We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

Start with APRS --- a lot of people aren't even aware that there are packet radio networks that exist on VHF outside of 144.390M, but no matter where you are in the US, you probably will be able to get something going on APRS.

There are all sorts of ways that you can go with packet radio. Here are a couple ideas:

1. Start monitoring APRS traffic in your area.

I have a blog post that I wrote about repurposing a $5 scanner from a swapfest with a broken USB headset from a junk drawer, and turning it into a receive-only APRS igate. [1] I run that on a raspberry pi, you can see the current status of it here: [2]

You can do this with an RTLSDR, or a Baofeng into your laptop's microphone, etc. This is the easiest way to just listen and hear for yourself that there is traffic around you, and I think that will motivate you to get further into it.

2. Start putting cool packets onto APRS!

If you have a Baofeng, you can make a cheap TNC out of a USB soundcard, an appropriate break-out cable (available for ~$15 on Amazon), and any computer running soundcard TNC software. I strongly recommend Direwolf if you are playing with a Raspberry Pi (or just a laptop running linux), and APRSDroid if you have an old phone in a drawer. Something to watch out for is the quality of the signal that you put out, you need to tweak the volumes so that things aren't being overdriven. Nobody will hear you otherwise, and you'll be jamming the band for others.

A cool project idea is to put together a Baofeng-powered APRS security system in your car, with the radio stowed in the trunk and tied into the ignition switch. You could track your car at any time! (I started a project like this but never finished it --- the Baofengs use something weird like 7.4V, and my Raspberry Pi was powered at 5V, and I never could think of a proper solution for my ground loops, and how to put it together in a clean package. I have a TH-D72A with a built-in GPS and TNC that I use for APRS in my car on longer trips, for now.)

I bought a cheap weather station, and I was able to get wee_wx to start pulling data from it, and sometime over Christmas I'm hoping that I'll find the time to start putting that data onto APRS. The sky is really the limit, there are dozens of interesting data formats on APRS besides positional data and weather data.

3. Non-APRS packet radio!

This is where the real fun is. Here in Wisconsin I have the following site to see where traffic is [3].

One of the craziest things I've done in Ham radio is hooked my TH-D72A up to my laptop, connected via raw commands to a neighboring station speaking AX.25, left a message on his BBS, and then issued a command which had me hopping from his VHF receive to his HF rig, which forwarded me onto another BBS over HF. The connection was very broken up, but enough came through that I know it happened, and that was enough for it to put a wide smile on my face.

4. If you live in Seattle, check out HamWan.

Hams are allowed to run standard 2.4GHz Wi-Fi equipment at higher power than normal people, provided that we stick to the FCC requirements (station identification in the form of our SSID, no encryption, etc.) I really don't know much about this project, but it's cool stuff. Fun to see what WiFi is theoretically capable of. [4]

[1]: https://nsielicki.blogspot.com/2018/04/repurposing-old-radio...

[2]: https://aprs.fi/info/a/W9NLS-2

[3]: https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wapr/bandplan.html

[4]: https://hamwan.org/

Check out the Pixie kits, they're extraordinarily cheap, like $5 on ebay cheap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtErr2E1kQ

I used to have a CB and it was fun to talk to mates on there and muck around. At the time I liked the idea of HAM radio because you could go longer distance, and the idea of speaking to someone in another country was really cool. However now with the internet etc. it may seem a little less cool. (The internet was around when I was young but was pretty expensive to get connected).

I remember a time when someone on the CB got 64kbps connection to the internet through packet radio, faster than dial up!

It's a bit like how mucking around with microcomputers was very cool back in the day, but now why would you bother when you can run a C64 in an emulator? But there is something nostalgic about it that makes me sometimes want to buy and old computer.

My dad was an amateur radio operator. That's exactly what he did. If you can imagine, back in the 70's and 80's normal people didn't have access to the internet. So all of the discussions that we normally have with strangers (like this one!) were basically impossible, except by radio in publicly accessible bands. I'm not that familiar with the how things worked, but I remember my dad spending at least an hour or two a day, chatting in morse code with people. They even had a kind of news service (I guess a bit like Usenet, except by hand) where they would relay messages around the world. It looked like a cool hobby, but I got access to a computer at a very early age and was instantly obsessed by it ;-)

http://sdr.hu as well for even more locations