14 ms·

Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

311 points by lightlyused 6y ago

hibby 6y ago
I saw this shared on Twitter this morning, and had some thoughts: While the graph is good, it is specific to the US and ignores the fact that a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ - the hobby is healthy now, but there's an age crisis coming soon. It doesn't really reflect the health of the entire hobby, globally, just a specific subset. Millenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials! That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects. I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!
- melling 6y ago
  I got my license 25 years ago and now I’m 50+. Even then the population skewed much older. I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.
  - jcims 6y ago
    I'm just about ready for my ten year renewal and almost 50. Same for me. I got it for the ability to use APRS and other higher power options for high altitude balloon tracking (project never got off the ground hurr).
  - ja27 6y ago
    Yeah I've been licensed for 25+ years and I'm still one of the younger hams here. I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles. Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.
- mikece 6y ago
  > a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being. There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.
  - vidanay 6y ago
    There's also more than a fair share of OM spouting off about their gout, dieabeetus, negroes, and Jeezus. Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.
    - paulirwin 6y ago
      I assume you're being downvoted because of the terms you're using, but you're not wrong. Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people. In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.
- brian_herman 6y ago
  I've been to ham radio clubs and the age gap is real. I go to the meetups in the Chicago land area and only see about one or two people my age. The people my age are usually sons or daughters of the older people.
  - hibby 6y ago
    This is a big problem in the UK too. The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club. This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique. I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!
  - armadsen 6y ago
    I got my license at age 15 in 1999. I'm 36 now, and still among the "young" people in the local club. That said, ham radio has been a huge, important part of my life, and is what inspired me to be an engineer. The people I've met through it, both young and old, have been really great.
- detaro 6y ago
  Two additional things from someone who has considered getting a license a few times, but never quite made the jump because it wasn't clear what for in the end: - a bunch of interesting radio things are available without a license today - e.g. hunting for various signals with a cheap SDR receiver. Which could potentially be a way for ham communities to then get people deeper into it, but the communities seem quite distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities) - online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through) A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory). EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!
  - hibby 6y ago
    Gosh it's weird to be recognised on HN for something good that I've done :D
  - bityard 6y ago
    I can't say I disagree with you. I got my ham radio license in my late 30's because radio has always fascinated the hell out of me, even as a kid. But when I was a kid, being able to talk to someone far away without incurring the cost of a long-distance phone call was still a novelty. The ubiquity of the Internet and smart phones took away that particular novelty. I still have a radio (several, actually) and one day when I have a larger piece of property I may even set up a reasonable HF station to participate in contests and the like but right now it's hard to justify spending time on a hobby that has little productive value at the end of the day.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  This is why I've swerved off of getting into HAM. By popular perception (in my circles, and perception doesn't necessarily reflect reality) it's a chatroom for boomers (not necessarily a bad thing) waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), with a cost of entry of at least a hundred dollars for equipment that supports a fixed set of protocols with a very narrow use-case. Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
  - BenjiWiebe 6y ago
    Mid 20's Extra here... Experimentation is totally allowed. Either the FCC will ignore the complaint, or you are actually outside the (very lenient) experimentation rules.
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      That's good to know. Any reccommended place to get started (assuming I already own an rtl-sdr)?
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    > waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), This is what always kept me away from HAM Radios. Everyone I knew that was into it was a huge stickler about the rules and would talk about all the bad stuff that should happen to rule breakers. It was pretty unnerving.
    - ezren 6y ago
      One of the express purposes of the amateur radio service is to facilitate experimentation and innovation in radio technology, and the FCC grants special licenses for that purpose all the time. There's a significant amount of harm you can do with a radio, so willfully causing interference to other radio services will earn you a hefty penalty. You should definitely get into amateur radio if you have an interest, and maybe look into some of the instances the FCC actually issued fines - if you're not out to cause harm you have nothing to worry about.
- abruzzi 6y ago
  I would agree that online there are a bunch of loud "get off my lawn" type voicer (I remember a published article on one of the bigger ham forums, where the guy bemoaned that a local ham club advertised a event as a "maker" event to appeal to young people, to him maker was for women, i.e. home maker.) But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)
- jdietrich 6y ago
  Here in the UK, we've seen a huge surge in people - especially younger people - getting licensed since lockdown, in large part because it's now possible to take your license exams online. I think that the RSGB (our ARRL) had severely under-estimated the amount of friction in the old examination system and the amount of pent-up demand created by things like RTL-SDR.
  - m0xte 6y ago
    That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help. Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.
- bobloblaw45 6y ago
  My dad is/was a ham. My experience growing up with ham radio in the house was so negative that it's just kinda a turn off for me. Going back to the early 90s, for a lot of those old boomer types ham was mostly just a way to out-do eachother by showing off their rigs. It's kind of disappointing to me that they have this awesome technology they could have been taking to the next level but instead just spend hours whistling into the mic and bragging. In addition I got a sense that many of the old guys were actively working as gatekeepers as a way to stroke their own egos. These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.
jron 6y ago
When I first read about FT8, I immediately started looking at the code to see how simple it would be to handle more meaningful conversations. Fortunately I stumbled onto this video from Jordan Sherer: https://youtu.be/mZKhVcFOljY https://youtu.be/mZKhVcFOljY He had done all the work for me in JS8Call: https://bitbucket.org/widefido/js8call/ https://bitbucket.org/widefido/js8call/ If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call
- jsherer 6y ago
  Glad you found me :) Here's the main site where you can learn more: http://js8call.com/ http://js8call.com/ And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o
  - hibby 6y ago
    oh JS8 is your fault? It's great, I love it and have been enjoying it for the last few months - thank you so much!
    - jsherer 6y ago
      Awesome. Hope to see you on the air sometime :)
  - ryanianian 6y ago
    Thanks for your work. JS8Call seems really cool, but I can never make any contacts with it. Maybe bad luck, but every time I try on 20m through 80m there's nobody on the other end. (FT8 and friends working fine.)
    - jron 6y ago
      The number of FT8 contacts dwarf JS8. That said, 40m is probably your best bet for making contacts on JS8 at the moment.
woofcat 6y ago
As someone who has looked on into the hobby in Canada. I feel there needs to be another class for people who just want to use a store bought radio. I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment. Just my two cents.
- alibarber 6y ago
  Interesting - in the UK we have a 'Foundation' license which is effectively just that. Sadly I don't think you could take it and use it abroad (i.e. outside the UK) though.
  - iuguy 6y ago
    You can't. I passed my foundation this month and am moving to the Republic of Ireland later this year, so I won't be able to operate from there. Ireland has a Class A/B licence a bit like the old City & Guilds exam, so there's a massive gulf between foundation and a Class A licence. There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down. As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
    - alibarber 6y ago
      Yeah I'm kinda in the same place (not literally, but I'm not a UK resident - Finland now) so I leveled up to intermediate but I'm still waiting on Full (which gives you HAREC, so a reciprocal full in most of the world) before I start transmitting, do hope the RSGB set it up soon :)
- jcims 6y ago
  You can definitely do that for the 2 and .75 meter bands. $30 off of Amazon for a BaoFeng. HF and the bottom half of VHF is where you start needing more (expensive) equipment and the antenna setup begins to really dominate performance. The other problem is that you'll go through all of the expense for a turnkey radio, get on the bands and all you hear people talking about is their radio setup.
TomMasz 6y ago
The overwhelming majority of hams are male, white and old (like me). Just take a look at most of the photos in QST or glance around a hamfest sometime. There is some synergy happening with the Maker crowd but it doesn't seem to me that it will be enough to keep ham radio alive.
tyingq 6y ago
I would guess that Digital Mobile Radio gets held back by the fact that most of the internet is now SSL/TLS. And that you aren't supposed to (outside of emergencies) pass encrypted traffic over Ham.
alibarber 6y ago
COVID has been a shot in the arm for Ham in the UK in my opinion, the best thing being remote exam invigilation. Now it's possible to study in your own time and take the exam when it suits you - not just a couple of times a year, or in a place miles away! Indeed, there's a lot to be said for meeting up as a club - like anything really, but the logistics of the exam system seemed like a vicious circle in the past: Not that many people are going to do it, so it's not worth setting one up and booking a facility and all the paperwork that often, so fewer people are going to be able to take it...
- iuguy 6y ago
  I did exactly that, passed my foundation online at the start of this month. I've been on my local 2m net a couple of times, but still setting up my rig. I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next. This is more that people studying online aren't part of clubs. I'm still learning etiquette and I think we'll end up with a lot of new passes ignoring it in 6 months time as behaviours become ingrained.
  - alibarber 6y ago
    Good point - I am optimistic that people will naturally find other local hams / clubs and join or establish communities and meetups and things. But it'll be interesting to see... Must confess that I don't actually live in the UK any more so I am having to hold out for the Full to become available online before I get back on the air so I haven't been listening in or transmitting. For me though I'm really keen to just build analogue circuits and QRP stuff, so I've been enjoying studying this lately.
  - hwatson 6y ago
    I think what you're describing is what the RSGB have been attempting to mitigate through the Beyond Exams schemes, wherein they've gamified different activities you could do on your own or with a club to further your knowledge of amateur radio. https://rsgb.org/main/beyond-exams-building-experience/ https://rsgb.org/main/beyond-exams-building-experience/
  - 6y ago
rthomas6 6y ago
I think a lot of young(er) people like me who would otherwise get into ham radio are being sniped by SDR. You can buy a $30 piece of hardware and listen to planes talking to the airport, see weather imaging from satellites, intercept and read pager messages, listen to emergency and police radio, listen to all channels of consumer grade walkie talkies, and also just generally see the invisible world of wireless communications going on around us. For a few hundred dollars, you can transmit things back. All on frequencies that require no license with equipment that is very cheap compared to ham radio.
- wrkronmiller 6y ago
  As someone who holds but doesn't use a Technician Class license, I completely agree. As someone commented below, sending encrypted data over HAM frequencies is not allowed (IANAL), which also rules out a lot of interesting projects and use-cases.
  - mikece 6y ago
    There is a proviso that goes with that. If you're doing a metro-area mesh network (some of the WiFi overlap with the 2.4GHz amateur band!) you can use WEP or WPA as long as the password for joining the network is "publicly available." Putting the current password on the website for the club/group running the project is sufficient to demonstrate, for FCC purposes, that the communications are open.
    - Retr0spectrum 6y ago
      What happens if I use SSL over the top of such a network? Is that allowed? If the answer is yes, it seems more like a loophole in the rules than anything.
      - hpoe 6y ago
        Probably not. These rules were put in place to prevent spies from using HAM to exfil data during the Cold War. Really I think it should be something that should be revisited but I don't know how the 3 letter agency's would like a method of communication that they can't access.
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
Someone help me understand what is the exciting thing about HAM cause this article doesn't do anything for that. My first exposure to HAM was back in ~2000 when I started working at a car stereo shop and the owner (NU5K) was huge into HAM. He was an asshole most of the time, but very knowledgeable and loved to tinker with different HAM components both benchtop and mobile. Everytime I would try and get interested the end result promise was something like: "You can bounce a wave off a cloud and talk with someone in Ukraine!" Ok, well I can also do that on ukraine.bbs - and being able to choose my topic instead of whomever is actually on this random band at this random time. Even moreso now - there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc. I see no reason that anyone would mess with HAM.
- JshWright 6y ago
  Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I enjoy being a ham (it's not an acronym, BTW). I get to tinker and constantly stretch my knowledge and technical skills.
  - mikece 6y ago
    I've always hated the "HAM" moniker and have always been pedantic about referring to it as "amateur radio."
    - JshWright 6y ago
      It might help if you don't all-caps shout it...
- jedimastert 6y ago
  It's a gigantic hobby that touches a lot of different nerdy things. First of, there's a wack-ton of science you can just dive straight into, with a lot of literature around because ham's been around for a long time. Are you in to EE and hacking? Cool! You can build your own radios! Are you into pushing boundries? DX (chasing long distance contacts) is for you. There's QRP (super low power) where you can talk to an amazing amount of people over morse code with just 5 watt and a deadnuts simple transmitter. It's like making a cellphone with a 9v and an altoids tin and talking to someone halfway cross the country. There's also the civic duty aspect, there even folk with just handie talkies (walkie-talkie-sized ham radios made for shorter-distance trasmission) can do their part in a natural disaster. But above all that, there's a really hands-on feel to making something out of bits and bobs and suddenly someone is talking to you!
geocrasher 6y ago
For as long as I can remember there have been people worried about the Old White Guys Club aspect of ham radio. "ham radio is dying!" they say. Well, the old guys keep pushing daisies and younger guys (not always young!) come along and do things. It's how it goes. And not all of us are club affiliated ARRL card carrying robots. I eschew all of that in favor of just having fun doing my own thing, and one thing I've learned: There are a lot of hams just like me.
vidanay 6y ago
Check out TARPN for an interesting usage of ham and more modern tinkering. http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
- ka2dew 6y ago
  Off the grid text messaging attracts young people into the hobby and retains existing hams, especially the young ones. This is a worthy concept.
joeclark77 6y ago
Learning about ham radio was one of my new "pandemic hobbies" and I got my license in June. I don't think it's dying at all; in fact, to me it's much more exclusive than Internet chatting or playing with Arduino. Both because of the licensing requirement, and because you need to learn something about electronics. That exclusivity is a draw! Similarly, learning CW (morse code) has become more popular since they dropped the requirement -- people like to learn things that are a challenge! I have kids aged 9 and younger, and their friends are starting to get cell phones. I'm hoping I can get them to earn their technician licenses so I can give them cheap radios instead; then they can have their own "social network" without all the harmful stuff a smartphone gives access to.
nickt 6y ago
TAPR [1] is a ham radio club that has a focus on digital stuff, it’s fantastically interesting geekery and should appeal to the HN crowd. The monthly newsletter, the Packet Status Register [2] is a great read, with projects typically involving radio, electronics, software and mechanicals. The TAPR Digital Communications Conference (virtual this year) is in just a few weeks [3]. It’s one of the few Amateur Radio clubs I know that has a Github repo [4] [1] https://tapr.org/about/ https://tapr.org/about/ [2] https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ [3] https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ [4] https://github.com/TAPR https://github.com/TAPR
joshmlewis 6y ago
Some of the growth is due to the rise of drone communications. In drone racing you are supposed to have a HAM license to operate your video transmitter on certain frequencies and powers. I'd bet a good chunk of the growth is from that.
Igorvelky 6y ago
My 5G mobile PHONE can provide me with 200MHZ of bandwidth and frequency range from 400 MHz to 7 GHZ So yes, HAM is DYING because outdated legislation is denying me same goodness in my mobile 6Watt radio.
- abruzzi 6y ago
  but an amateur license potentially gives you access to 1.8 mhz up to beyond 10ghz.
  - lightlyused 6y ago
    There are allocations below 1.8 MHz now.
  - Igorvelky 6y ago
    200MHz channel spacing capable radio. It is not that hard.
- retrac 6y ago
  There's more than 500 MHz of spectrum allocated to amateurs between 400 and 7 GHz in most jurisdictions. 420 - 450 MHz, 902 - 928 MHz, 1240 - 1300 MHz, 2390 - 2450 MHz, 3300 - 3500 MHz, 5650 - 5925 MHz are amateur bands here, and I think in the USA. It's also generally very illegal as a hobbyist to build and operate your own transmitter, except with an amateur radio licence. If you're more interested in how the phone works and building your own, than just using it, that's what amateur radio is for.
  - Igorvelky 6y ago
    i can simultaneously receive and transmit a 200MHz wide part of band in frequencies between 400MHz an 7GHz with my mobile SDR 5G phone after flashing custom firmware. so what channel spacing do you use on your ham radio?
    - retrac 6y ago
      My interest lies mostly in building my own SDRs. I'm not quite sure what you're asking as I don't even have a traditional voice transceiver. I got my licence so I can build radio equipment.
squarefoot 6y ago
I love the new technologies allowing what once was considered impossible, like long range bidirectional data links using milliwatts, however keep in mind that most of those ready made modules use closed sources protocols, and it's very hard if not impossible replicating their functionality using non proprietary parts. Does it mean they're of inferior quality compared to open source solutions? Absolutely not, but if the manufacturer decides to push another technology, all your beloved swarm of data transceivers sending sensor data back and forth becomes instantly obsolete. Also, give youngsters some access to old tech as well. I don't have a ham license, but by experience could possibly repair a damaged analog radio after an accident, then send a distress SOS call by using a screwdriver to close two contacts. It's forgotten practice, still there's one probability over a billion times that it could turn out useful.
Shoreleave 6y ago
Regarding attracting a newer generation: appearances are important! The first image on the page should not have people sitting on a toilet in what is obviously a bathroom. It's kind of crazy someone thought that was a good idea. Fear of being a loner who eats lunch in a school bathroom stall keeps kids away from electronics and hobbies like these.
nipponese 6y ago
A timely blog post for me: A close friend who is the same age as me (and an EE) has been trying to get me into Ham for over 10 years. I finally became interested and bought a $25 radio (BaoFeng UV-5R) on Amazon ... only to learn that I couldn't talk to my friend on Day 0 because 1. he lives >20 mi away, 2. no line of sight and had to learn about repeaters, and 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak. The proposition value that Ham is not an "old IM client" and instead a toy for analog protocol nerds took a long time to understand. Edit: added radio model, fixed price
- blnqr 6y ago
  I remember somebody saying Ham is just a bunch of grumpy old retired guys complaining about the government. Someone else said wait, we aren't all retired!
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  > 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?
  - wycy 6y ago
    There's no technical enforcement of this. I think this is just referring to the general conventions of the way people speak on ham radio, which is different.
    - creeble 6y ago
      And varies widely. Our club/repeaters don't have any obvious "cultural" norms or rules. Announcing your call sign as required by FCC ham rules is about the only obvious rule.
- generalizations 6y ago
  > I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak. That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.
marianov 6y ago
Depends on the country I guess. In the US you can watch videos from Ham Radio Crash Course and sit for a license online. The quiz is easy and you can then move on to learn more advanced stuff. The only focus should be on not breaking things (like interfering others or causing electrical havoc) In Argentina you only can sit for an exam after 30 2.5 hour lessons, that is several months listening to things you would better read/study out of a webpage. And the attitude if you try to suggest a simpler process is "you are a criminal wanting to circunvent the laws!" (this attitude also comes from guys in the US if you suggest things like asking if you could license on a country and operate on a different one. I'm better off using marine band, off road VHF frecuencies and GMRS as I please.
blnqr 6y ago
I became a ham out of love and respect for my deceased father, who held a General license, knew Morse code and had been a comms tech in the Air Force. I keep the license in case of emergencies. But neither of those (good) reasons are going to pull new people into Ham.
aphrax 6y ago
I remember trying to get into HAM a couple of years ago, I followed the standard advice of joining a local group - after emailing to enquire I received a reply which can only be described as rude, the exact opposite of welcoming. Kind of left a sour taste, a shame really - I should give it another go.
kawfey 6y ago
Reiterates a lot of the points from this post, "Millennials are Killing Ham Radio" [https://n0ssc.com/posts/583-millennials-are-killing-ham-radio https://n0ssc.com/posts/583-millennials-are-killing-ham-radi...]. There is a movement/revolution in ham radio occurring, led by young people online. Large youth-oriented groups like YOTA (in IARU region 1[0], 2[1] and 3[2]), YARC[3], YACHT[4], ILYH[5], and others. The advent of SDR and software-based radio peripherals has really opened the ham radio door up into the hackerspace, such that it's increasingly common to see radio-related articles on Hackaday. Remote operation is also growing immensely and giving young people a lot less barrier to entry into the real fun parts of HF operating. I have high hopes for the future of ham radio, especially after emailing with the new ARRL CEO [6]. He has a lot of plans and visions to fill the void where youth advocacy and modern marketing led by ARRL have fallen short. [0] https://www.ham-yota.com/ https://www.ham-yota.com/ [1] https://youthontheair.org/ https://youthontheair.org/ [2] https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/ https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/ [3] https://yarc.world/ https://yarc.world/ [4] http://yacht.younghams.org/ http://yacht.younghams.org/ [5] https://ilyh.org/ https://ilyh.org/ [6] http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-ceo-david-minster-na2aa http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-...
heyflyguy 6y ago
I wonder how much of the new licenses have to do with FPV flying and long range ISM radios for direct FMV feeds.
geocrasher 6y ago
I actually wrote an article on my blog that is making fun of the "Ham Radio Is Dying!" or "[This Radio Thing] is going to save Ham Radio!" crowds: https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/ https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/ if anyone cares to read it.
rawoke083600 6y ago
Im trying to get into HAM, My country South Africa, seems a bit disorganized with respect to HAM. The few emails Ive sent to the local (national) ham organisation has gone completely unanswered :/ I wished we had the USA's books and exam guides. It all looks like such a smooth licensing process. In South Africa - there only seems to be two licensing opportunities per year and I think I need to travel to another province to take exam. I have an uncle that is quite deep into the hobbie and he is also an E.E. He has this basement lab full of electronics and radio gear that just makes me a software dev giddy with excitement :) Think dexter lab ! ps. Any hams in and around Cape Town that wants to give me a quick intro or hands-on experience :) ?? Ps2. SideNote: Ive been trying to get into old school irc again. Had some good friends and community back in the 90s there.
oneplane 6y ago
I'm curious as to why you would bother with HAM. It used to give you something that wasn't available otherwise, but that hasn't been the case for a very long time. There are plenty of ways to communicate with whoever you want, however you want, whenever you want and completely encrypted too! I see a lot of anecdotes of special distaster cases when HAM was the magical solution, but I don't remember normal communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?
- asperous 6y ago
  My understanding is that it's a mix between a social club and a tinkering hobby. Just like people who own old motorcycles and tinker with them and join biker gangs. Similar idea
- kawfey 6y ago
  Because ham radio is fun. It's a different hobby than the other myriad ways of communications which you describe. It's a radio service explicitly dedicated to the personal enjoyment of radio. It is not a personal communication service in the likes of FRS, GMRS, or even part 15 (wifi), microwave, or cellular networks. Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked. It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation. There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed. Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.
RIMR 6y ago
As long as radio waves can travel through the air, amateur radio will not die. Why would it?
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  In 1900-1940 you could talk to people far outside walking distance, miles away, without needing to pay a phone bill or choose one person to ring up and talk to, using some of the most advanced technology on the planet, to achieve things you simply couldn't do any other way, and explore phenomena nobody had looked at. In 1940-~1990 you could talk to people internationally, places you could never go on holiday, watching valves give way to integrated circuits, lead acid batteries turning to NiCad, improving signal sensitivity, reliability, portability, take part in the hobby developing around the mass availability of personal cars for things like assisting at sports events, or disaster assistance and relaying emergency messages, competitions like radio contact from hilltops, taking part in the developing space industry - satellites! Now you can't build advanced radios from scratch in your shed, they're massively complicated microcontrollers. There's no need to build your own power supplies, cheap and efficient and reliable ones are abundant. There's no need to build your own radios, for the same reason. And the internet exists; chatrooms where you can talk to random people around the world are abundant, internet broadcasts of airport control towers and such are available, smartphones make portable contact nearly ubiquitous. Exploring new things is fine, but when you can find hundreds of YouTube videos showing you that it really is explored pretty thoroughly by now, that damps the allure.
- mtreis86 6y ago
  Politics, regulations, and lobbying by telecom companies are all wolves at the door of the hobby.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I am always very suspicious of graphs that use a vertical scale that doesn't start at 0. It makes you think the ham radio population has doubled or tripled, while in reality it only gained a few percentage points.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You shouldn't be suspicious! Not all data is best graphed starting at zero. Such as graphs with negative and positive values or ones intended to show differences in values where the magnitude of the changes are substantially less than that of the values.
raziel2701 6y ago
Not being confrontational, as someone that knows very little about ham radio, what is the appeal? My impression was that crusty old guys were into it and they'd speak all kinds of technical stuff and I was just not vibing with that whole scene.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  If you're into RF as a hobby or want to use RF gear in your projects, it's the cheapest, easiest, and most straightforward path to getting access to a whole bunch of radio spectrum and the ability to use a whole bunch of power. With a basic license you can run a 250W transmitter. With an advanced license you can run a 1kW transmitter. You have access to allocations pretty much across the entire spectrum[1]: * LF: ~136kHz * MF: ~476kHz, 1.8-2MHz * HF: 3.5MHz-4.0MHz, 7.0-7.3MHz, 10.1-10.15MHz, 14.0-14.35MHz, 18.068-18.168MHz, 21-21.45MHz, 24.89-24.99MHz, 28.0-29.7MHz * VHF: 50-54MHz, 144-148MHz, 219-220MHz, 222-225MHz * UHF: 420-450MHz, 902-928MHz, 1240-1300MHz, 2300-2310MHz, 2390-2450MHz * SHF: 3.3-3.5GHz, 5.650-5.925GHz, 10.0-10.5GHz, 24.0-24.25GHz * EHF: 47.0-47.2GHz, 75.5-81.0GHz, 122.5-123.0GHz, 134-141GHz, 241-250GHz An amateur radio license (depending on your locale, specific class may be required) allows you to build and operate your own equipment without any required pre-approval by the FCC or whatever your equivalent is. The license is attached to you personally. You can buy, build, or cobble together any equipment you'd like and operate it legally and take personal responsibility for ensuring you're operating within your assigned bands/modes/etc. It's basically an experimenter's license for radio. You can use it to talk to some old guys, participate in emergency preparedness stuff, work communications as a public service for events... but at it's core it's really just a license to use a huge chunk of radio spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_allocations#ITU_Region_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_alloca...
jodrellblank 6y ago
> "Getting young kids involved in ham radio [..] We must get children interested in the hobby." This has often had a bit of a creepy vibe to me. Not a sexually creepy vibe, more like the Church targetting children to instill a set of beliefs about the world before they develop critical thinking skill. More like "adults won't want to do it our way, they'll try and introduce all these new digital modes; we need to get to them while they're young to "instill the correct values"" creepy. Apart from that it has a "treating women as objects" vibe to it; imagine The Simpsons' Comicbook guy saying "we need more women in here", or Google saying "we want more women employed here", Or Peter Thiel and his "I want young people's blood"[1] ideas. Instead of wanting people with radio skills or technical skills or organizational skills, instead of valuing people's humanity and ability, only (non-sexually) fetishising one desirable attribute - age or gender or skin colour or malleability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning life inexperience) or excitability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning pre-cynical age). And apart from those ways, it's predatory in the sense of Facebook building its software to focus on how to extract information from you, instead of focusing on what you want. "We want more (youth/women/people of colour), nevermind what they want". You want more children interested, why should the children give a damn? In the way that incels aren't entitled to a woman's attention just because they want a girlfriend, amateur radio isn't entitled to young people just because it's ageing out. You want to expand amateur radio, no problem with that. Be interesting. Welcome whoever is interested. You want to spend more time with kids? Get out of the shed and volunteer at a school or play Fortnite, somewhere they are, and support what they are interested in. Don't be the "parent" saying they only have value to the extent that they mould themselves to the life shape you want them to have, they already have personalities, they are people not club-number-filler. (I'm neither young, nor a ham, but I've seen it as a sentiment over the years in RadCom the magazine for the Radio Society of Great Britain, not just in this blogpost, and other places which I won't try to name and shame, but this isn't just a rant from one line in one blog post). [1] allegedly.
hinkley 6y ago
You know that friend in college who turned out to be someone very different than the person you knew at the time? He may be out there with a family and community of his own, living it up, but the person you liked is gone, and it’s not just okay but perfectly normal to mourn that loss.
stakkur 6y ago
I'm a ham. I don't think there's hard data on the 'average age' of hams--it's very anecdotal. Nobody really knows that, and the ARRL or feds don't have the actual age of licensees documented. I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not. More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?
- ProZsolt 6y ago
  I was part of my university's ham club. Getting people onboard by saying that you could communicate with Australia is not niche any more in the internet age.
epx 6y ago
Personally I don't like the usage of proprietary codecs on digital voice. It was a letdown.
unnouinceput 6y ago
Quote: "Tell us why RHR would be a good fit for you" OMFG! Really? This corporate BS question, that I get tired of it every time I find a interesting project to bid on, and the naive potential client has it hidden in there - it's here for youngsters? I usually just go with a snarky "because I'm awesome" or "because I'm the best you'll get" on my potential clients. Hope youngsters are replying to them with "It's not, I'm a masochist".
rmason 6y ago
I wanted this essay to offer some hope and I was greatly disappointed. I've been a ham for over fifty years and an ARRL member for even longer. This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language? When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. When you were a kid few adults took you seriously or cared about your opinions. I joined a club, met all sorts of people. I became an expert on certain arcane parts of the hobby because they interested me. Suddenly when questions on this area of expertise came up I was the expert people four times my age consulted and this helped me gain self confidence. I also saw examples where not only age but race or sex just did not matter because we were all part of the ham radio fraternity. I think we need to pitch ham radio as a worthwhile pursuit to those budding nerds. Pick up technical knowledge that could lead to a career in engineering. A social club where the work done to pursue membership had its rewards. A chance to compare yourself to others in competition. Not everyone is a natural born athlete but we all have a desire to compete in something and ham radio contests are a way to do it.
- MrRadar 6y ago
  > This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language? I got my General license last year and this month I decided to give CW a try. I do have to say that as an absolute beginner developing my listening skills brings me back to when I was first learning Spanish in high school and how much effort it took to figure out where words started and ended. Obviously it's not quite as hard because you don't need to learn a large vocabulary, but don't brush it off as trivial. > When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. I think this has much more to do with economics and the progress of technology than it has to do with lack of interest. The Antique Wireless Museum recently posted a series of videos on their YouTube channel on the history of amateur radio and one of the things I learned was that before the 1950s commercially-produced transmitters for the amateur radio bands largely weren't a thing, so building them yourself was pretty much a requirement to get into the hobby. Additionally, up to the 1960s commercial electronics were largely still made entirely of discrete components hand-wired point-to-point which was a very labor-intensive method of construction. If you bought the parts yourself or you bought a kit you would be doing pretty much exactly the same thing they would be doing in the factory but on your own time, giving you large savings of money since you weren't paying for someone else's labor. Since then electronics manufacturing has advanced greatly: PCBs, surface mount components, pick-and-place machines, wave soldering, integrated circuits, etc. Many electronics devices you buy today would be much, much harder to try to build in a DIY environment than they would in a factory, even with a kit, and the labor costs are so much less due to these innovations (and overseas manufacturing) that you don't get the savings you once did. I see the surge in interest in SDRs (which bring the infinite malleability of software to radio at zero marginal cost once you have the SDR itself) as a sign that this interest in DIY never went away, it's just the accessibility of it that did.
anon776 6y ago
My offroad club has switched from CB to 2m. It really was not a challenge to convince people once they saw/heard the difference between AM and FM and the increased safety factor. Biggest hurdle was getting everyone licensed but the practice tests online make it pretty simple now. I think the future of HAM is finding practical uses for it that the average joe can take advantage of. Hikers, campers etc can buy a $40 radio on amazon now and have a great backup for when they are out of cell service.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I wonder if part of the problem is that if someone finds a sufficiently compelling application, it will be adapted into a product that avoids the need for a license. I know that the CB band was originally intended to be licensed, but they gave up on that once it became wildly popular in the 1970s, and it sounds like those FRS products are basically designed to avoid the user having to acquire a license. In that sort of situation, the Ham community is basically an incubator of communications products, 90% of which will remain niche or fail and 1% of which will be tweaked slightly and sold to non-Hams.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
I have been meaning to get into the hobby but without some basic equipment I havent even bothered to start. Also unsure about good resources to learn. I have heard of SDR but I am unsure how those work properly. Given the current state of things it might be worthwhile to pick it up sooner rather than later.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Step 1: seed the knowledge part of your brain by learning of the existence of an Elecraft’s KX2 and KX3 radios: https://elecraft.com/products/kx2-ssb-cw-data-80-10-m-transceiver https://elecraft.com/products/kx2-ssb-cw-data-80-10-m-transc... Step 2: sit back and relax as the rest of your brain goes into overdrive to attain a license in order to justify purchasing one of these radios. You never knew you wanted one until now! Time to start revising for the license exam!
riffic 6y ago
get your license folks!
funkaster 6y ago
Not necessarily HAM, but I just bought a pair of T800s[0] to use when I go camping with my 4yo son and friends. I'm trying to get him to understand how radios work so we have been having fun talking and learning how to use call signals, etc. What I really liked about the T800 is the Bluetooth modem that you can use to send extra data between radios (like chat and geo coords). [0]: https://shop.motorolasolutions.com/t800-two-way-radios/product/B8F22204LBHAAW https://shop.motorolasolutions.com/t800-two-way-radios/produ...
nyanpasu64 6y ago
I don't like how ham radio broadcasts are linked to your callsign under your legal name (deadname) and identity. It creates the potential for trolls who dislike like what you say to doxx you by sharing your legal identity and mailing address (taken from websites linked to the government database of licensees).
wcfields 6y ago
One factor that I bring up whenever the “ham radio is dying” discussion happen is the FCC public database and safety/doxxing, specifically for marginalized communities such as Trans individuals and Black folks. It, itself, is creating a safety concern in modern society for people that may want to join the hobby but fear doxxing and harassment. If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup. The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.
- geocrasher 6y ago
  With my last address change, I used a PO Box. My current physical address isn't listed in the FCC database (or qrz.com) and I use my PO Box everywhere else. You can find past addresses easily but not my current. I like it that way for the very reasons you've mentioned.
  - robertely 6y ago
    I'm studying for my test and they warn you that having an undeliverable address could get your license revoked. I wasn't sure how seriously to take that one.
    - geocrasher 6y ago
      Well considering how seriously they take the chatter that happens on some bands (extreme profanity etc) I'd not worry about it. But, its better to be above board completely. Safest route would be to have a PO Box at a forwarder in another town.
      - jupp0r 6y ago
        There are services who scan/forward mail for you. It's not cheap but convenient compared to a physical po box.
gaze 6y ago
Ham radio, the way boomers practice it, is very expensive and gatekeepey. I don't have money for some fancy expensive SDR. Also, I'm sorry, but the ham radio community these days is not actually that technically savvy. Most largely know enough to get their license. There's a weird crossover between the free energy community and preppers and ham radio. A lot just get their license and get expensive rigs and compare them. If I wanna get at the good engineers and have good technical chats, I just go to the extra-only bands but that's even more gatekeepey.
- gaze 6y ago
  Basically if I want technical questions answered, I'll post on EEVBlog. If I want to talk about how these dern kids and political correctness blah blah blah (I don't), I'll go on ham radio general/technician bands.
jokit 6y ago
As people begin to understand that centralization is pursued to have a central point of corruption, there becomes a push to decentralize. How many times have we seen in the last decade some regime attempting to block/constrict communication? It's not the abuse of power that is the problem but the power to abuse. The solution is permissionless, decentralized, alternatives.
lxe 6y ago
Getting interested in ham radio is difficult when you have a smartphone and internet. "I can just talk to the world from my phone... what's the point of this?" What really got me hooked is the fact that modern information infrastructure is so massive, expensive, and pervasive, and we just take it for granted. Ham radio lets you replicate some functional aspects of modern communication with literally nothing but $50 worth of parts and a long wire. No cell towers, no fiber, no undersea cables, no comcast, no google, no facebook, no internet servers/protocols/routers/hardware/etc... It's amazing how much of this you can just collapse into a hobby project.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
It would be interesting to see numbers for the actual active radio Hans rather than license holders. I’ve a feeling (but no proof) that a ham license today is more of a geeky/fun thing to get whilst learning about radio than it was 50 years ago and many with a license may have a UHF radio but don’t actively use it as much.
halcasteel 6y ago
I was really glad to find this thread, been doing electronics, do it yourself since the 1959 when I was six and met my first HAM who shared enough to get excited, my paper route got me enough cash to buy my first decent used shortwave receiver. That and a wire I ran from my second story bedroom out to the roof of the garage, and suddenly I was listening to people in different countries and developing a serious interest in languages and putting pins in a world map of everyone I had listened to in different parts of the world. Eventually I learned some of those languages and went lived in some those countries. HAM radio opened the world to me. I just got my General license in June and with SDR radio and my computer started listening in on HAMs. I was shocked at the language and topics and conversations. Way different than 60 years. Started shopping for a kit traceiver to build, hard to find one, not like the old Heathkit days, when I built my first radio when I was 8 years old. It made me sad, then I started realizing that the nerdy kids like me were into 3d printing and Arduino and robots. However, they are going to miss out on the IoT, which will be driven by radios. The young kids are going miss learning the electronics and radio skills I got to learn before I was ten. Those skills took me into computers, programming and physics eventually. I am experimenting now with open source SDR and Lora mesh radio. Still alot to learn. If we really want our country to these type of skill taught early enough to open kids minds to what is possible and that they can design and build it. In my life, it only took one HAM to open my mind. The rest is history...

311 points by lightlyused 6y ago

I saw this shared on Twitter this morning, and had some thoughts: While the graph is good, it is specific to the US and ignores the fact that a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ - the hobby is healthy now, but there's an age crisis coming soon. It doesn't really reflect the health of the entire hobby, globally, just a specific subset. Millenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials! That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects. I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!

melling 6y ago
I got my license 25 years ago and now I’m 50+. Even then the population skewed much older. I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.
- jcims 6y ago
  I'm just about ready for my ten year renewal and almost 50. Same for me. I got it for the ability to use APRS and other higher power options for high altitude balloon tracking (project never got off the ground hurr).
- ja27 6y ago
  Yeah I've been licensed for 25+ years and I'm still one of the younger hams here. I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles. Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.
mikece 6y ago
> a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being. There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.
- vidanay 6y ago
  There's also more than a fair share of OM spouting off about their gout, dieabeetus, negroes, and Jeezus. Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.
  - paulirwin 6y ago
    I assume you're being downvoted because of the terms you're using, but you're not wrong. Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people. In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.
brian_herman 6y ago
I've been to ham radio clubs and the age gap is real. I go to the meetups in the Chicago land area and only see about one or two people my age. The people my age are usually sons or daughters of the older people.
- hibby 6y ago
  This is a big problem in the UK too. The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club. This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique. I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!
- armadsen 6y ago
  I got my license at age 15 in 1999. I'm 36 now, and still among the "young" people in the local club. That said, ham radio has been a huge, important part of my life, and is what inspired me to be an engineer. The people I've met through it, both young and old, have been really great.
detaro 6y ago
Two additional things from someone who has considered getting a license a few times, but never quite made the jump because it wasn't clear what for in the end: - a bunch of interesting radio things are available without a license today - e.g. hunting for various signals with a cheap SDR receiver. Which could potentially be a way for ham communities to then get people deeper into it, but the communities seem quite distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities) - online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through) A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory). EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!
- hibby 6y ago
  Gosh it's weird to be recognised on HN for something good that I've done :D
- bityard 6y ago
  I can't say I disagree with you. I got my ham radio license in my late 30's because radio has always fascinated the hell out of me, even as a kid. But when I was a kid, being able to talk to someone far away without incurring the cost of a long-distance phone call was still a novelty. The ubiquity of the Internet and smart phones took away that particular novelty. I still have a radio (several, actually) and one day when I have a larger piece of property I may even set up a reasonable HF station to participate in contests and the like but right now it's hard to justify spending time on a hobby that has little productive value at the end of the day.
crocodiletears 6y ago
This is why I've swerved off of getting into HAM. By popular perception (in my circles, and perception doesn't necessarily reflect reality) it's a chatroom for boomers (not necessarily a bad thing) waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), with a cost of entry of at least a hundred dollars for equipment that supports a fixed set of protocols with a very narrow use-case. Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
- BenjiWiebe 6y ago
  Mid 20's Extra here... Experimentation is totally allowed. Either the FCC will ignore the complaint, or you are actually outside the (very lenient) experimentation rules.
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    That's good to know. Any reccommended place to get started (assuming I already own an rtl-sdr)?
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), This is what always kept me away from HAM Radios. Everyone I knew that was into it was a huge stickler about the rules and would talk about all the bad stuff that should happen to rule breakers. It was pretty unnerving.
  - ezren 6y ago
    One of the express purposes of the amateur radio service is to facilitate experimentation and innovation in radio technology, and the FCC grants special licenses for that purpose all the time. There's a significant amount of harm you can do with a radio, so willfully causing interference to other radio services will earn you a hefty penalty. You should definitely get into amateur radio if you have an interest, and maybe look into some of the instances the FCC actually issued fines - if you're not out to cause harm you have nothing to worry about.
abruzzi 6y ago
I would agree that online there are a bunch of loud "get off my lawn" type voicer (I remember a published article on one of the bigger ham forums, where the guy bemoaned that a local ham club advertised a event as a "maker" event to appeal to young people, to him maker was for women, i.e. home maker.) But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)
jdietrich 6y ago
Here in the UK, we've seen a huge surge in people - especially younger people - getting licensed since lockdown, in large part because it's now possible to take your license exams online. I think that the RSGB (our ARRL) had severely under-estimated the amount of friction in the old examination system and the amount of pent-up demand created by things like RTL-SDR.
- m0xte 6y ago
  That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help. Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.
bobloblaw45 6y ago
My dad is/was a ham. My experience growing up with ham radio in the house was so negative that it's just kinda a turn off for me. Going back to the early 90s, for a lot of those old boomer types ham was mostly just a way to out-do eachother by showing off their rigs. It's kind of disappointing to me that they have this awesome technology they could have been taking to the next level but instead just spend hours whistling into the mic and bragging. In addition I got a sense that many of the old guys were actively working as gatekeepers as a way to stroke their own egos. These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.

jron 6y ago

When I first read about FT8, I immediately started looking at the code to see how simple it would be to handle more meaningful conversations. Fortunately I stumbled onto this video from Jordan Sherer: https://youtu.be/mZKhVcFOljY https://youtu.be/mZKhVcFOljY He had done all the work for me in JS8Call: https://bitbucket.org/widefido/js8call/ https://bitbucket.org/widefido/js8call/ If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call

jsherer 6y ago
Glad you found me :) Here's the main site where you can learn more: http://js8call.com/ http://js8call.com/ And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o
- hibby 6y ago
  oh JS8 is your fault? It's great, I love it and have been enjoying it for the last few months - thank you so much!
  - jsherer 6y ago
    Awesome. Hope to see you on the air sometime :)
- ryanianian 6y ago
  Thanks for your work. JS8Call seems really cool, but I can never make any contacts with it. Maybe bad luck, but every time I try on 20m through 80m there's nobody on the other end. (FT8 and friends working fine.)
  - jron 6y ago
    The number of FT8 contacts dwarf JS8. That said, 40m is probably your best bet for making contacts on JS8 at the moment.

woofcat 6y ago

As someone who has looked on into the hobby in Canada. I feel there needs to be another class for people who just want to use a store bought radio. I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment. Just my two cents.

alibarber 6y ago
Interesting - in the UK we have a 'Foundation' license which is effectively just that. Sadly I don't think you could take it and use it abroad (i.e. outside the UK) though.
- iuguy 6y ago
  You can't. I passed my foundation this month and am moving to the Republic of Ireland later this year, so I won't be able to operate from there. Ireland has a Class A/B licence a bit like the old City & Guilds exam, so there's a massive gulf between foundation and a Class A licence. There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down. As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
  - alibarber 6y ago
    Yeah I'm kinda in the same place (not literally, but I'm not a UK resident - Finland now) so I leveled up to intermediate but I'm still waiting on Full (which gives you HAREC, so a reciprocal full in most of the world) before I start transmitting, do hope the RSGB set it up soon :)
jcims 6y ago
You can definitely do that for the 2 and .75 meter bands. $30 off of Amazon for a BaoFeng. HF and the bottom half of VHF is where you start needing more (expensive) equipment and the antenna setup begins to really dominate performance. The other problem is that you'll go through all of the expense for a turnkey radio, get on the bands and all you hear people talking about is their radio setup.

TomMasz 6y ago

The overwhelming majority of hams are male, white and old (like me). Just take a look at most of the photos in QST or glance around a hamfest sometime. There is some synergy happening with the Maker crowd but it doesn't seem to me that it will be enough to keep ham radio alive.

tyingq 6y ago

I would guess that Digital Mobile Radio gets held back by the fact that most of the internet is now SSL/TLS. And that you aren't supposed to (outside of emergencies) pass encrypted traffic over Ham.

alibarber 6y ago

COVID has been a shot in the arm for Ham in the UK in my opinion, the best thing being remote exam invigilation. Now it's possible to study in your own time and take the exam when it suits you - not just a couple of times a year, or in a place miles away! Indeed, there's a lot to be said for meeting up as a club - like anything really, but the logistics of the exam system seemed like a vicious circle in the past: Not that many people are going to do it, so it's not worth setting one up and booking a facility and all the paperwork that often, so fewer people are going to be able to take it...

iuguy 6y ago
I did exactly that, passed my foundation online at the start of this month. I've been on my local 2m net a couple of times, but still setting up my rig. I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next. This is more that people studying online aren't part of clubs. I'm still learning etiquette and I think we'll end up with a lot of new passes ignoring it in 6 months time as behaviours become ingrained.
- alibarber 6y ago
  Good point - I am optimistic that people will naturally find other local hams / clubs and join or establish communities and meetups and things. But it'll be interesting to see... Must confess that I don't actually live in the UK any more so I am having to hold out for the Full to become available online before I get back on the air so I haven't been listening in or transmitting. For me though I'm really keen to just build analogue circuits and QRP stuff, so I've been enjoying studying this lately.
- hwatson 6y ago
  I think what you're describing is what the RSGB have been attempting to mitigate through the Beyond Exams schemes, wherein they've gamified different activities you could do on your own or with a club to further your knowledge of amateur radio. https://rsgb.org/main/beyond-exams-building-experience/ https://rsgb.org/main/beyond-exams-building-experience/
- 6y ago

rthomas6 6y ago

I think a lot of young(er) people like me who would otherwise get into ham radio are being sniped by SDR. You can buy a $30 piece of hardware and listen to planes talking to the airport, see weather imaging from satellites, intercept and read pager messages, listen to emergency and police radio, listen to all channels of consumer grade walkie talkies, and also just generally see the invisible world of wireless communications going on around us. For a few hundred dollars, you can transmit things back. All on frequencies that require no license with equipment that is very cheap compared to ham radio.

wrkronmiller 6y ago
As someone who holds but doesn't use a Technician Class license, I completely agree. As someone commented below, sending encrypted data over HAM frequencies is not allowed (IANAL), which also rules out a lot of interesting projects and use-cases.
- mikece 6y ago
  There is a proviso that goes with that. If you're doing a metro-area mesh network (some of the WiFi overlap with the 2.4GHz amateur band!) you can use WEP or WPA as long as the password for joining the network is "publicly available." Putting the current password on the website for the club/group running the project is sufficient to demonstrate, for FCC purposes, that the communications are open.
  - Retr0spectrum 6y ago
    What happens if I use SSL over the top of such a network? Is that allowed? If the answer is yes, it seems more like a loophole in the rules than anything.
    - hpoe 6y ago
      Probably not. These rules were put in place to prevent spies from using HAM to exfil data during the Cold War. Really I think it should be something that should be revisited but I don't know how the 3 letter agency's would like a method of communication that they can't access.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

Someone help me understand what is the exciting thing about HAM cause this article doesn't do anything for that. My first exposure to HAM was back in ~2000 when I started working at a car stereo shop and the owner (NU5K) was huge into HAM. He was an asshole most of the time, but very knowledgeable and loved to tinker with different HAM components both benchtop and mobile. Everytime I would try and get interested the end result promise was something like: "You can bounce a wave off a cloud and talk with someone in Ukraine!" Ok, well I can also do that on ukraine.bbs - and being able to choose my topic instead of whomever is actually on this random band at this random time. Even moreso now - there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc. I see no reason that anyone would mess with HAM.

JshWright 6y ago
Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I enjoy being a ham (it's not an acronym, BTW). I get to tinker and constantly stretch my knowledge and technical skills.
- mikece 6y ago
  I've always hated the "HAM" moniker and have always been pedantic about referring to it as "amateur radio."
  - JshWright 6y ago
    It might help if you don't all-caps shout it...
jedimastert 6y ago
It's a gigantic hobby that touches a lot of different nerdy things. First of, there's a wack-ton of science you can just dive straight into, with a lot of literature around because ham's been around for a long time. Are you in to EE and hacking? Cool! You can build your own radios! Are you into pushing boundries? DX (chasing long distance contacts) is for you. There's QRP (super low power) where you can talk to an amazing amount of people over morse code with just 5 watt and a deadnuts simple transmitter. It's like making a cellphone with a 9v and an altoids tin and talking to someone halfway cross the country. There's also the civic duty aspect, there even folk with just handie talkies (walkie-talkie-sized ham radios made for shorter-distance trasmission) can do their part in a natural disaster. But above all that, there's a really hands-on feel to making something out of bits and bobs and suddenly someone is talking to you!

geocrasher 6y ago

For as long as I can remember there have been people worried about the Old White Guys Club aspect of ham radio. "ham radio is dying!" they say. Well, the old guys keep pushing daisies and younger guys (not always young!) come along and do things. It's how it goes. And not all of us are club affiliated ARRL card carrying robots. I eschew all of that in favor of just having fun doing my own thing, and one thing I've learned: There are a lot of hams just like me.

vidanay 6y ago

Check out TARPN for an interesting usage of ham and more modern tinkering. http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html

ka2dew 6y ago
Off the grid text messaging attracts young people into the hobby and retains existing hams, especially the young ones. This is a worthy concept.

joeclark77 6y ago

Learning about ham radio was one of my new "pandemic hobbies" and I got my license in June. I don't think it's dying at all; in fact, to me it's much more exclusive than Internet chatting or playing with Arduino. Both because of the licensing requirement, and because you need to learn something about electronics. That exclusivity is a draw! Similarly, learning CW (morse code) has become more popular since they dropped the requirement -- people like to learn things that are a challenge! I have kids aged 9 and younger, and their friends are starting to get cell phones. I'm hoping I can get them to earn their technician licenses so I can give them cheap radios instead; then they can have their own "social network" without all the harmful stuff a smartphone gives access to.

nickt 6y ago

TAPR [1] is a ham radio club that has a focus on digital stuff, it’s fantastically interesting geekery and should appeal to the HN crowd. The monthly newsletter, the Packet Status Register [2] is a great read, with projects typically involving radio, electronics, software and mechanicals. The TAPR Digital Communications Conference (virtual this year) is in just a few weeks [3]. It’s one of the few Amateur Radio clubs I know that has a Github repo [4] [1] https://tapr.org/about/ https://tapr.org/about/ [2] https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ [3] https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ [4] https://github.com/TAPR https://github.com/TAPR

joshmlewis 6y ago

Some of the growth is due to the rise of drone communications. In drone racing you are supposed to have a HAM license to operate your video transmitter on certain frequencies and powers. I'd bet a good chunk of the growth is from that.

Igorvelky 6y ago

My 5G mobile PHONE can provide me with 200MHZ of bandwidth and frequency range from 400 MHz to 7 GHZ So yes, HAM is DYING because outdated legislation is denying me same goodness in my mobile 6Watt radio.

abruzzi 6y ago
but an amateur license potentially gives you access to 1.8 mhz up to beyond 10ghz.
- lightlyused 6y ago
  There are allocations below 1.8 MHz now.
- Igorvelky 6y ago
  200MHz channel spacing capable radio. It is not that hard.
retrac 6y ago
There's more than 500 MHz of spectrum allocated to amateurs between 400 and 7 GHz in most jurisdictions. 420 - 450 MHz, 902 - 928 MHz, 1240 - 1300 MHz, 2390 - 2450 MHz, 3300 - 3500 MHz, 5650 - 5925 MHz are amateur bands here, and I think in the USA. It's also generally very illegal as a hobbyist to build and operate your own transmitter, except with an amateur radio licence. If you're more interested in how the phone works and building your own, than just using it, that's what amateur radio is for.
- Igorvelky 6y ago
  i can simultaneously receive and transmit a 200MHz wide part of band in frequencies between 400MHz an 7GHz with my mobile SDR 5G phone after flashing custom firmware. so what channel spacing do you use on your ham radio?
  - retrac 6y ago
    My interest lies mostly in building my own SDRs. I'm not quite sure what you're asking as I don't even have a traditional voice transceiver. I got my licence so I can build radio equipment.

squarefoot 6y ago

I love the new technologies allowing what once was considered impossible, like long range bidirectional data links using milliwatts, however keep in mind that most of those ready made modules use closed sources protocols, and it's very hard if not impossible replicating their functionality using non proprietary parts. Does it mean they're of inferior quality compared to open source solutions? Absolutely not, but if the manufacturer decides to push another technology, all your beloved swarm of data transceivers sending sensor data back and forth becomes instantly obsolete. Also, give youngsters some access to old tech as well. I don't have a ham license, but by experience could possibly repair a damaged analog radio after an accident, then send a distress SOS call by using a screwdriver to close two contacts. It's forgotten practice, still there's one probability over a billion times that it could turn out useful.

Shoreleave 6y ago

Regarding attracting a newer generation: appearances are important! The first image on the page should not have people sitting on a toilet in what is obviously a bathroom. It's kind of crazy someone thought that was a good idea. Fear of being a loner who eats lunch in a school bathroom stall keeps kids away from electronics and hobbies like these.

nipponese 6y ago

A timely blog post for me: A close friend who is the same age as me (and an EE) has been trying to get me into Ham for over 10 years. I finally became interested and bought a $25 radio (BaoFeng UV-5R) on Amazon ... only to learn that I couldn't talk to my friend on Day 0 because 1. he lives >20 mi away, 2. no line of sight and had to learn about repeaters, and 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak. The proposition value that Ham is not an "old IM client" and instead a toy for analog protocol nerds took a long time to understand. Edit: added radio model, fixed price

blnqr 6y ago
I remember somebody saying Ham is just a bunch of grumpy old retired guys complaining about the government. Someone else said wait, we aren't all retired!
jimhefferon 6y ago
> 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?
- wycy 6y ago
  There's no technical enforcement of this. I think this is just referring to the general conventions of the way people speak on ham radio, which is different.
  - creeble 6y ago
    And varies widely. Our club/repeaters don't have any obvious "cultural" norms or rules. Announcing your call sign as required by FCC ham rules is about the only obvious rule.
generalizations 6y ago
> I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak. That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.

marianov 6y ago

Depends on the country I guess. In the US you can watch videos from Ham Radio Crash Course and sit for a license online. The quiz is easy and you can then move on to learn more advanced stuff. The only focus should be on not breaking things (like interfering others or causing electrical havoc) In Argentina you only can sit for an exam after 30 2.5 hour lessons, that is several months listening to things you would better read/study out of a webpage. And the attitude if you try to suggest a simpler process is "you are a criminal wanting to circunvent the laws!" (this attitude also comes from guys in the US if you suggest things like asking if you could license on a country and operate on a different one. I'm better off using marine band, off road VHF frecuencies and GMRS as I please.

blnqr 6y ago

I became a ham out of love and respect for my deceased father, who held a General license, knew Morse code and had been a comms tech in the Air Force. I keep the license in case of emergencies. But neither of those (good) reasons are going to pull new people into Ham.

aphrax 6y ago

I remember trying to get into HAM a couple of years ago, I followed the standard advice of joining a local group - after emailing to enquire I received a reply which can only be described as rude, the exact opposite of welcoming. Kind of left a sour taste, a shame really - I should give it another go.

kawfey 6y ago

Reiterates a lot of the points from this post, "Millennials are Killing Ham Radio" [https://n0ssc.com/posts/583-millennials-are-killing-ham-radio https://n0ssc.com/posts/583-millennials-are-killing-ham-radi...]. There is a movement/revolution in ham radio occurring, led by young people online. Large youth-oriented groups like YOTA (in IARU region 1[0], 2[1] and 3[2]), YARC[3], YACHT[4], ILYH[5], and others. The advent of SDR and software-based radio peripherals has really opened the ham radio door up into the hackerspace, such that it's increasingly common to see radio-related articles on Hackaday. Remote operation is also growing immensely and giving young people a lot less barrier to entry into the real fun parts of HF operating. I have high hopes for the future of ham radio, especially after emailing with the new ARRL CEO [6]. He has a lot of plans and visions to fill the void where youth advocacy and modern marketing led by ARRL have fallen short. [0] https://www.ham-yota.com/ https://www.ham-yota.com/ [1] https://youthontheair.org/ https://youthontheair.org/ [2] https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/ https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/ [3] https://yarc.world/ https://yarc.world/ [4] http://yacht.younghams.org/ http://yacht.younghams.org/ [5] https://ilyh.org/ https://ilyh.org/ [6] http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-ceo-david-minster-na2aa http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-...

heyflyguy 6y ago

I wonder how much of the new licenses have to do with FPV flying and long range ISM radios for direct FMV feeds.

geocrasher 6y ago

I actually wrote an article on my blog that is making fun of the "Ham Radio Is Dying!" or "[This Radio Thing] is going to save Ham Radio!" crowds: https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/ https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/ if anyone cares to read it.

rawoke083600 6y ago

Im trying to get into HAM, My country South Africa, seems a bit disorganized with respect to HAM. The few emails Ive sent to the local (national) ham organisation has gone completely unanswered :/ I wished we had the USA's books and exam guides. It all looks like such a smooth licensing process. In South Africa - there only seems to be two licensing opportunities per year and I think I need to travel to another province to take exam. I have an uncle that is quite deep into the hobbie and he is also an E.E. He has this basement lab full of electronics and radio gear that just makes me a software dev giddy with excitement :) Think dexter lab ! ps. Any hams in and around Cape Town that wants to give me a quick intro or hands-on experience :) ?? Ps2. SideNote: Ive been trying to get into old school irc again. Had some good friends and community back in the 90s there.

oneplane 6y ago

I'm curious as to why you would bother with HAM. It used to give you something that wasn't available otherwise, but that hasn't been the case for a very long time. There are plenty of ways to communicate with whoever you want, however you want, whenever you want and completely encrypted too! I see a lot of anecdotes of special distaster cases when HAM was the magical solution, but I don't remember normal communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?

asperous 6y ago
My understanding is that it's a mix between a social club and a tinkering hobby. Just like people who own old motorcycles and tinker with them and join biker gangs. Similar idea
kawfey 6y ago
Because ham radio is fun. It's a different hobby than the other myriad ways of communications which you describe. It's a radio service explicitly dedicated to the personal enjoyment of radio. It is not a personal communication service in the likes of FRS, GMRS, or even part 15 (wifi), microwave, or cellular networks. Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked. It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation. There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed. Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.

RIMR 6y ago

As long as radio waves can travel through the air, amateur radio will not die. Why would it?

jodrellblank 6y ago
In 1900-1940 you could talk to people far outside walking distance, miles away, without needing to pay a phone bill or choose one person to ring up and talk to, using some of the most advanced technology on the planet, to achieve things you simply couldn't do any other way, and explore phenomena nobody had looked at. In 1940-~1990 you could talk to people internationally, places you could never go on holiday, watching valves give way to integrated circuits, lead acid batteries turning to NiCad, improving signal sensitivity, reliability, portability, take part in the hobby developing around the mass availability of personal cars for things like assisting at sports events, or disaster assistance and relaying emergency messages, competitions like radio contact from hilltops, taking part in the developing space industry - satellites! Now you can't build advanced radios from scratch in your shed, they're massively complicated microcontrollers. There's no need to build your own power supplies, cheap and efficient and reliable ones are abundant. There's no need to build your own radios, for the same reason. And the internet exists; chatrooms where you can talk to random people around the world are abundant, internet broadcasts of airport control towers and such are available, smartphones make portable contact nearly ubiquitous. Exploring new things is fine, but when you can find hundreds of YouTube videos showing you that it really is explored pretty thoroughly by now, that damps the allure.
mtreis86 6y ago
Politics, regulations, and lobbying by telecom companies are all wolves at the door of the hobby.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I am always very suspicious of graphs that use a vertical scale that doesn't start at 0. It makes you think the ham radio population has doubled or tripled, while in reality it only gained a few percentage points.

mywittyname 6y ago
You shouldn't be suspicious! Not all data is best graphed starting at zero. Such as graphs with negative and positive values or ones intended to show differences in values where the magnitude of the changes are substantially less than that of the values.

raziel2701 6y ago

Not being confrontational, as someone that knows very little about ham radio, what is the appeal? My impression was that crusty old guys were into it and they'd speak all kinds of technical stuff and I was just not vibing with that whole scene.

nucleardog 6y ago
If you're into RF as a hobby or want to use RF gear in your projects, it's the cheapest, easiest, and most straightforward path to getting access to a whole bunch of radio spectrum and the ability to use a whole bunch of power. With a basic license you can run a 250W transmitter. With an advanced license you can run a 1kW transmitter. You have access to allocations pretty much across the entire spectrum[1]: * LF: ~136kHz * MF: ~476kHz, 1.8-2MHz * HF: 3.5MHz-4.0MHz, 7.0-7.3MHz, 10.1-10.15MHz, 14.0-14.35MHz, 18.068-18.168MHz, 21-21.45MHz, 24.89-24.99MHz, 28.0-29.7MHz * VHF: 50-54MHz, 144-148MHz, 219-220MHz, 222-225MHz * UHF: 420-450MHz, 902-928MHz, 1240-1300MHz, 2300-2310MHz, 2390-2450MHz * SHF: 3.3-3.5GHz, 5.650-5.925GHz, 10.0-10.5GHz, 24.0-24.25GHz * EHF: 47.0-47.2GHz, 75.5-81.0GHz, 122.5-123.0GHz, 134-141GHz, 241-250GHz An amateur radio license (depending on your locale, specific class may be required) allows you to build and operate your own equipment without any required pre-approval by the FCC or whatever your equivalent is. The license is attached to you personally. You can buy, build, or cobble together any equipment you'd like and operate it legally and take personal responsibility for ensuring you're operating within your assigned bands/modes/etc. It's basically an experimenter's license for radio. You can use it to talk to some old guys, participate in emergency preparedness stuff, work communications as a public service for events... but at it's core it's really just a license to use a huge chunk of radio spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_allocations#ITU_Region_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_alloca...

jodrellblank 6y ago

> "Getting young kids involved in ham radio [..] We must get children interested in the hobby." This has often had a bit of a creepy vibe to me. Not a sexually creepy vibe, more like the Church targetting children to instill a set of beliefs about the world before they develop critical thinking skill. More like "adults won't want to do it our way, they'll try and introduce all these new digital modes; we need to get to them while they're young to "instill the correct values"" creepy. Apart from that it has a "treating women as objects" vibe to it; imagine The Simpsons' Comicbook guy saying "we need more women in here", or Google saying "we want more women employed here", Or Peter Thiel and his "I want young people's blood"[1] ideas. Instead of wanting people with radio skills or technical skills or organizational skills, instead of valuing people's humanity and ability, only (non-sexually) fetishising one desirable attribute - age or gender or skin colour or malleability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning life inexperience) or excitability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning pre-cynical age). And apart from those ways, it's predatory in the sense of Facebook building its software to focus on how to extract information from you, instead of focusing on what you want. "We want more (youth/women/people of colour), nevermind what they want". You want more children interested, why should the children give a damn? In the way that incels aren't entitled to a woman's attention just because they want a girlfriend, amateur radio isn't entitled to young people just because it's ageing out. You want to expand amateur radio, no problem with that. Be interesting. Welcome whoever is interested. You want to spend more time with kids? Get out of the shed and volunteer at a school or play Fortnite, somewhere they are, and support what they are interested in. Don't be the "parent" saying they only have value to the extent that they mould themselves to the life shape you want them to have, they already have personalities, they are people not club-number-filler. (I'm neither young, nor a ham, but I've seen it as a sentiment over the years in RadCom the magazine for the Radio Society of Great Britain, not just in this blogpost, and other places which I won't try to name and shame, but this isn't just a rant from one line in one blog post). [1] allegedly.

hinkley 6y ago

You know that friend in college who turned out to be someone very different than the person you knew at the time? He may be out there with a family and community of his own, living it up, but the person you liked is gone, and it’s not just okay but perfectly normal to mourn that loss.

stakkur 6y ago

I'm a ham. I don't think there's hard data on the 'average age' of hams--it's very anecdotal. Nobody really knows that, and the ARRL or feds don't have the actual age of licensees documented. I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not. More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?

ProZsolt 6y ago
I was part of my university's ham club. Getting people onboard by saying that you could communicate with Australia is not niche any more in the internet age.

epx 6y ago

Personally I don't like the usage of proprietary codecs on digital voice. It was a letdown.

unnouinceput 6y ago

Quote: "Tell us why RHR would be a good fit for you" OMFG! Really? This corporate BS question, that I get tired of it every time I find a interesting project to bid on, and the naive potential client has it hidden in there - it's here for youngsters? I usually just go with a snarky "because I'm awesome" or "because I'm the best you'll get" on my potential clients. Hope youngsters are replying to them with "It's not, I'm a masochist".

rmason 6y ago

I wanted this essay to offer some hope and I was greatly disappointed. I've been a ham for over fifty years and an ARRL member for even longer. This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language? When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. When you were a kid few adults took you seriously or cared about your opinions. I joined a club, met all sorts of people. I became an expert on certain arcane parts of the hobby because they interested me. Suddenly when questions on this area of expertise came up I was the expert people four times my age consulted and this helped me gain self confidence. I also saw examples where not only age but race or sex just did not matter because we were all part of the ham radio fraternity. I think we need to pitch ham radio as a worthwhile pursuit to those budding nerds. Pick up technical knowledge that could lead to a career in engineering. A social club where the work done to pursue membership had its rewards. A chance to compare yourself to others in competition. Not everyone is a natural born athlete but we all have a desire to compete in something and ham radio contests are a way to do it.

MrRadar 6y ago
> This guy compares learning Morse code to learning a foreign language! How does learning the alphabet, numbers and a little punctuation compare to learning a language? I got my General license last year and this month I decided to give CW a try. I do have to say that as an absolute beginner developing my listening skills brings me back to when I was first learning Spanish in high school and how much effort it took to figure out where words started and ended. Obviously it's not quite as hard because you don't need to learn a large vocabulary, but don't brush it off as trivial. > When I started over half of us built our own rigs, now it's probably 5%. I think this has much more to do with economics and the progress of technology than it has to do with lack of interest. The Antique Wireless Museum recently posted a series of videos on their YouTube channel on the history of amateur radio and one of the things I learned was that before the 1950s commercially-produced transmitters for the amateur radio bands largely weren't a thing, so building them yourself was pretty much a requirement to get into the hobby. Additionally, up to the 1960s commercial electronics were largely still made entirely of discrete components hand-wired point-to-point which was a very labor-intensive method of construction. If you bought the parts yourself or you bought a kit you would be doing pretty much exactly the same thing they would be doing in the factory but on your own time, giving you large savings of money since you weren't paying for someone else's labor. Since then electronics manufacturing has advanced greatly: PCBs, surface mount components, pick-and-place machines, wave soldering, integrated circuits, etc. Many electronics devices you buy today would be much, much harder to try to build in a DIY environment than they would in a factory, even with a kit, and the labor costs are so much less due to these innovations (and overseas manufacturing) that you don't get the savings you once did. I see the surge in interest in SDRs (which bring the infinite malleability of software to radio at zero marginal cost once you have the SDR itself) as a sign that this interest in DIY never went away, it's just the accessibility of it that did.

anon776 6y ago

My offroad club has switched from CB to 2m. It really was not a challenge to convince people once they saw/heard the difference between AM and FM and the increased safety factor. Biggest hurdle was getting everyone licensed but the practice tests online make it pretty simple now. I think the future of HAM is finding practical uses for it that the average joe can take advantage of. Hikers, campers etc can buy a $40 radio on amazon now and have a great backup for when they are out of cell service.

hakfoo 6y ago
I wonder if part of the problem is that if someone finds a sufficiently compelling application, it will be adapted into a product that avoids the need for a license. I know that the CB band was originally intended to be licensed, but they gave up on that once it became wildly popular in the 1970s, and it sounds like those FRS products are basically designed to avoid the user having to acquire a license. In that sort of situation, the Ham community is basically an incubator of communications products, 90% of which will remain niche or fail and 1% of which will be tweaked slightly and sold to non-Hams.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

I have been meaning to get into the hobby but without some basic equipment I havent even bothered to start. Also unsure about good resources to learn. I have heard of SDR but I am unsure how those work properly. Given the current state of things it might be worthwhile to pick it up sooner rather than later.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Step 1: seed the knowledge part of your brain by learning of the existence of an Elecraft’s KX2 and KX3 radios: https://elecraft.com/products/kx2-ssb-cw-data-80-10-m-transceiver https://elecraft.com/products/kx2-ssb-cw-data-80-10-m-transc... Step 2: sit back and relax as the rest of your brain goes into overdrive to attain a license in order to justify purchasing one of these radios. You never knew you wanted one until now! Time to start revising for the license exam!

riffic 6y ago

get your license folks!

funkaster 6y ago

Not necessarily HAM, but I just bought a pair of T800s[0] to use when I go camping with my 4yo son and friends. I'm trying to get him to understand how radios work so we have been having fun talking and learning how to use call signals, etc. What I really liked about the T800 is the Bluetooth modem that you can use to send extra data between radios (like chat and geo coords). [0]: https://shop.motorolasolutions.com/t800-two-way-radios/product/B8F22204LBHAAW https://shop.motorolasolutions.com/t800-two-way-radios/produ...

nyanpasu64 6y ago

I don't like how ham radio broadcasts are linked to your callsign under your legal name (deadname) and identity. It creates the potential for trolls who dislike like what you say to doxx you by sharing your legal identity and mailing address (taken from websites linked to the government database of licensees).

wcfields 6y ago

One factor that I bring up whenever the “ham radio is dying” discussion happen is the FCC public database and safety/doxxing, specifically for marginalized communities such as Trans individuals and Black folks. It, itself, is creating a safety concern in modern society for people that may want to join the hobby but fear doxxing and harassment. If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup. The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.

geocrasher 6y ago
With my last address change, I used a PO Box. My current physical address isn't listed in the FCC database (or qrz.com) and I use my PO Box everywhere else. You can find past addresses easily but not my current. I like it that way for the very reasons you've mentioned.
- robertely 6y ago
  I'm studying for my test and they warn you that having an undeliverable address could get your license revoked. I wasn't sure how seriously to take that one.
  - geocrasher 6y ago
    Well considering how seriously they take the chatter that happens on some bands (extreme profanity etc) I'd not worry about it. But, its better to be above board completely. Safest route would be to have a PO Box at a forwarder in another town.
    - jupp0r 6y ago
      There are services who scan/forward mail for you. It's not cheap but convenient compared to a physical po box.

gaze 6y ago

Ham radio, the way boomers practice it, is very expensive and gatekeepey. I don't have money for some fancy expensive SDR. Also, I'm sorry, but the ham radio community these days is not actually that technically savvy. Most largely know enough to get their license. There's a weird crossover between the free energy community and preppers and ham radio. A lot just get their license and get expensive rigs and compare them. If I wanna get at the good engineers and have good technical chats, I just go to the extra-only bands but that's even more gatekeepey.

gaze 6y ago
Basically if I want technical questions answered, I'll post on EEVBlog. If I want to talk about how these dern kids and political correctness blah blah blah (I don't), I'll go on ham radio general/technician bands.

jokit 6y ago

As people begin to understand that centralization is pursued to have a central point of corruption, there becomes a push to decentralize. How many times have we seen in the last decade some regime attempting to block/constrict communication? It's not the abuse of power that is the problem but the power to abuse. The solution is permissionless, decentralized, alternatives.

lxe 6y ago

Getting interested in ham radio is difficult when you have a smartphone and internet. "I can just talk to the world from my phone... what's the point of this?" What really got me hooked is the fact that modern information infrastructure is so massive, expensive, and pervasive, and we just take it for granted. Ham radio lets you replicate some functional aspects of modern communication with literally nothing but $50 worth of parts and a long wire. No cell towers, no fiber, no undersea cables, no comcast, no google, no facebook, no internet servers/protocols/routers/hardware/etc... It's amazing how much of this you can just collapse into a hobby project.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

It would be interesting to see numbers for the actual active radio Hans rather than license holders. I’ve a feeling (but no proof) that a ham license today is more of a geeky/fun thing to get whilst learning about radio than it was 50 years ago and many with a license may have a UHF radio but don’t actively use it as much.

halcasteel 6y ago

I was really glad to find this thread, been doing electronics, do it yourself since the 1959 when I was six and met my first HAM who shared enough to get excited, my paper route got me enough cash to buy my first decent used shortwave receiver. That and a wire I ran from my second story bedroom out to the roof of the garage, and suddenly I was listening to people in different countries and developing a serious interest in languages and putting pins in a world map of everyone I had listened to in different parts of the world. Eventually I learned some of those languages and went lived in some those countries. HAM radio opened the world to me. I just got my General license in June and with SDR radio and my computer started listening in on HAMs. I was shocked at the language and topics and conversations. Way different than 60 years. Started shopping for a kit traceiver to build, hard to find one, not like the old Heathkit days, when I built my first radio when I was 8 years old. It made me sad, then I started realizing that the nerdy kids like me were into 3d printing and Arduino and robots. However, they are going to miss out on the IoT, which will be driven by radios. The young kids are going miss learning the electronics and radio skills I got to learn before I was ten. Those skills took me into computers, programming and physics eventually. I am experimenting now with open source SDR and Lora mesh radio. Still alot to learn. If we really want our country to these type of skill taught early enough to open kids minds to what is possible and that they can design and build it. In my life, it only took one HAM to open my mind. The rest is history...