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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

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Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#151

Post by falcolas »

jiggunjer wrote: post #126
vitaflo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I got my license I also got a Skywarn license (that has to be renewed every 2 years) so I can do storm spotting. It's basically a volunteer effort for the National Weather Service. Licensed spotters get called out to go spot severe weather and report back in on the ham bands to the Weather Net. I installed a ham radio in my car for this very purpose. There are a million different areas in this hobby. Chatting w…

voice reports over radio seems a rather strange way of collecting weather data? A text-based form on the web seems more practical?

Voice reports have a few major advantages:

They can be made while your hands are otherwise occupied (driving, flying, etc.)

They don't require web access (can be done while in the middle of a forest, or 10,000 feet above the ground)

They lessen the chance of being DDOSed by a bored teenager

Doing them while within range of the internet may be less efficient, but they're also not limited by the internet.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#152

Post by piffey »

girmad wrote: post #147
themodelplumber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, as a radio operator, even just a listener-operator, you quickly find that A) you are expected to keep a log, and in many situations _must_ keep a log (contests are a good example), and B) a log easily runs circles around your memory. As it turns out, logs also provide a helpful context for bridging the gap between the subjective and objective lenses, both of which are helpful and needed for solving problems, re…

I think you're on to something. I'd love to dig even deeper about this topic maybe with some examples of your logs, as well as the time commitment this practice requires.

Maybe not quite the same, but very similar, is the bullet journal fad that's going on right now. Lots of people have found bullet journaling (which is essentially logging) very useful in their daily life.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#153

Post by ablation »

Uberphallus wrote: post #149
ablation wrote: post #145

Are those cheap Baofeng radios decent? Was considering getting into this and using one of those as a starting point (to listen at first, obviously, not broadcast until I've got a licence.)

They're decent for their price... but you won't hear much, as they're stuck in 136-174 MHz (some AM airband, but the radio is FM) and 400-480MHz (local PMR446, some pager networks operate here). Also no digital modes, and max bandwidth (25 KHz? don't remember) limits what you can postprocess in the computer. Otherwise, they're fine for low bandwidth stuff. They work great as ghetto amplifier for 433MHz applications.…

Thanks for the reply, very useful. I have an SDR dongle around somewhere already I think.

Are there any entry-level (price wise) handhelds you'd recommend? It's not always hugely easy to carry my laptop around with me sometimes.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#154

Post by michaelt »

m4x wrote: post #127
tabhygfr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know one person who volunteers at the local marathon as a radio operator. (Not sure why standards mobile stuff hasn't replaced it.)

I volunteer as a radio operator at some sport events. The main reason we use radios instead of cell phones is that it's faster to relay information and works well when you have many field stations talking to a single base station. There's quite a lot of overhead involved in making a cell phone call, and it doesn't work well when you need to relay lots of short messages without tying up the line for everybody else. Wi…

I'm curious about how this works - Do you personally own a stack of handheld radios that work with your radio operator rig? Does the sports event hire handheld radios and a base station that you operate? Presumably they need to be license-free if you're issuing them to unlicensed volunteers? How do you respond to reports distant stations aren't receiving messages?

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#155

Post by HocusLocus »

Cell phones are laughable single points of failure. Everyone brought this upon themselves from decades of bad engineering choices, if you consider resilience an objective. Once upon a time there was a terrestrial network of small autonomous telephone exchanges. Your phone numbers were tied to geographical locations. It seemed 'inconvenient'. Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for call completion, even between two phones 10 feet apart. Even so-called 'land line phones' are tied into this network now because cell phone providers have remade the old Bell system in their own image and require, of all things, Internet connectivity and utility power to boxes on poles all over the neighborhood to work.

Expect it to fail all at once. You will not be disappointed. What this means in terms of the value of amateur radio is not hard to figure out.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#156

Post by eythian »

furyg3 wrote: post #139

I was a HAM in the US, mostly just to get internet access via packet radio (and play with higher power wifi) back in early 2000's. I participated in a few field day's which were really awesome. The community was pretty cool. I didn't take this hobby over to Europe when I moved, and let my license lapse. How's the community over here (specifically the Netherlands)?

Can't speak to it specifically - yet - but I've been in NL for a few years now and haven't converted my licence as it requires some paperwork hoops on the non-NL side that I haven't bothered to figure out all of yet. Probably easier than doing the exam in a tweede taal though.

But I was at SHA2017 where we had a temporary repeater hoisted up on a cherry-picker, and someone who had boated in was doing APRS (I brought my HackRF so could dabble on the edges of legality :)

But one of these days, soon I'm sure, I'll get my HAREC thing sorted and convert it over.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#157

Post by Uberphallus »

ablation wrote: post #153
Uberphallus wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're decent for their price... but you won't hear much, as they're stuck in 136-174 MHz (some AM airband, but the radio is FM) and 400-480MHz (local PMR446, some pager networks operate here). Also no digital modes, and max bandwidth (25 KHz? don't remember) limits what you can postprocess in the computer. Otherwise, they're fine for low bandwidth stuff. They work great as ghetto amplifier for 433MHz applications.…

Thanks for the reply, very useful. I have an SDR dongle around somewhere already I think. Are there any entry-level (price wise) handhelds you'd recommend? It's not always hugely easy to carry my laptop around with me sometimes.

If you have a (rooted?) Android phone, you can use the dongle with an OTG cable.

Otherwise, a Baofeng DM-5R should do the job, it has digital modes compared to the cheaper and more popular models. Still limited to FM in analog, which is a pity for airband (where, by the way, you should never ever transmit in).

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#159

Post by HocusLocus »

jeffwass wrote: post #123
httpz wrote: post #30

I have a license because my high school teacher made us do it but I never quite understood what hobbyists do with it. I see how it can be a useful skill to have for people in a certain profession but as a hobbyist what do you do? Do people just talk to random people on the radio? I'm genuinely curious.

Back in the 80’s, before there was Iridium satellite, my uncle would use HAM radio to keep in touch with us while sailing his boat between Hawaii and California. Even though my household weren’t HAM’s at the time, he’d “call” us every few days through a “phone patch” to give status updates in the middle of the Pacific. Basically, he’d make connections to various HAM’s somewhere, trying to find someone who could do a…

My good friend WA2AAX, now a silent key, told of a visit he once made to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. During a lull in operation they let him traverse the catwalk spanning the 'dish' (a spherical mesh 1,000 ft diameter built inside a natural sinkhole) as the moon reached its zenith. Scanning his VHF HT he was able to hear many moonbouncing HAMs and even voice traffic from repeaters in the US. With a standard offset he was even able to make a brief contact with someone on a faraway VHF repeater before the celestial mechanics drifted out of alignment. A 2,000 mile QSO on VHF with a handheld, via the Moon. He considered it his finest Geek moment.

Re: We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio

#160

Post by tomjakubowski »

sathackr wrote: post #105
geggam wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanners are legal in all 50 states. In some states its illegal to use a scanner while breaking the law ( this I find funny for some reason ) https://www.zipscanners.com/resources/are-police-scanners-le...

Recursive law-breaking. Using the scanner while breaking the law is breaking the law, so by breaking the law while using the scanner, you're also breaking the law...while using the scanner. Kinda like using a gun in the commission of a felony...is a felony. Or being arrested and the only charge is resisting arrest.

I think of it more as computing something in "two passes". First, decide if the person committed a crime not in that "tack-on" category. Then, evaluate which "tack-ons" are applicable and possibly make those charges.
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