I was a 16-year-old kid in still-developing India, 1986. One had to wait seven years to get a landline connection.
My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was issued the handle OM118.
The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for 30-minute slots.
Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least, please God.
A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras, we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."
Homeland Security tries to get local first responders to join the SHARES emergency radio network.[1] This is 5 HF channels at 5 MHz, and some more around 15 MHz. They test on Wednesdays around noon. Transmission is voice or PACTOR. It's ham-type technology for
government emergency response.
Although many local first responders are not on this net, the USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from a large disaster area.
My US state gives such hams free specialty vehicle license plates which are emblazened with "EMERGENCY" below the callsign. Now, along with a clever vanity handle, I no longer receive police attention/enforcement. —73
The basic problem with using HF radio is that you need to know most of the things required for a ham license to operate one. Modern HF radios have displays, scanners, lots of features, and are moderately complicated to operate. Even hooking up an antenna requires some understanding of what antennas really do.
Here's a typical modern portable ham radio.[1] (Not a recommendation, just an example) This one does both HF and VHF, so you can reach both SHARES and locals. Here are some simple wire antenna kits.[2] If you have both of those items, and some kind of power (a car battery), you can contact various US emergency services, radio hams, preppers, and whatnot, even if infrastructure is down for hundreds of miles around.
A small solar panel to charge the thing would be a good idea. All this is probably about US$1500.
Any isolated town should have something like that, and some people who know how to use it.
Town halls, volunteer fire departments, sheriff's offices, etc. are good locations to keep it.
Preppers seem to be more into VHF handhelds such as the Baofeng UV-5R. That's about US$80.
Less range, can't reach SHARES, but can reach a few miles, depending on terrain.
Useful if you're two miles from the main road.
Here's a prepper view.[3] He uses a Slinky as an antenna.
Once you have the ability to communicate at all, the problem is finding someone useful to talk to in an emergency. There's no addressing, just frequencies. On HF there's so much range that most of the people you can reach are not in a position to do much. The whole point of SHARES is that there are a few frequencies where someone is regularly listening. During a disaster, they're probably dealing with bigger problems than yours, so calling up Homeland Security HQ as an individual may not be helpful for anything not immediately life-threatening.
If you're near a coast, you can usually reach the Coast Guard on a marine VHF channel. They're a first responder set up to take radio calls.[4] If the emergency requires a boat, call them. Marine Channel 16 VHF-FM (156.8 MHz). The Coast Guard gets involved with major floods, they maintain good communications with other emergency services, and they know almost everybody with a boat.
In the simplest analogy, it's just the TV rabbit ears with two wires in opposite directions, except much longer wires, because the frequencies are lower and therefore the wavelength is larger. Those classic rabbit ears are effectively a dipole antenna, which is basically: "stretch a wire out in a line so it's half the wavelength of the frequency you want to receive or transmit on, cut it in half, and send the signal from the middle, out both ends of the cut wire".
Picking that length of wire results in the lowest impedance (kind of analogous to friction) at the radio for pushing signal out to the antenna, but various lengths work with more or less efficiency, and you don't have to send the signal from the middle either if you have appropriate inductors and capacitors to adjust the impedance (it's just the simplest way).
As with most things on the internet these days, it seems the best content is in the form of YouTube videos, so amusingly, this is the best written information I came across after some quick searching:
A dipole is a very simple antenna, and pretty efficient. There are other shorter options that have worse performance too, but perhaps more suitable for an adhoc tree deployment. (random wire, EFHW)
(I know you know this, but just adding in. Ham is fun! I like doing park & camping deployments)
So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency? Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying for it.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license. But it’s easier to use when you’ve had the practice and aren’t fumbling around learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better, when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the building management team, which politely informed every corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they would be participating.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but
the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Reading about it generates expectations, and they can be deadly.
On average we fall to the level of our training, but then there's moment to moment variation because of "human error" which has little to do with lack of skill or training, and more to do with individual and situational factors.
Training is critical, but even then you can still fail, which is why layers of backups are great.
For a lot of us, skill might never be as reliable as other layers, but it's generally different from other layers making it less likely to fail at the same time because of the same cause.
Crew Resource Management has a lot of great insights.
> In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license.
Just to clarify: the law in the US (47 CFR § 97.403) says that you can use amateur radio frequencies without a license, or unlicensed frequencies, for: "essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available". That's much narrower than just "in an emergency".
And if you try to use ham radio equipment without knowing what you're doing, there's a risk that you'll interfere with other amateur or non-amateur users who are coordinating their own emergency response.
Thank you for the clarification. I wanted my explanation to be generic enough to apply to any jurisdiction. For example, I’m in Canada where the regulations are differently worded but have a similar effect.
It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather have a cheap Baofeng.
This is the correct answer. I have my license and help with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool, but the ham radio community has been around for a century, is far better organized and entrenched with various services, etc. There is far more trust and reliability there.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Meshtastic is also still very much "beta" quality. Unless you spend a bit of time working with it, messing with different radios and antennas, you can end up with a setup that can't get much range at all, negating one of the main features of the mesh.
Though just buying a Baofeng can lead to similar results, as it's not that amazing at reception. In my testing I've only been able to get a good signal within a few hundred meters, which might not be enough to hit an area repeater except in ideal conditions.
Either way, having the knowledge and practice going into an emergency is much more helpful than just the equipment!
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I’m not sure where you live, but I’ve never lived in a house or apartment where I could hit a local 2m repeater without driving or getting up on a roof.
I also have an 80 watt 2m radio in my truck, and will turn it on when I’m doing long trips. Very rare to encounter anyone else (simplex), let alone be able to chat for more than a very short period of time.
Experiences do definitely vary in this regard. I live in a CA Bay Area suburb. Geographically, this is a valley, and there are a fair number of more-or-less active repeaters mounted up along various mountain ridges, and I can generally hit a couple of them from my tiny backyard w/ a 5W HT (and a decent antenna!).
OTOH, while I never got in to it, there is spectrum available to Technician licensees (assuming you're in the US) on 6m and 10m. You're not likely to get NVIS propagation there and hit more local folk that you couldn't hit w/ LOS, but that might get contacts where nothing's available on 2m/70cm, for not too much more initial equipment cost (again, assuming US and an HN user, where moving from $40 to say, $400 isn't completely out of the question).
Fair point. I live in Chapel Hill, NC, and we're fortunate enough to have multiple repeaters that can be worked with a hand-held from where I live. But yes, geography will definitely play a factor. I should probably have noted that originally. Good catch.
I haven't done a like, systematic survey or anything but when I used to travel for work I'd take my little quansheng and mess around. Basically every american city with at least one "tall" building has a repeater up there that covers the whole metro area. There's one on the sears tower that you can hear in michigan. But even dubuque had one I could contact from a hotel room across town.
So yeah most of the area is rural and there's probably not much out there without big gear. But most of the population lives within 30 miles of a 12-storey building.
One thing I will say, the Internet deeply and dramatically changed my perspective on the global community and connectivity in general.
When I got my ham license (DE K2KD) at age ~11, the idea of picking up a microphone or tapping on a morse key or using a computer with RTTY to talk to someone on the other side of the world was mind-blowing. "Mom, I'm talking to someone in Australia! I'm talking to someone in Nigeria!".
Now we block entire IP ranges because they send too much spam or because we think the traffic from an entire country has a high fraud rate.
The problem is that a huge fraction of people are worth talking to, but a small fraction -- 5%? 10%? -- can poison that well so thoroughly that it is unusable. Being a ham operator takes some effort and is harder to exploit, so most people you talk to will just be normal humans -- enthusiasts. But the internet attracts every freak and scam operator in the world.
I'm reminded of various "free" rock concerts of my youth, which were often disasters -- too many people, half of them stoned or otherwise out of control, etc. -- things I quickly learned I would pay to avoid. Things that are too easy attract people I don't want to interact with.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
Hams have privileges on 2200m, too! At those wavelengths people are using big loading coils. Saw a video last week of a guy in Alaska with a sizeable loop in the trees and was putting in about 1 KW to get 1W EIRP.
WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).
Wikipedia is just being weird by using an MF band in its example. Most WSPR is in the shortwave bands, which can use large antennas, but not THAT large.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development. ... What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days?
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
My son and I listen to DMR and P25 all the time, and we listened to a bunch of the samples of Codec2 vs AMBE. And while it might be a slight improvement, it doesn't move the needle enough to really excite. Perhaps a longer QSO would be more exciting to hear the difference on. Wouldn't hardware be a constratint just like it is with M17?
DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map to find out where they are.
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
apologies, I'm ignorant when it comes to HAM but have always been interested in it: what does DX'ing and contesting mean? I'm assuming DX = talking to other HAMs, but I can't figure out what contesting would be.
Sorry... DX is short for a distance contact, so someone outside of your country. There are 340-odd "DX entities" defined, some of them incredibly rare (Bouvet Island, North Korea), and people spend their lives trying to get the ones they're missing. Other people will gather a group and raise funds to go to those places so that they get on the air.
Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.
Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.
FT8 - a weak signal mode that lets you make contacts around the world with not much power. From Canada, I've made contacts with Japan and Romania on 10W of power.
Satellites - the ISS has a repeater, so you can make VHF/UHF contacts with people in a huge footprint.
This youtube video by No Boilerplate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcF6tvepRlg) was a great summary and really got my interest up initially but I personally got bogged down quite quickly by the prospect of having to learn Morse Code
I'm curious how satellite Internet like Starlink will enhance and complement ham radio. To be clear, I don't see it replacing ham radio--there are too many great reasons to get into the hobby for that. But Starlink has been playing a similar emergency communications role in recent hurricane-hit areas as ham radio has in the past. Will be interesting to see how the two are used going forward.
We had a freak earthquake in the northeast some months back. Guess what immediately went down when you needed it most? Cell towers. My guess is they’re not designed for the capacity they’d need in an emergency where almost everyone is trying to call simultaneously. That’s reason enough to have an alternate comm link.
Widespread access to space-based networks might finally kill hams. When disaster strikes, the guy with solar panels and a starlink terminal can facilitate more traffic than a hundred hams. Having cellphones that can get an SMS up to a sat might be more useful than handing out 4w radios.
Access to space-based network only works if it doesn't rely on a downlink connected to a fiber-optic network (eg: Starlink). There's nothing glamorous about amateur radio but being able to string up a wire and get a message hundreds or thousands of miles using only a 12V battery has its moments.
Once Starlink is fully built out, if we get to the point that enough downlink stations are out of commission that the entire network fails, amateur radio will be of no use because we're looking at an extinction-sized meteor strike, global thermonuclear war, or similar event.
In those cases amateur radio will be only useful for saying goodbye to all of your frequent QSOs before the tidal wave hits your location in Denver.
I've been a licensed ham for 30 years. I'm also a realist.
Starlink is better in this regard now. First, the ground station density in the US is really quite good and you're likely to be able to hit a single up/down path through most emergencies. And, second, over the last year they've turned on a lot of inter-satellite links (ISLs). The ISLs have a huge effect on reach -- you can now have a sat terminal in parts of eastern Africa and reach the ground station in Lagos, for example.
(No affiliation with them; I'm working with a Ph.D. student studying this question.)
I'd say that one advantage of ham is that you can operate it on much lower power equipment still - there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet, although we're starting to get close with cell phones with emergency satellite messaging. But starlink has a bandwidth advantage if you need to send photos or tunnel cell. Different capabilities - it's good to have both!
"...there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet..."
The FCC just gave emergency authorization for Starlink to enable direct-to-satellite service for T-Mobile customers in western North Carolina. It's my understanding that this is what Starlink was planning on releasing but they are doing a live beta right now.
Any comparison between Amateur Radio and commercial communication services serves little point, it's like comparing apples and oranges. It's been thus since the early 1930s when commercial shortwave services became commonplace.
Amateur Radio operators are a unique cliquey bunch with practices not easily understood by those who aren't inculcated into the culture.
I often wonder why amateur radio operators put up with the derogatory name ham because many are very skilled in electronics and they're anything but hams. I've always hated the term, even the term amateur has negative connotations that aren't warranted.
I'd prefer the term experimental radio operator or such. I say that as someone who once held an amateur ticket (for quite some decades) which I got whilst I was still at school.
It’s impolite but the hobby is dominated by older men who sit on their ratios talking about their radios. Why would young people choose that as an interest when there are so many new STEM type things to do (programming, 3D printing, etc)
It's not impolite to speak your mind, and my comments are not meant to offend. :-)
You're right. When I used to participate in amateur radio as a teenager, those who were not involved—usually irritated wives and girlfriends—were apt to often repeat things like 'get off that radio and help me with the dishes', or 'they're always wasting time talking unintelligible gibberish', and in my mother's case 'stop mucking about and do your homework'. I remember the taunts and criticisms well.
Listen to this YouTube audio of comedian Tony Hancock's Radio Ham. He wasn't an amateur but he summarized the prevailing attitude of many back then: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=stmSok14-IU
However, in recent years amateur radio operators have had their revenge—and it's come by the ton! With the advent of the internet Amateurs can now correctly point to not millions but billions of totally-addicted smartphone and internet users who waste endless hours texting, or talking/posting on social media—Facebook, WhatsApp, X, etc.—mostly inconsequential nonsense and drivel, or dealing in fake news that's damaging the social fabric of society. (BTW, I've no social media accounts, HN's my limit.)
Right, the very thing past generations accused amateurs of doing is now not only done by billions of people but also for millions of them their involvement is far in excess of anything amateurs would have done pre-internet. As you would be aware, smartphone, social media and internet addiction has become a serious social problem.
As an ex-amateur I'll put this on the record. Amateurs by virtue of their technical abilities in radio/electronics—skills that must meet a set minimum standard of proficiency as mandated by regulations/law by both governments and the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—are granted access to very valuable spectrum space. An Amateur radio license, which is only obtained after passing an examination, gives Amateurs exclusive access to many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In effect, Amateurs have had and still have exclusive communications channels that allow them to communicate to any part of the world whenever they feel like it so long as they do so within the terms of their license, which, in brief, boils down to not causing interference or disrupting other communication users/services.
Even in this internet age this is a privilege that not even internet and social media users can boast about for they're always under the control—the fickle beck and call—of ISPs and Big Tech and the requirement that internet protocols and network hardware remain functional. On the other hand amateurs are always in full control of their stations (that's the edict set out in the terms of their licenses). It's why for over a century Amateurs have been called upon in emergencies whenever normal communications fail.
As mentioned, my dislike of names Ham Radio and Amateur do not do justice to this longstanding and valuable service, they do not reflect the true extent of the pool of talent that exists within its members. Also, amateurs are a cliquish bunch with a language and etiquette of their own and that has very distinct advantages. For instance, decades ago I used to work in the prototype laboratory of one of RCA's divisions that manufactured telecommunications, radio and TV broadcast equipment and my boss, a brilliant electronics engineer and radio amateur who also helped establish the division, employed me over other applicants because I was a radio amateur. His experience was that when employing people with equal qualifications then selecting the one that also has an amateur ticket made the best sense, as often they had a diehard interest in electronics from a very young age and thus had a much better intrinsic/core understanding of the subject. I've frequently seen this scenario played out over the years.
You ask 'Why would young people choose Amateur Radio as an interest when there are so many new STEM-type things to do (programming, 3D printing, etc.).'
I'll answer that but I'll begin by saying Amateur Radio still has a strong following and many enthusiastic followers, but I'd agree that per capita it doesn’t attract the numbers it did in the pre-internet days (especially youngsters—and it needs new blood). There are several reasons for this:
Until around 1970 those interested in electronics and who wanted it as a hobby at home had few options, that usually came down to repairing/building radios (sometimes TVs), and or Hi-Fi amplifiers. There were others, but that was mainly it. Thus, many youngsters gravitated to amateur radio, it was a sort of natural progression. For instance, the first radios I built were crystal sets, on one I picked up an amateur radio operator (by profession a grocery store manager) who lived about four miles away who I befriended, he taught me a lot. That led to me to passing my amateur ticket exam at age 14 and eventually to my career in electronics.
By the early 1980s microprocessors became the rage, back then I had an advanced S100 system with a 8085/8086 combo, it also had a Z80 board, I had to program in Assembler to get its BIOS functioning. This 'new' electronics diluted the pool of those with an interest in electronics. Also, around that time the hype around computers was phenomenal. Amateur radio got drowned in the noise. Then a decade or so later the internet and later still other distractions, social media, access to online media etc. It wasn't only amateur radio that suffered declining numbers, also the 'new' tech had hijacked interest away from many other hobbies.
So to your point about why one would choose Amateur Radio when there are so many others available. To answer that one has to ask what is it that drives a person's interest and what environment was he/she exposed to that nurtured that interest at an early age. If one has an interest in physics, that is how things really work then one has to get to grips with the hardware at its most fundamental level. One not only has to understand how semiconductors work but also resistors, capacitors and so, not only that but one must be fully fluent about how they operate. On the other hand, lounge-lizard programmers are glued to their screens programming in high-level languages, C et al, and often they don't know one end of a soldering iron from another. An amateur who doesn't get his hands dirty from hardware or the occasional belt from a high voltage anode isn't worthy of the name.
Many of us who are interested in the physics side of radio had to become good programmers whether we liked it or not. For that, engineering at uni made me learn Fortran, and later various Assemblers, Lisp and C and a smattering of others. One of my amateur friends was so good at machine code that he could just scan pages of a hex dump then make a comment such as 'I'll just change value at hex addr 'ABCD' from 'xx' to 'yy', that'll save me having to change R53 from 270kΩ to 330kΩ (I never had that level of patience). It's this inherent hands-on feel for electronics at its most fundamental grassroots level that often gives Amateurs the edge. You'd be surprised how many influential people in tech have an amateur ticket filed away somewhere even if they never mention it. And you'll often find that their interest began when they were kids. It goes with the territory.
I'm sorry that Amateur Radio has been somewhat lost in the noise, the fact is that it has many facets some of which are highly technical and many youngsters are unaware of it. I'd venture that Amateur Radio is still of importance, unfortunately, this post long so I'm unable to develop a supporting argument, I'll just give an illustration instead.
Your smartphone is by far the most advanced and sophisticated technology that you now own (years ago, I used to say that about television sets). Here's some rhetorical questions for which no answers are required. How much do you actually know about the working of your smartphone? You may have a rough idea of the goings-on at OSI levels from say levels 4 to 7, perhaps even 3. but what about levels 1 and 2? Well, let me say that to have a reasonable working understanding of those levels/hardware you need to know some quantum mechanics (at least at its practical level such as how quantum tunneling works). If you don't then you can't design the semiconductors to run the device. Such understanding is crucial in both the microprocessors and the extremely low noise amplifiers that are used in the phone's RF stages, especially the GPS receiver. Also, one needs an understanding of electrical principles including Maxwell's equations, then there's thermodynamics—one has to understand how thermal noise occurs in low noise amplifiers, the WiFi, mobile and GPS receivers. One must implicitly understand the relationship between bandwidth and noise—the thermal noise equation†, and so on. I'll bet many who think they understand the workings of a smartphone have never heard of said equation let alone having ever derived it from first principles.
What's this to do with Amateur radio? Well, the history of AR (and comms generally) is littered with the struggle to make HW perform better and various forms of noise are the enemy, amateurs instinctively understand this struggle, and you'll often find that engineers who work with noise in RF circuits have Amateur Radio backgrounds, again it often comes with the territory.
AR comes in many levels. And many of those who natter on air with seemingly little to say frequently have a deep understanding of the above topics. Whilst this understanding is usually honed fine during tertiary education you'll often find the roots of their understanding began with Amateur Radio. AR is what one makes of it, it's a hobby with a truly vast array of diverse technical aspects, and with it comes the enjoyable camaraderie of fellow amateurs.
I'm a an operator myself. To be honest: Ham radio - in my opinion - is slowly dying.
At some point there was a split between the ham radio and opensource scene. There are still some connections, but the majority is gone. It's IMHO pretty much a question of mentality ("No license? Underling").
A lot of software/hardware there isn't opensource but badly written shareware and the entire thing seems to be stuck in the past. Have a look at this VARA stuff.. that list endlessy can be continued.
I know nothing about ham radio but I’ve been looking to join this global community for the past few years. This thread and post did entice me to start my journey but you’re wrong on a few details:
- the exam is cheap and easy as long as you study for a week (high-schoolers did it in the past)
- in some countries, you don’t need to pay yearly fee to keep your ID thing (which is also cheap)
- the effort doesn’t seem very hard
Last but not least and it’s the most important for me: you can talk around the whole world without needing a phone maker or an ISP or any other kind of company filtering what and how you can talk as long as you respect global human rules. It’s like the last freedom that we have here since the newsgroups of the 80s/90s. You can send a global message without having to rely on a weird protocol sent through a black box (phone) relayed by an ISP. It’s the rawest form of global messaging out there.
This is a pretty gross mischaracterization of ham radio.
There are exams, sure. But the entry level one(s) are typically not that bad. Something a high-school grad could do in an afternoon.
Fortune? Most exams now are free, although there are some clubs that charge a token fee (~$10 USD or so). Radios from China are cheap and cost around $25.
Sure, the hobby can get really expensive, but it doesn't have to be.
And "standard phrase" is not even accurate. Typically, people "ragchew" on repeaters with the Tech license, but that is not it either. Digital modes, RC/Model airplane control, satellite coms, APRS (GPS tracking), etc.
Ham radio and blogs are at similar stages of cultural relevance. There may be something the blogging community can learn from the ham community, though hopefully blogging survives as something more than an emergency-response phenomenon.
I was a 16-year-old kid in still-developing India, 1986. One had to wait seven years to get a landline connection.
My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was issued the handle OM118.
The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for 30-minute slots.
Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least, please God.
A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras, we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."
1. Madras is now called Chennai.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamal_Haasan
That is a cool story!
Homeland Security tries to get local first responders to join the SHARES emergency radio network.[1] This is 5 HF channels at 5 MHz, and some more around 15 MHz. They test on Wednesdays around noon. Transmission is voice or PACTOR. It's ham-type technology for government emergency response.
Although many local first responders are not on this net, the USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from a large disaster area.
[1] https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/programs/shared-resourc...
[2] https://ema.arrl.org/wp-content/uploads/files/SHARES_Spectru...
My US state gives such hams free specialty vehicle license plates which are emblazened with "EMERGENCY" below the callsign. Now, along with a clever vanity handle, I no longer receive police attention/enforcement. —73
Do you have a link that describes the equipment, for those of us who don't yet understand what a long wire antenna is?
Having been in the WNC hurricane area, I have a newfound interest in this stuff.
The basic problem with using HF radio is that you need to know most of the things required for a ham license to operate one. Modern HF radios have displays, scanners, lots of features, and are moderately complicated to operate. Even hooking up an antenna requires some understanding of what antennas really do.
Here's a typical modern portable ham radio.[1] (Not a recommendation, just an example) This one does both HF and VHF, so you can reach both SHARES and locals. Here are some simple wire antenna kits.[2] If you have both of those items, and some kind of power (a car battery), you can contact various US emergency services, radio hams, preppers, and whatnot, even if infrastructure is down for hundreds of miles around. A small solar panel to charge the thing would be a good idea. All this is probably about US$1500.
Any isolated town should have something like that, and some people who know how to use it. Town halls, volunteer fire departments, sheriff's offices, etc. are good locations to keep it.
Preppers seem to be more into VHF handhelds such as the Baofeng UV-5R. That's about US$80. Less range, can't reach SHARES, but can reach a few miles, depending on terrain. Useful if you're two miles from the main road.
Here's a prepper view.[3] He uses a Slinky as an antenna.
Once you have the ability to communicate at all, the problem is finding someone useful to talk to in an emergency. There's no addressing, just frequencies. On HF there's so much range that most of the people you can reach are not in a position to do much. The whole point of SHARES is that there are a few frequencies where someone is regularly listening. During a disaster, they're probably dealing with bigger problems than yours, so calling up Homeland Security HQ as an individual may not be helpful for anything not immediately life-threatening.
If you're near a coast, you can usually reach the Coast Guard on a marine VHF channel. They're a first responder set up to take radio calls.[4] If the emergency requires a boat, call them. Marine Channel 16 VHF-FM (156.8 MHz). The Coast Guard gets involved with major floods, they maintain good communications with other emergency services, and they know almost everybody with a boat.
[1] https://www.icomamerica.com/lineup/products/IC-705
[2] https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/wire-antennas
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_sDHTTZYMg
[4] https://navcen.uscg.gov/radio-information-for-boaters
In the simplest analogy, it's just the TV rabbit ears with two wires in opposite directions, except much longer wires, because the frequencies are lower and therefore the wavelength is larger. Those classic rabbit ears are effectively a dipole antenna, which is basically: "stretch a wire out in a line so it's half the wavelength of the frequency you want to receive or transmit on, cut it in half, and send the signal from the middle, out both ends of the cut wire".
https://www.aa5tb.com/dipole.html
Picking that length of wire results in the lowest impedance (kind of analogous to friction) at the radio for pushing signal out to the antenna, but various lengths work with more or less efficiency, and you don't have to send the signal from the middle either if you have appropriate inductors and capacitors to adjust the impedance (it's just the simplest way).
As with most things on the internet these days, it seems the best content is in the form of YouTube videos, so amusingly, this is the best written information I came across after some quick searching:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0684938.pdf
At 5MHz you have a wavelength of approximately 60m. So for a dipole antenna (the most basic) you'd need approximately 30m of wire.
You'd have a length of coax cable going to the centre point of the antenna, so pair of 15m wires extending from each side.
Getting your amateur radio license covers this in more detail.
Dave Casler has a bunch of useful videos on things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-6sJHk9hU
A dipole is a very simple antenna, and pretty efficient. There are other shorter options that have worse performance too, but perhaps more suitable for an adhoc tree deployment. (random wire, EFHW)
(I know you know this, but just adding in. Ham is fun! I like doing park & camping deployments)
You might want to check out this guy's stuff:
https://qrper.com/2024/10/helene-aftermath-update-power-to-t...
So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency? Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying for it.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license. But it’s easier to use when you’ve had the practice and aren’t fumbling around learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better, when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the building management team, which politely informed every corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they would be participating.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
There's a galactic difference between just reading about it and actually experiencing it even just once.
Essentially the difference between being book smart vs. street wise.
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Reading about it generates expectations, and they can be deadly.
On average we fall to the level of our training, but then there's moment to moment variation because of "human error" which has little to do with lack of skill or training, and more to do with individual and situational factors.
Training is critical, but even then you can still fail, which is why layers of backups are great.
For a lot of us, skill might never be as reliable as other layers, but it's generally different from other layers making it less likely to fail at the same time because of the same cause.
Crew Resource Management has a lot of great insights.
> In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license.
Just to clarify: the law in the US (47 CFR § 97.403) says that you can use amateur radio frequencies without a license, or unlicensed frequencies, for: "essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available". That's much narrower than just "in an emergency".
And if you try to use ham radio equipment without knowing what you're doing, there's a risk that you'll interfere with other amateur or non-amateur users who are coordinating their own emergency response.
Thank you for the clarification. I wanted my explanation to be generic enough to apply to any jurisdiction. For example, I’m in Canada where the regulations are differently worded but have a similar effect.
It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather have a cheap Baofeng.
This is the correct answer. I have my license and help with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool, but the ham radio community has been around for a century, is far better organized and entrenched with various services, etc. There is far more trust and reliability there.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Meshtastic is also still very much "beta" quality. Unless you spend a bit of time working with it, messing with different radios and antennas, you can end up with a setup that can't get much range at all, negating one of the main features of the mesh.
Though just buying a Baofeng can lead to similar results, as it's not that amazing at reception. In my testing I've only been able to get a good signal within a few hundred meters, which might not be enough to hit an area repeater except in ideal conditions.
Either way, having the knowledge and practice going into an emergency is much more helpful than just the equipment!
Meshtastic has actual issues with bandwidth running out on the LoRa when there are too many people using it in a small area.
https://bayme.sh is IIRC actively experimenting with moving from LongFast to MediumSlow specifically to try to address this.
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> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I’m not sure where you live, but I’ve never lived in a house or apartment where I could hit a local 2m repeater without driving or getting up on a roof.
I also have an 80 watt 2m radio in my truck, and will turn it on when I’m doing long trips. Very rare to encounter anyone else (simplex), let alone be able to chat for more than a very short period of time.
Experiences do definitely vary in this regard. I live in a CA Bay Area suburb. Geographically, this is a valley, and there are a fair number of more-or-less active repeaters mounted up along various mountain ridges, and I can generally hit a couple of them from my tiny backyard w/ a 5W HT (and a decent antenna!).
OTOH, while I never got in to it, there is spectrum available to Technician licensees (assuming you're in the US) on 6m and 10m. You're not likely to get NVIS propagation there and hit more local folk that you couldn't hit w/ LOS, but that might get contacts where nothing's available on 2m/70cm, for not too much more initial equipment cost (again, assuming US and an HN user, where moving from $40 to say, $400 isn't completely out of the question).
Fair point. I live in Chapel Hill, NC, and we're fortunate enough to have multiple repeaters that can be worked with a hand-held from where I live. But yes, geography will definitely play a factor. I should probably have noted that originally. Good catch.
I haven't done a like, systematic survey or anything but when I used to travel for work I'd take my little quansheng and mess around. Basically every american city with at least one "tall" building has a repeater up there that covers the whole metro area. There's one on the sears tower that you can hear in michigan. But even dubuque had one I could contact from a hotel room across town.
So yeah most of the area is rural and there's probably not much out there without big gear. But most of the population lives within 30 miles of a 12-storey building.
One thing I will say, the Internet deeply and dramatically changed my perspective on the global community and connectivity in general.
When I got my ham license (DE K2KD) at age ~11, the idea of picking up a microphone or tapping on a morse key or using a computer with RTTY to talk to someone on the other side of the world was mind-blowing. "Mom, I'm talking to someone in Australia! I'm talking to someone in Nigeria!".
Now we block entire IP ranges because they send too much spam or because we think the traffic from an entire country has a high fraud rate.
Easy come easy go. Sigh.
The problem is that a huge fraction of people are worth talking to, but a small fraction -- 5%? 10%? -- can poison that well so thoroughly that it is unusable. Being a ham operator takes some effort and is harder to exploit, so most people you talk to will just be normal humans -- enthusiasts. But the internet attracts every freak and scam operator in the world.
I'm reminded of various "free" rock concerts of my youth, which were often disasters -- too many people, half of them stoned or otherwise out of control, etc. -- things I quickly learned I would pay to avoid. Things that are too easy attract people I don't want to interact with.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
It’s the only time I’ve used my General class privileges.
Omg reading the wiki for wspr i thought i saw a typo "630m" but yup, ~430 kHz, wow. What antenna did you use, a quarter mile dipole? ;)
Hams have privileges on 2200m, too! At those wavelengths people are using big loading coils. Saw a video last week of a guy in Alaska with a sizeable loop in the trees and was putting in about 1 KW to get 1W EIRP.
WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).
Wikipedia is just being weird by using an MF band in its example. Most WSPR is in the shortwave bands, which can use large antennas, but not THAT large.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development. ... What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days?
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
Check out https://github.com/drowe67/radae. David Rowe has been working on a really neat new digital mode for audio transmission over HF channels, using a pretrained autoencoder. It's currently getting integrated into the freeDV gui in this branch https://github.com/drowe67/freedv-gui/tree/ms-rade-integ
That reminds me. I'd like ppl to get excited abt the "codec2" open source replacement for c4fm, p25, and dmr... unless sth newer is out there
https://www.amateurradio.com/codec2-open-source-vocoder-proj...
My son and I listen to DMR and P25 all the time, and we listened to a bunch of the samples of Codec2 vs AMBE. And while it might be a slight improvement, it doesn't move the needle enough to really excite. Perhaps a longer QSO would be more exciting to hear the difference on. Wouldn't hardware be a constratint just like it is with M17?
For me it's not the sound quality (as long as it's comparable), but the ability to use digital modes on any radio without vendor lock-in!
DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map to find out where they are.
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
N3RTW
Parks on the Air is responsible for nearly all of my radio time--I've activated a park in almost every state (8 left)!
N7YHF
> DX'ing and contesting
apologies, I'm ignorant when it comes to HAM but have always been interested in it: what does DX'ing and contesting mean? I'm assuming DX = talking to other HAMs, but I can't figure out what contesting would be.
Sorry... DX is short for a distance contact, so someone outside of your country. There are 340-odd "DX entities" defined, some of them incredibly rare (Bouvet Island, North Korea), and people spend their lives trying to get the ones they're missing. Other people will gather a group and raise funds to go to those places so that they get on the air.
Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.
Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.
APRS is cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...
https://aprs.fi/ is a site that displays a bunch of devices online.
Some people have APRS radios in their cars so they can see exactly where it is for example.
You can find a selection of things you can do with ham radio in this blog post: https://dk1mi.radio/a-declaration-of-love-to-amateur-radio/
For me it's:
FT8 - a weak signal mode that lets you make contacts around the world with not much power. From Canada, I've made contacts with Japan and Romania on 10W of power.
Satellites - the ISS has a repeater, so you can make VHF/UHF contacts with people in a huge footprint.
With packet radio you can transmit digitally, and basically have IRC via radio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
This youtube video by No Boilerplate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcF6tvepRlg) was a great summary and really got my interest up initially but I personally got bogged down quite quickly by the prospect of having to learn Morse Code
You don't have to learn morse code to pass the initial HAM test.
In the US, I don't believe morse is required for any tier of license anymore. For sure, I have my general and don't know it.
Yes, it's any ham test in the U.S.
The sw code (morse) portion was eliminated back in the 2000s.
Or any ham test in the united states (note: learning Morse code is worth doing anyway)
Heh, I just finished an AuxComm training and two IMS (Ontario’s version of ICS) courses last week. Great timing.
I'm curious how satellite Internet like Starlink will enhance and complement ham radio. To be clear, I don't see it replacing ham radio--there are too many great reasons to get into the hobby for that. But Starlink has been playing a similar emergency communications role in recent hurricane-hit areas as ham radio has in the past. Will be interesting to see how the two are used going forward.
We had a freak earthquake in the northeast some months back. Guess what immediately went down when you needed it most? Cell towers. My guess is they’re not designed for the capacity they’d need in an emergency where almost everyone is trying to call simultaneously. That’s reason enough to have an alternate comm link.
Widespread access to space-based networks might finally kill hams. When disaster strikes, the guy with solar panels and a starlink terminal can facilitate more traffic than a hundred hams. Having cellphones that can get an SMS up to a sat might be more useful than handing out 4w radios.
Access to space-based network only works if it doesn't rely on a downlink connected to a fiber-optic network (eg: Starlink). There's nothing glamorous about amateur radio but being able to string up a wire and get a message hundreds or thousands of miles using only a 12V battery has its moments.
Once Starlink is fully built out, if we get to the point that enough downlink stations are out of commission that the entire network fails, amateur radio will be of no use because we're looking at an extinction-sized meteor strike, global thermonuclear war, or similar event.
In those cases amateur radio will be only useful for saying goodbye to all of your frequent QSOs before the tidal wave hits your location in Denver.
I've been a licensed ham for 30 years. I'm also a realist.
Starlink is better in this regard now. First, the ground station density in the US is really quite good and you're likely to be able to hit a single up/down path through most emergencies. And, second, over the last year they've turned on a lot of inter-satellite links (ISLs). The ISLs have a huge effect on reach -- you can now have a sat terminal in parts of eastern Africa and reach the ground station in Lagos, for example.
(No affiliation with them; I'm working with a Ph.D. student studying this question.)
I'd say that one advantage of ham is that you can operate it on much lower power equipment still - there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet, although we're starting to get close with cell phones with emergency satellite messaging. But starlink has a bandwidth advantage if you need to send photos or tunnel cell. Different capabilities - it's good to have both!
AC3ME
"...there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet..."
The FCC just gave emergency authorization for Starlink to enable direct-to-satellite service for T-Mobile customers in western North Carolina. It's my understanding that this is what Starlink was planning on releasing but they are doing a live beta right now.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/fcc-lets-starlin...
Any comparison between Amateur Radio and commercial communication services serves little point, it's like comparing apples and oranges. It's been thus since the early 1930s when commercial shortwave services became commonplace.
Amateur Radio operators are a unique cliquey bunch with practices not easily understood by those who aren't inculcated into the culture.
Unless you're on the wrong side of a space-billionaire's political inclinations...
There is more to amateur radio than disaster communications.
I often wonder why amateur radio operators put up with the derogatory name ham because many are very skilled in electronics and they're anything but hams. I've always hated the term, even the term amateur has negative connotations that aren't warranted.
I'd prefer the term experimental radio operator or such. I say that as someone who once held an amateur ticket (for quite some decades) which I got whilst I was still at school.
It’s impolite but the hobby is dominated by older men who sit on their ratios talking about their radios. Why would young people choose that as an interest when there are so many new STEM type things to do (programming, 3D printing, etc)
It's not impolite to speak your mind, and my comments are not meant to offend. :-)
You're right. When I used to participate in amateur radio as a teenager, those who were not involved—usually irritated wives and girlfriends—were apt to often repeat things like 'get off that radio and help me with the dishes', or 'they're always wasting time talking unintelligible gibberish', and in my mother's case 'stop mucking about and do your homework'. I remember the taunts and criticisms well.
Listen to this YouTube audio of comedian Tony Hancock's Radio Ham. He wasn't an amateur but he summarized the prevailing attitude of many back then: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=stmSok14-IU
However, in recent years amateur radio operators have had their revenge—and it's come by the ton! With the advent of the internet Amateurs can now correctly point to not millions but billions of totally-addicted smartphone and internet users who waste endless hours texting, or talking/posting on social media—Facebook, WhatsApp, X, etc.—mostly inconsequential nonsense and drivel, or dealing in fake news that's damaging the social fabric of society. (BTW, I've no social media accounts, HN's my limit.)
Right, the very thing past generations accused amateurs of doing is now not only done by billions of people but also for millions of them their involvement is far in excess of anything amateurs would have done pre-internet. As you would be aware, smartphone, social media and internet addiction has become a serious social problem.
As an ex-amateur I'll put this on the record. Amateurs by virtue of their technical abilities in radio/electronics—skills that must meet a set minimum standard of proficiency as mandated by regulations/law by both governments and the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—are granted access to very valuable spectrum space. An Amateur radio license, which is only obtained after passing an examination, gives Amateurs exclusive access to many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In effect, Amateurs have had and still have exclusive communications channels that allow them to communicate to any part of the world whenever they feel like it so long as they do so within the terms of their license, which, in brief, boils down to not causing interference or disrupting other communication users/services.
Even in this internet age this is a privilege that not even internet and social media users can boast about for they're always under the control—the fickle beck and call—of ISPs and Big Tech and the requirement that internet protocols and network hardware remain functional. On the other hand amateurs are always in full control of their stations (that's the edict set out in the terms of their licenses). It's why for over a century Amateurs have been called upon in emergencies whenever normal communications fail.
As mentioned, my dislike of names Ham Radio and Amateur do not do justice to this longstanding and valuable service, they do not reflect the true extent of the pool of talent that exists within its members. Also, amateurs are a cliquish bunch with a language and etiquette of their own and that has very distinct advantages. For instance, decades ago I used to work in the prototype laboratory of one of RCA's divisions that manufactured telecommunications, radio and TV broadcast equipment and my boss, a brilliant electronics engineer and radio amateur who also helped establish the division, employed me over other applicants because I was a radio amateur. His experience was that when employing people with equal qualifications then selecting the one that also has an amateur ticket made the best sense, as often they had a diehard interest in electronics from a very young age and thus had a much better intrinsic/core understanding of the subject. I've frequently seen this scenario played out over the years.
You ask 'Why would young people choose Amateur Radio as an interest when there are so many new STEM-type things to do (programming, 3D printing, etc.).'
I'll answer that but I'll begin by saying Amateur Radio still has a strong following and many enthusiastic followers, but I'd agree that per capita it doesn’t attract the numbers it did in the pre-internet days (especially youngsters—and it needs new blood). There are several reasons for this:
Until around 1970 those interested in electronics and who wanted it as a hobby at home had few options, that usually came down to repairing/building radios (sometimes TVs), and or Hi-Fi amplifiers. There were others, but that was mainly it. Thus, many youngsters gravitated to amateur radio, it was a sort of natural progression. For instance, the first radios I built were crystal sets, on one I picked up an amateur radio operator (by profession a grocery store manager) who lived about four miles away who I befriended, he taught me a lot. That led to me to passing my amateur ticket exam at age 14 and eventually to my career in electronics.
By the early 1980s microprocessors became the rage, back then I had an advanced S100 system with a 8085/8086 combo, it also had a Z80 board, I had to program in Assembler to get its BIOS functioning. This 'new' electronics diluted the pool of those with an interest in electronics. Also, around that time the hype around computers was phenomenal. Amateur radio got drowned in the noise. Then a decade or so later the internet and later still other distractions, social media, access to online media etc. It wasn't only amateur radio that suffered declining numbers, also the 'new' tech had hijacked interest away from many other hobbies.
So to your point about why one would choose Amateur Radio when there are so many others available. To answer that one has to ask what is it that drives a person's interest and what environment was he/she exposed to that nurtured that interest at an early age. If one has an interest in physics, that is how things really work then one has to get to grips with the hardware at its most fundamental level. One not only has to understand how semiconductors work but also resistors, capacitors and so, not only that but one must be fully fluent about how they operate. On the other hand, lounge-lizard programmers are glued to their screens programming in high-level languages, C et al, and often they don't know one end of a soldering iron from another. An amateur who doesn't get his hands dirty from hardware or the occasional belt from a high voltage anode isn't worthy of the name.
Many of us who are interested in the physics side of radio had to become good programmers whether we liked it or not. For that, engineering at uni made me learn Fortran, and later various Assemblers, Lisp and C and a smattering of others. One of my amateur friends was so good at machine code that he could just scan pages of a hex dump then make a comment such as 'I'll just change value at hex addr 'ABCD' from 'xx' to 'yy', that'll save me having to change R53 from 270kΩ to 330kΩ (I never had that level of patience). It's this inherent hands-on feel for electronics at its most fundamental grassroots level that often gives Amateurs the edge. You'd be surprised how many influential people in tech have an amateur ticket filed away somewhere even if they never mention it. And you'll often find that their interest began when they were kids. It goes with the territory.
I'm sorry that Amateur Radio has been somewhat lost in the noise, the fact is that it has many facets some of which are highly technical and many youngsters are unaware of it. I'd venture that Amateur Radio is still of importance, unfortunately, this post long so I'm unable to develop a supporting argument, I'll just give an illustration instead.
Your smartphone is by far the most advanced and sophisticated technology that you now own (years ago, I used to say that about television sets). Here's some rhetorical questions for which no answers are required. How much do you actually know about the working of your smartphone? You may have a rough idea of the goings-on at OSI levels from say levels 4 to 7, perhaps even 3. but what about levels 1 and 2? Well, let me say that to have a reasonable working understanding of those levels/hardware you need to know some quantum mechanics (at least at its practical level such as how quantum tunneling works). If you don't then you can't design the semiconductors to run the device. Such understanding is crucial in both the microprocessors and the extremely low noise amplifiers that are used in the phone's RF stages, especially the GPS receiver. Also, one needs an understanding of electrical principles including Maxwell's equations, then there's thermodynamics—one has to understand how thermal noise occurs in low noise amplifiers, the WiFi, mobile and GPS receivers. One must implicitly understand the relationship between bandwidth and noise—the thermal noise equation†, and so on. I'll bet many who think they understand the workings of a smartphone have never heard of said equation let alone having ever derived it from first principles.
What's this to do with Amateur radio? Well, the history of AR (and comms generally) is littered with the struggle to make HW perform better and various forms of noise are the enemy, amateurs instinctively understand this struggle, and you'll often find that engineers who work with noise in RF circuits have Amateur Radio backgrounds, again it often comes with the territory.
AR comes in many levels. And many of those who natter on air with seemingly little to say frequently have a deep understanding of the above topics. Whilst this understanding is usually honed fine during tertiary education you'll often find the roots of their understanding began with Amateur Radio. AR is what one makes of it, it's a hobby with a truly vast array of diverse technical aspects, and with it comes the enjoyable camaraderie of fellow amateurs.
† V(noise)=(4kTRΔf)^0.5, https://www.qsl.net/va3iul/Noise/Understanding%20Noise%20Fig...
I'm a an operator myself. To be honest: Ham radio - in my opinion - is slowly dying.
At some point there was a split between the ham radio and opensource scene. There are still some connections, but the majority is gone. It's IMHO pretty much a question of mentality ("No license? Underling").
A lot of software/hardware there isn't opensource but badly written shareware and the entire thing seems to be stuck in the past. Have a look at this VARA stuff.. that list endlessy can be continued.
hard to completely agree, wsjtx is a good example
logging software has enjoyed some fatcats for a while for sure tho
I don’t see it enduring much longer. Why would I want to pay a fortune and sit exams just to use a radio to say a standard test phrase to a stranger?
I think it would be nice to have a radio but it just seems like too much effort for too little reward.
I know nothing about ham radio but I’ve been looking to join this global community for the past few years. This thread and post did entice me to start my journey but you’re wrong on a few details:
- the exam is cheap and easy as long as you study for a week (high-schoolers did it in the past)
- in some countries, you don’t need to pay yearly fee to keep your ID thing (which is also cheap)
- the effort doesn’t seem very hard
Last but not least and it’s the most important for me: you can talk around the whole world without needing a phone maker or an ISP or any other kind of company filtering what and how you can talk as long as you respect global human rules. It’s like the last freedom that we have here since the newsgroups of the 80s/90s. You can send a global message without having to rely on a weird protocol sent through a black box (phone) relayed by an ISP. It’s the rawest form of global messaging out there.
This is a pretty gross mischaracterization of ham radio.
There are exams, sure. But the entry level one(s) are typically not that bad. Something a high-school grad could do in an afternoon.
Fortune? Most exams now are free, although there are some clubs that charge a token fee (~$10 USD or so). Radios from China are cheap and cost around $25.
Sure, the hobby can get really expensive, but it doesn't have to be.
And "standard phrase" is not even accurate. Typically, people "ragchew" on repeaters with the Tech license, but that is not it either. Digital modes, RC/Model airplane control, satellite coms, APRS (GPS tracking), etc.
Ham radio and blogs are at similar stages of cultural relevance. There may be something the blogging community can learn from the ham community, though hopefully blogging survives as something more than an emergency-response phenomenon.