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Amateur radio is a different beast. A full license permits 400 Watts! Not that you need it if you are building an Adafruit weather station for your garden. T
by gorgoiler 5y ago
Amateur radio is a different beast. A full license permits 400 Watts!
Not that you need it if you are building an Adafruit weather station for your garden. That is to say — and and I say this with the utmost respect to my fellow license holders — actually doing something useful with the spectrum.
A lot of amateur radio culture is more about building your own equipment from scratch and then trying not to cook / kill yourself with it. It’s like an open access drag strip for home made muscle cars, as opposed to testing your hand built recumbent bike on the public streets.
- sparker72678 5y agoTotally agree! Which is why I have a hard time with the arguments about why amateur radio is so important/needed. We’ve reserved all this spectrum so that some people can exercise their muscle car hobby. Is that worth it? Maybe. But it’d be nice if the conversation was at least grounded in reality.
- sliken 5y agoWell the trick is, amateur radio is hard. If you want a community to help when there's a storm, earthquake, hurricane, power grid failure, large fire, etc you need them to practice regularly. Ideally with no external funding. Hams are often civic minded, so they will help out in bike races, horse races, and similar events ... especially if they are out of reach of cell towers, which is quite common even in central california. So if you want something to fall back on when the local cell tower and internet provider is down, you need to have something the community finds worth while to participate in when there's not an emergency. So it might seem like a useless hobby when there's internet and no emergency, but that's just the training for them to have the needed skills in an emergency.