exception to amateur station. Someone chose that for a reason, and it's a good reason... even licenced hams can cause trouble (eg. forget to turn off a simplex repeater on a radio, "mars mod" it and then jam the fire department frequencies with it,... a few weeks ago), and people who can't pass the simple exam don't need such radios, they can get by with GMRS (if they're from US and able to fill out an online form) for FRS/PMR (if they're not) or even MURS (again in US). There is no real difference in range between an uv-5r and a uv-5g (ham and gmrs radios), and a very small difference with frs/pmr (you need a line of sight anyway).
If someone had a heart attack, somewhere remote enough, that there is no cell signal, using a GMRS radio will have the same effect and range than a ham radio (i'm talking about 5W HTs here). Using something like a garmin inreach would actually get them help, but still, preppers want their baofengs, and for some reason don't want the *g models. That's why i get bothered when people promote ham radios, especially baofengs for emergencies, because they'll be useless in most cases and people who don't know that, will rely on them instead of getting a proper tool for the job. Many of those even have that in their pockets right now (some samsungs and iphone can do satellite communications already). Promoting the "you don't need a licence in emergencies" and then turning to "you'll be breaking the law anyway but who cares" mentality means that people don't learn even the basics (if they did, they'd be able to pass the exam) but still rely on those radios to get help.. and in turn, people will die because of that.
As i said before.. if you have a heart attack in the middle of nowhere, a baofeng won't get you help. If you went with gmrs/frs, you'd test it out and see the limited range and that no one is actually listening out there (unless arranged, and that person is in simplex range), if you get licenced, then you'd do the same, call out cqs into the void until you got bored, but if you do the "just buy one, you don't need licences..." (even if you do need to be licenced), people will be using that radio for the first time during an active emergency and fail in getting help with them. Stop promoting the untrue myth of getting help with a ham radio, instead offer proper tools for the job and people will actually be able to get help.
You're arguing for why people shouldn't buy a ham for prepping without a license or weirdly arguing that someone who is totally unprepared should've just happened to have a garmin on them. Realistically most people aren't toally prepared. A wife went to a remote cabin with their husband who is a ham op and has a heart attack, someone falls off a cliff while taking a photo of someone with their phone and the only thing is a mobile vhf/uhf radio in their car, etc etc etc. there are countless reasons why someone unlicensed might end up needing to transmit on amateur bands in an emergency, which again is why it's vague. You're claiming its not even though FCC enforcers themselves have said otherwise, so you should probably go argue with the fcc instead of strangers on the internet.
I'd be happy if we at least started punishing the large, well known and established companies for spamming us...
...you know the one, where you have email preferences, and you only have "new messages" and "commercial offers" in the settings, and you uncheck the "commercial offers" and think you're sae. Then you get a spam email from them... check the preferences again, and there's a "new product notification" preference, checked by default, and you uncheck that too. Bam! another spam! "personalized offers" option appeared, check by default. "limited time offers". "value deals", etc.
bambus are great in the "just print stuff" market (no modding needed, everything comes properly configured, the calibration is done automatically, profiles are tested, etc.)
There are some controversies about them locking their printers to their own software and some other issues though.
I'd rather more like to imagine a software packaging/distribution regimen whereby dropping a patch(1)-compatible patch file into "an appropriate folder" meant that it would instantly take effect the very next time you run the program.
But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.
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