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Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it

Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. With the advent of Amazon and cheap electronics anybody can now get into it without tinkering at all. Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.

nullc 2y ago
Your mistake may be doing things you find uninteresting with it. There are experimental protocols and PHYs... you just don't (generally) find them on the VHF repeaters, which, I agree are super boring.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  I'd love to do more local / device networking, but I feel that's basically a solved problem. I can plug zigbee modules in all day and make serial packets bounce anywhere. Hackers are sparse geographically. It's not like my friend down the street would plug in his radio and we'd share packets. And if we did, why not use the internet? HAM has been a bit of a letdown to me, too. I had higher / hackier hopes for it.
  - falcolas 2y ago
    > that's basically a solved problem. ... why not use the internet? Pretty close to everything you can do with radio signals is "solved", just like almost everything you can do with computers is solved. But these problems have been solved by other people. Not you. What are your motivations for hacking at all? It's probably not because you're in entirely novel territory.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. my experience, too. I did EW in the military and it was interesting-ish. decided to, a couple years back, get the license and play around, see if I could connect with some of the local Elmers -- and it was laaaaaaame. by comparison, other meetup groups like for drones, linux, or other nerdy-as-hell topics was still pretty lively. I went to some LUGs in Australia that were a straight-up blast, Linux trivia night in bars, etc. but ham was a snoozefest, and outside of doing some illegal-ass shit that the FCC would absolutely hammer me for, I can't think of anything cool to do with the license.
- cloudripper 2y ago
  In California, you can get a license plate with your call sign. That's kind of cool, right? Maybe moreso if you have a punny vanity call sign.
  - dave78 2y ago
    I think this is true for many states, however I personally am not interested since callsigns are easily looked up online. I don't really want to be driving around with a giant sign on my car telling every random passer-by who I am. I do sometimes wonder if the privacy of amateur radio operator info should be reconsidered - having my name and home address plastered all over the internet just because I have an amateur radio license is rather annoying.
    - yabbs 2y ago
      I went with a PO box to add a layer, but yeah, ham does provide ample identity surface area.
- vitaflo 2y ago
  With all due respect, if you can't think of anything to do with a ham radio license then that shows some lack of imagination. Just because most of the users on voice are boring ass old fucks doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the amateur radio world or that you yourself can't be a tinkerer and come up with your own experiments and contributions to the space. It's a bit like saying the internet is stupid because of all the social media and you can't think of anything else to do on the internet.
unethical_ban 2y ago
I agree it is largely boring, particularly on the local bands where it's basically a local discord of people talking about traffic. But if you get your General license you can play with HF and get geeky with antennas, try to make contact with people on low power (qrp) on protocols like JS8. I was able to make contacts from Texas to South America and Canada, and even Europe I think, on 10w with a crummy EFHW antenna, a wire slung over a tree at 45 degrees. As far as more geeky protocol hacking, I haven't gotten into it.
- wdfx 2y ago
  I've played with a cheap Chinese clone sdr receiver and LNA and filter and have received FT8 calls from Indonesia and Australia on a length of scrap wire I hung up in my loft here in London UK. Calls from all over Europe and from USA are pretty trivial to pick up. I would be interested in getting licensed to TX, but then to apply that practically I'd need to invest also in 100s - 1000s of £££ of gear rather than a mere 10s. And then once I've done that ... I think the novelty would be mostly gone if I'm honest. I don't think the practical expense seems worth it.
schmidtleonard 2y ago
The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.
- Borg3 2y ago
  Exacly. I've myself been looking around HAMs from networking point of view. I am networker and I would love to get hands on some digital radio.. at least 128Kbps, ideally 1024Kbps stuff where I can slap all the protocol to build network on top of it and then IP. But nope, cannot find anything interesting with decent ranges and cheap enough to buy for tinkering. It seems to be a nische that noone cares to claim. I know about HSMM, but they are using normal WiFi AP and just slap custom software on top of it and use HAM frequencies. Not bad idea... They communities are also awfully closed. I tried to find some IRC servers for HAM/network related stuff and no luck really. Found one channel, but they are mostly US people out there (TZ issue for me).
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    Another issue is that encryption is not allowed on amateur radio, so most internet applications are a no-go.
    - mingus88 2y ago
      That's somewhat of an unenforceable policy. Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference. And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.
      - Manuel_D 2y ago
        > Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference. Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions. What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used. You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.
etimberg 2y ago
Similar problem for me. It seems like most folks near me do a lot of contesting which I have neither the time nor the interest to do.
clbrmbr 2y ago
Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives. That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend: 2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz) VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters) HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air. Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).
- adrianpike 2y ago
  Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?
  - asciimike 2y ago
    I went deep into this earlier in the year, here are a few resources I found helpful: - https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_symposium_ver2.pdf https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_sy... has a good overview of how to hit the ISS (and other sats) - https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib is the software stack you probably want to play with
kwesthaus 2y ago
> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. https://m17project.org/ https://m17project.org/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://freedv.org/ https://freedv.org/ These are a few projects that I personally think embody this well.
nvy 2y ago
>It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum Yup and the grouchy boomers who LARP as emergency preparedness personnel. My experiences with amateur radio people have been universally negative, and in my opinion the death of ham radio is squarely the fault of its participants.
- bityard 2y ago
  Interesting. My experiences with amateur radio people on the air have been largely positive. But on the internet, there seem to be only two groups: 1. Old hams: New hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby! 2. New hams: Old hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby! Funny enough, I ran across a ham radio magazine from the 1920's and found letters to the editor that said the exact same things. A hundred years ago, the same old flame war rages on.
  - nvy 2y ago
    The standard refrain of "it's always been like this" is a great way to avoid confronting the very real problems facing amateur radio. But despite your insinuation I'm not a "new ham". After a few brushes with the ham community in my area I very quickly decided I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
    - dl9999 2y ago
      My experience with ham radio has also been positive. I've been a ham for about 14 years now, and I can't recall any bad experiences. Most of the contacts are barely more than signal reports, but any conversations I've had have been at least cordial. I can't speak for bityard, but I think that pointing out that there have always been complaints is just saying that there are always unhappy people regardless of the state of the hobby. Most people don't talk about something if there's no problem. The people that speak up are unhappy with something. That can make it seem like the problems are common, even if they are rare. That's my take on it anyway.
rcurry 2y ago
For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible. Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety. It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit. Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.
- nightbrawler 2y ago
  Yep! The New Mexico Mega-Link repeater network is still up and running. http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg There’s also a great APRS repeater network: http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs With APRS you can send/recv text messages from pretty much anywhere in NM
  - rcurry 2y ago
    That’s great to hear, and thanks for the link to the map.
ozim 2y ago
Uhm yeah talking with people is optional and only required to check how well they receive you when you set antenna up. Buying off the shelf everything is not fun. Buy radio and try to build an antenna from metal wire or whatever else. Then try to see if old farts can hear your calls. It is much more like fishing it is supposed to be boring unless you are really interested in the topic. Yes there is Chinese vendor that you can buy antennas that will work much better than whatever you cobble up by hand but yeah YOU are the one to make it fun for yourself not old farts in your propagation range.
jcalvinowens 2y ago
You're barking up the wrong tree! Get into HF digital modes: the lowest hanging fruit is WSJTX, but there's so much beyond that if you want to tinker. I can honestly say I've never plugged a mic into my transceiver, and I probably never will. And I have 500+ confirmed contacts across 40+ countries. Phone is boring :)
- vitaflo 2y ago
  This, been a ham for 20 years, have never been on the mic. Digital modes are where its at and where all the fun tinkering is. Plus there's so many small radio kits you can also build if you want to tinker that way, not to mention antenna building which is an entire hobby in itself. Get your General license and get on HF and have fun. Be the change you want to see. There's more to ham radio than just decrepit Boomers talking about their gout and diabetes. It's like saying there's nothing interesting to do on the internet because of social media.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    This sounds great. I just got my tech license and have just been messing with the UV-5R radios. The chatter on the local repeaters isn’t boring either. But I was drawn to ham radio because I am tired of the internet today. I want to get that feeling back like the early internet. Early internet with bizarre protocols like gopher and finger. You had to know your way around and everyone else put in the effort too. Just a great time in history to connect with someone across the world HF digital mode sounds like a blast
    - vitaflo 2y ago
      Then you will enjoy the digital modes because there are so many different ones that all use different tech to accomplish different tasks. Some are extremely popular (like FT8, which is BY FAR the most popular thing on ham radio, even more than voice), down to very obscure experimental digital modes that very few people use but half the fun is trying to use them and see who else may be out there trying to do the same. The FCC also just increased the bandwidth limit on HF so I expect a ton of new experimental modes to start popping up in short order.
bobmcnamara 2y ago
A few weeks ago I heard the following exchange. Canadian: Is this frequency in use? ...Silence... Canadian: Cqcqcqcqcq... MM: THIS FREQUENCY IS RESERVED FOR MARITIME MOBILE EMERGENCY TRAFFIC! Me: What is the nature of the emergency? Can I be of assistance? MM: no emergency, just you know, in case there's an emergency please stay off A cultured Canadian: kindly fuck off. MM: hey now you can't swear on the radio FCCs gonna jumpya... Canadian: proceeds to make several contacts over the protests of MM lid calling out FCC profanity regulation numbers.
- bityard 2y ago
  Yes, the MM "net" is known to just be a bunch of lids looking to pick fights with strangers for their own entertainment. They've been doing it forever.
- doom2 2y ago
  Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of 14.300
batch12 2y ago
> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. Is this enforced by the HAMs? I didn't think it'd be possible to claim ownership of a slice of the amateur spectrum. Is it just a public shaming?
- bityard 2y ago
  Generally, it is not possible to claim ownership of a frequency or band. However, repeaters are one very narrow exception to this. The owner of a repeater can say who is and is not allowed to use the repeater. This is just a guess on my part, but I assume this came about back when repeaters were much more complicated to set up and run. (E.g. there were repeaters that operated only on battery, or were owned by an individual to talk with his friends and family in a mountainous region, or had weird technical limitations.) Repeaters which are open for use by anyone with a license are called "open" repeaters and those which have some kind of requirement or permission are called "closed." Closed repeaters are actually pretty rare these days, most repeater owners are more than happy to have anyone use their repeater as long as they are not intentionally being a nuisance.
  - batch12 2y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to explain
  - genewitch 2y ago
    additionally, VHF repeaters generally are horizon + 10% sort of range, and there is a committee to help with frequency allocations to avoid interference between systems that are close together. So really, the "slice of the band" is regional, the same way (broadcast) FM stations are.
vidanay 2y ago
> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again. I was hoping to see some innovation after the FCC lifted the baud rate restrictions[1], but so far nothing seems to have changed. [1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf
bityard 2y ago
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. Well, that "recently" there in that sentence is likely the root of your problem. You've barely scratched the surface, run into a dickbag or two (which exist in EVERY community) and then decided to stereotype the whole culture. You have no idea how wide and deep the hobby is, and probably won't as long as you hold onto your false generalizations. > It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to And might I ask, who are you to judge what other people talk about on the radio? If you don't like what other people are talking about, spin the dial. Or go to another repeater/frequency and call CQ so you can talk about whatever interests you. Be the change you want to see in the world. > gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. I live in a metro area and have over 40 repeaters programmed into my radio. Most of the repeaters are owned by various clubs. I have never ONCE heard anyone get a stern finger wagging for using a repeater for a club they aren't a member of. Around here at least, the attitude is, the more the merrier. > From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. It still is, you just didn't look hard enough. The past couple of years have seen interesting long-range weak-signal digital modes, mesh networking using commodity hardware, hackable handheld radios, and bunches of independent QRP kits. LEO satellite repeaters, POTA, SOTA, Field Day, designing antennas with cheap $50 antenna analyzers, these are just the things that I find interesting. I could go on forever. There is more to explore in ham radio than you can fit in a lifetime. If you find it boring, that is not ham radio's fault.
Spastche 2y ago
I got mine and have used it a handful of times, mainly helping my friend test his radios. it's all radio tests or talking about your radio. it is incredibly boring and I like boring technical stuff. SDR is where all the fun radio stuff is.
hugs 2y ago
I suspect most tinkering is happening around digital modes these days. I got my amateur radio license four years ago and I have zero interest in talking with (other) old dudes where they're driving. I currently enjoy the hobby by watching the ISS flyover schedule and transmitting to the amateur radio repeater on the space station. It's fun! It's even more fun during the early evening highly visible passes. In those cases, I don't even have to look at a chart in an app to know where to point, I can just aim the antenna at the very bright dot zooming by in the sky. (Fun to see those visible passes anyway, even without a radio license.) I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth. This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.
- genewitch 2y ago
  APRS also works on 30 meter band, which means HF, which means "hemisphere without trying very hard" distances. Obviously the radios are not $30, but really if one cares about the hobby one should not splatter so much. It will also work if there's a (nearly?) statewide internet/cellphone/landline outage due to natural disasters. The $30 radio would too (if you can get in to an APRS repeater, or the space station, or whatever), but i'd rather have HF in an emergency of that scale, and VHF/UHF for day-to-day use. I forget the (VHF) APRS frequency offhand but you can find out if there's a digipeater or even a regular store and evenutally forward repeater in your area by tuning to that frequency and see if you hear the same station replying whenever any other station sends a message - it's usually pretty obvious. also https://aprs.fi/ https://aprs.fi/ if anyone wants to see what else it can do. I built a slack bot after map reducing all of the weather nodes aprs.fi knows about to "least distance from zip and/or city/state", then hitting the public web and beautiful souping the weather information from aprs.fi for that particular weather station.
winrid 2y ago
You can volunteer for comms at stage rallies, we always need volunteer hams. My first stage rally experience, over 10yrs ago now, was sitting around the campfire in the Mendocino forest with a bunch of hams the night before the event. They had good whisky, too. :) Feel free to email me, email in profile.
resters 2y ago
It sounds like you listened to rag chewers on 75 and came up with a knee-jerk impression that ham radio is boring. Ham radio is far more than what you observed. I advise that you check out some of the following before you give up on it: - QEX magazine - MSK144 meteor scatter and similar modes - CW Ops, CW radiosport - FlexRadio, SmartSDR, PowerSDR - The QDX transceiver, QRP Labs, etc. There is a tremendously active community of experimenters and people doing really interesting things. It takes a little bit of digging to find it. Much of it is on email lists rather than traditional discussion forums.

nullc 2y ago

Your mistake may be doing things you find uninteresting with it. There are experimental protocols and PHYs... you just don't (generally) find them on the VHF repeaters, which, I agree are super boring.

jvanderbot 2y ago
I'd love to do more local / device networking, but I feel that's basically a solved problem. I can plug zigbee modules in all day and make serial packets bounce anywhere. Hackers are sparse geographically. It's not like my friend down the street would plug in his radio and we'd share packets. And if we did, why not use the internet? HAM has been a bit of a letdown to me, too. I had higher / hackier hopes for it.
- falcolas 2y ago
  > that's basically a solved problem. ... why not use the internet? Pretty close to everything you can do with radio signals is "solved", just like almost everything you can do with computers is solved. But these problems have been solved by other people. Not you. What are your motivations for hacking at all? It's probably not because you're in entirely novel territory.

red-iron-pine 2y ago

> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. my experience, too. I did EW in the military and it was interesting-ish. decided to, a couple years back, get the license and play around, see if I could connect with some of the local Elmers -- and it was laaaaaaame. by comparison, other meetup groups like for drones, linux, or other nerdy-as-hell topics was still pretty lively. I went to some LUGs in Australia that were a straight-up blast, Linux trivia night in bars, etc. but ham was a snoozefest, and outside of doing some illegal-ass shit that the FCC would absolutely hammer me for, I can't think of anything cool to do with the license.

cloudripper 2y ago
In California, you can get a license plate with your call sign. That's kind of cool, right? Maybe moreso if you have a punny vanity call sign.
- dave78 2y ago
  I think this is true for many states, however I personally am not interested since callsigns are easily looked up online. I don't really want to be driving around with a giant sign on my car telling every random passer-by who I am. I do sometimes wonder if the privacy of amateur radio operator info should be reconsidered - having my name and home address plastered all over the internet just because I have an amateur radio license is rather annoying.
  - yabbs 2y ago
    I went with a PO box to add a layer, but yeah, ham does provide ample identity surface area.
vitaflo 2y ago
With all due respect, if you can't think of anything to do with a ham radio license then that shows some lack of imagination. Just because most of the users on voice are boring ass old fucks doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the amateur radio world or that you yourself can't be a tinkerer and come up with your own experiments and contributions to the space. It's a bit like saying the internet is stupid because of all the social media and you can't think of anything else to do on the internet.

unethical_ban 2y ago

I agree it is largely boring, particularly on the local bands where it's basically a local discord of people talking about traffic. But if you get your General license you can play with HF and get geeky with antennas, try to make contact with people on low power (qrp) on protocols like JS8. I was able to make contacts from Texas to South America and Canada, and even Europe I think, on 10w with a crummy EFHW antenna, a wire slung over a tree at 45 degrees. As far as more geeky protocol hacking, I haven't gotten into it.

wdfx 2y ago
I've played with a cheap Chinese clone sdr receiver and LNA and filter and have received FT8 calls from Indonesia and Australia on a length of scrap wire I hung up in my loft here in London UK. Calls from all over Europe and from USA are pretty trivial to pick up. I would be interested in getting licensed to TX, but then to apply that practically I'd need to invest also in 100s - 1000s of £££ of gear rather than a mere 10s. And then once I've done that ... I think the novelty would be mostly gone if I'm honest. I don't think the practical expense seems worth it.

schmidtleonard 2y ago

The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.

Borg3 2y ago
Exacly. I've myself been looking around HAMs from networking point of view. I am networker and I would love to get hands on some digital radio.. at least 128Kbps, ideally 1024Kbps stuff where I can slap all the protocol to build network on top of it and then IP. But nope, cannot find anything interesting with decent ranges and cheap enough to buy for tinkering. It seems to be a nische that noone cares to claim. I know about HSMM, but they are using normal WiFi AP and just slap custom software on top of it and use HAM frequencies. Not bad idea... They communities are also awfully closed. I tried to find some IRC servers for HAM/network related stuff and no luck really. Found one channel, but they are mostly US people out there (TZ issue for me).
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  Another issue is that encryption is not allowed on amateur radio, so most internet applications are a no-go.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    That's somewhat of an unenforceable policy. Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference. And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      > Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference. Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions. What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used. You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.

etimberg 2y ago

Similar problem for me. It seems like most folks near me do a lot of contesting which I have neither the time nor the interest to do.

clbrmbr 2y ago

Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives. That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend: 2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz) VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters) HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air. Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).

adrianpike 2y ago
Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?
- asciimike 2y ago
  I went deep into this earlier in the year, here are a few resources I found helpful: - https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_symposium_ver2.pdf https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_sy... has a good overview of how to hit the ISS (and other sats) - https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib is the software stack you probably want to play with

kwesthaus 2y ago

> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. https://m17project.org/ https://m17project.org/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://freedv.org/ https://freedv.org/ These are a few projects that I personally think embody this well.

nvy 2y ago

>It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum Yup and the grouchy boomers who LARP as emergency preparedness personnel. My experiences with amateur radio people have been universally negative, and in my opinion the death of ham radio is squarely the fault of its participants.

bityard 2y ago
Interesting. My experiences with amateur radio people on the air have been largely positive. But on the internet, there seem to be only two groups: 1. Old hams: New hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby! 2. New hams: Old hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby! Funny enough, I ran across a ham radio magazine from the 1920's and found letters to the editor that said the exact same things. A hundred years ago, the same old flame war rages on.
- nvy 2y ago
  The standard refrain of "it's always been like this" is a great way to avoid confronting the very real problems facing amateur radio. But despite your insinuation I'm not a "new ham". After a few brushes with the ham community in my area I very quickly decided I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
  - dl9999 2y ago
    My experience with ham radio has also been positive. I've been a ham for about 14 years now, and I can't recall any bad experiences. Most of the contacts are barely more than signal reports, but any conversations I've had have been at least cordial. I can't speak for bityard, but I think that pointing out that there have always been complaints is just saying that there are always unhappy people regardless of the state of the hobby. Most people don't talk about something if there's no problem. The people that speak up are unhappy with something. That can make it seem like the problems are common, even if they are rare. That's my take on it anyway.

rcurry 2y ago

For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible. Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety. It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit. Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.

nightbrawler 2y ago
Yep! The New Mexico Mega-Link repeater network is still up and running. http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg There’s also a great APRS repeater network: http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs With APRS you can send/recv text messages from pretty much anywhere in NM
- rcurry 2y ago
  That’s great to hear, and thanks for the link to the map.

ozim 2y ago

Uhm yeah talking with people is optional and only required to check how well they receive you when you set antenna up. Buying off the shelf everything is not fun. Buy radio and try to build an antenna from metal wire or whatever else. Then try to see if old farts can hear your calls. It is much more like fishing it is supposed to be boring unless you are really interested in the topic. Yes there is Chinese vendor that you can buy antennas that will work much better than whatever you cobble up by hand but yeah YOU are the one to make it fun for yourself not old farts in your propagation range.

jcalvinowens 2y ago

You're barking up the wrong tree! Get into HF digital modes: the lowest hanging fruit is WSJTX, but there's so much beyond that if you want to tinker. I can honestly say I've never plugged a mic into my transceiver, and I probably never will. And I have 500+ confirmed contacts across 40+ countries. Phone is boring :)

vitaflo 2y ago
This, been a ham for 20 years, have never been on the mic. Digital modes are where its at and where all the fun tinkering is. Plus there's so many small radio kits you can also build if you want to tinker that way, not to mention antenna building which is an entire hobby in itself. Get your General license and get on HF and have fun. Be the change you want to see. There's more to ham radio than just decrepit Boomers talking about their gout and diabetes. It's like saying there's nothing interesting to do on the internet because of social media.
- mingus88 2y ago
  This sounds great. I just got my tech license and have just been messing with the UV-5R radios. The chatter on the local repeaters isn’t boring either. But I was drawn to ham radio because I am tired of the internet today. I want to get that feeling back like the early internet. Early internet with bizarre protocols like gopher and finger. You had to know your way around and everyone else put in the effort too. Just a great time in history to connect with someone across the world HF digital mode sounds like a blast
  - vitaflo 2y ago
    Then you will enjoy the digital modes because there are so many different ones that all use different tech to accomplish different tasks. Some are extremely popular (like FT8, which is BY FAR the most popular thing on ham radio, even more than voice), down to very obscure experimental digital modes that very few people use but half the fun is trying to use them and see who else may be out there trying to do the same. The FCC also just increased the bandwidth limit on HF so I expect a ton of new experimental modes to start popping up in short order.

bobmcnamara 2y ago

A few weeks ago I heard the following exchange. Canadian: Is this frequency in use? ...Silence... Canadian: Cqcqcqcqcq... MM: THIS FREQUENCY IS RESERVED FOR MARITIME MOBILE EMERGENCY TRAFFIC! Me: What is the nature of the emergency? Can I be of assistance? MM: no emergency, just you know, in case there's an emergency please stay off A cultured Canadian: kindly fuck off. MM: hey now you can't swear on the radio FCCs gonna jumpya... Canadian: proceeds to make several contacts over the protests of MM lid calling out FCC profanity regulation numbers.

bityard 2y ago
Yes, the MM "net" is known to just be a bunch of lids looking to pick fights with strangers for their own entertainment. They've been doing it forever.
doom2 2y ago
Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of 14.300

batch12 2y ago

> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. Is this enforced by the HAMs? I didn't think it'd be possible to claim ownership of a slice of the amateur spectrum. Is it just a public shaming?

bityard 2y ago
Generally, it is not possible to claim ownership of a frequency or band. However, repeaters are one very narrow exception to this. The owner of a repeater can say who is and is not allowed to use the repeater. This is just a guess on my part, but I assume this came about back when repeaters were much more complicated to set up and run. (E.g. there were repeaters that operated only on battery, or were owned by an individual to talk with his friends and family in a mountainous region, or had weird technical limitations.) Repeaters which are open for use by anyone with a license are called "open" repeaters and those which have some kind of requirement or permission are called "closed." Closed repeaters are actually pretty rare these days, most repeater owners are more than happy to have anyone use their repeater as long as they are not intentionally being a nuisance.
- batch12 2y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to explain
- genewitch 2y ago
  additionally, VHF repeaters generally are horizon + 10% sort of range, and there is a committee to help with frequency allocations to avoid interference between systems that are close together. So really, the "slice of the band" is regional, the same way (broadcast) FM stations are.

vidanay 2y ago

> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again. I was hoping to see some innovation after the FCC lifted the baud rate restrictions[1], but so far nothing seems to have changed. [1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf

bityard 2y ago

> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. Well, that "recently" there in that sentence is likely the root of your problem. You've barely scratched the surface, run into a dickbag or two (which exist in EVERY community) and then decided to stereotype the whole culture. You have no idea how wide and deep the hobby is, and probably won't as long as you hold onto your false generalizations. > It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to And might I ask, who are you to judge what other people talk about on the radio? If you don't like what other people are talking about, spin the dial. Or go to another repeater/frequency and call CQ so you can talk about whatever interests you. Be the change you want to see in the world. > gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging. I live in a metro area and have over 40 repeaters programmed into my radio. Most of the repeaters are owned by various clubs. I have never ONCE heard anyone get a stern finger wagging for using a repeater for a club they aren't a member of. Around here at least, the attitude is, the more the merrier. > From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. It still is, you just didn't look hard enough. The past couple of years have seen interesting long-range weak-signal digital modes, mesh networking using commodity hardware, hackable handheld radios, and bunches of independent QRP kits. LEO satellite repeaters, POTA, SOTA, Field Day, designing antennas with cheap $50 antenna analyzers, these are just the things that I find interesting. I could go on forever. There is more to explore in ham radio than you can fit in a lifetime. If you find it boring, that is not ham radio's fault.

Spastche 2y ago

I got mine and have used it a handful of times, mainly helping my friend test his radios. it's all radio tests or talking about your radio. it is incredibly boring and I like boring technical stuff. SDR is where all the fun radio stuff is.

hugs 2y ago

I suspect most tinkering is happening around digital modes these days. I got my amateur radio license four years ago and I have zero interest in talking with (other) old dudes where they're driving. I currently enjoy the hobby by watching the ISS flyover schedule and transmitting to the amateur radio repeater on the space station. It's fun! It's even more fun during the early evening highly visible passes. In those cases, I don't even have to look at a chart in an app to know where to point, I can just aim the antenna at the very bright dot zooming by in the sky. (Fun to see those visible passes anyway, even without a radio license.) I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth. This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.

genewitch 2y ago
APRS also works on 30 meter band, which means HF, which means "hemisphere without trying very hard" distances. Obviously the radios are not $30, but really if one cares about the hobby one should not splatter so much. It will also work if there's a (nearly?) statewide internet/cellphone/landline outage due to natural disasters. The $30 radio would too (if you can get in to an APRS repeater, or the space station, or whatever), but i'd rather have HF in an emergency of that scale, and VHF/UHF for day-to-day use. I forget the (VHF) APRS frequency offhand but you can find out if there's a digipeater or even a regular store and evenutally forward repeater in your area by tuning to that frequency and see if you hear the same station replying whenever any other station sends a message - it's usually pretty obvious. also https://aprs.fi/ https://aprs.fi/ if anyone wants to see what else it can do. I built a slack bot after map reducing all of the weather nodes aprs.fi knows about to "least distance from zip and/or city/state", then hitting the public web and beautiful souping the weather information from aprs.fi for that particular weather station.

winrid 2y ago

You can volunteer for comms at stage rallies, we always need volunteer hams. My first stage rally experience, over 10yrs ago now, was sitting around the campfire in the Mendocino forest with a bunch of hams the night before the event. They had good whisky, too. :) Feel free to email me, email in profile.

resters 2y ago

It sounds like you listened to rag chewers on 75 and came up with a knee-jerk impression that ham radio is boring. Ham radio is far more than what you observed. I advise that you check out some of the following before you give up on it: - QEX magazine - MSK144 meteor scatter and similar modes - CW Ops, CW radiosport - FlexRadio, SmartSDR, PowerSDR - The QDX transceiver, QRP Labs, etc. There is a tremendously active community of experimenters and people doing really interesting things. It takes a little bit of digging to find it. Much of it is on email lists rather than traditional discussion forums.