201–210 of 213 posts
I would like to have a go at building a receiver for listening to CW with my kids. I don't want anything on the computer, just something I can solder that will work. Is there a kit that has a good success rate? I'm in the UK if that matters.
Check out the Pixie kits, they're extraordinarily cheap, like $5 on ebay cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtErr2E1kQ
For example, they are morse code only.
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Shortwave feels like an abandoned town unless you like religious radio.
Not so. The HF Ham bands are as busy as ever, while the Shortwave Broadcast bands are chock full of mainly Chinese stations, who incidentally play some amazing music.
I used to go camping in the 1970's and had a shortwave radio that I would listen to for hours. The variety of stuff I could hear was vastly greater than what I can hear today.
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.
I've talked (in morse code) to people on the air that are former US Navy radio telegraphers, submariners, Air force mechanics etc. That generation is heading into their golden years and many of them will be gone in 10-20 years. It's interesting to hear about their lives in their own words.
I've made contacts to Moscow Russia on 100 watts, Asia, most of Europe and most of the States in the US.
I've also built the tiny QCX in that article by soldering and hand winding toroids. Fired it up and made a contact several hundred miles away on a tiny amount of power. I used an arduino to create a scratch built keyer with all my own circuts and code. Then I hooked it up to my paddles, set the speed and used it for tons of contacts.
In short, it can be a very satisfying hobby if you are nerdy enough.
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 f…
All this stuff sounds interesting to me (buying and learning new equipment/techniques/etc) and I can see the possible benefits of emergency preparedness. But what I don't see is how this is really a viable hobby (for me). It seems like the daily practice of it is... boring. If I want to talk with people, I can use the internet.
On the emergency preparedness front, hell, just buy a $50 handheld radio and learn how to use it, and throw the thing in a safe spot (along with the manual and extra batteries) and forget about it.
What are the real payoffs as a hobby that you practice frequently, I mean. I don't mean to be dismissive. Amateur radio clearly has utility in specific circumstances, but I just don't understand why, after a day of browsing reddit and HN (and working!), I'd want to sit down to the radio and try and do the same thing with an antiquated piece of equipment.
I mean, I'd love to be convinced. I love tech just as much as the next guy.
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This is a big problem. I find CW to be populated with less annoying people.
This reminds me: has anyone done a survey of the relative Democrat/Republican/Other distribution of voice hams vs CW HAMS? I would be interested in the results.
If you want to learn Morse Code I can recommend using these Anki decks: - Easy start but without punctuation. You might want to add that https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/950182698 - Pretty good but hard to start with https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3645353967 - There are a few more Decks: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/morse%20code
I learned visually at first and the amount of effort it took to unlearn it was unbelievable. You have to learn by hearing the audible character and have your brain immediately translated it through shear practice and repetition.
If you have to convert it to a visual dot dash symbol in your head you will be too slow to ever have a conversation on the air.
I'm interested in amateur radio but always feel that I can't get anything done without a big honking antenna?
There are also "compromise" antennas that use inductors and other trickery to be shorter. Are they efficient? Not great, but people make contacts on them everyday. (I have a 4-5 foot antenna that can operated on the same bands as my 65 foot antenna although it's not super efficient.
There are loop antennas that are tiny and portable but they can get expensive.
Also their are people that use an antenna tuner to tune a random piece of wire or even their gutters to get a workable HF antenna.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out the Pixie kits, they're extraordinarily cheap, like $5 on ebay cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwtErr2E1kQ
Not a pixie. They are super simple, but require considerable skill to use. For example, they are morse code only.
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 f…
I know this post is a day old, so nobody probably will read it anymore, but I am still curious. All this stuff sounds interesting to me (buying and learning new equipment/techniques/etc) and I can see the possible benefits of emergency preparedness. But what I don't see is how this is really a viable hobby (for me). It seems like the daily practice of it is... boring. If I want to talk with people, I can use the inte…
Plenty of other stuff is boring and mostly useless, e.g. most of the raspberry pi stuff I've done. A $20 Google Chromecast or Roku is wayy less of a PITA than a rPi media center but I did it anyway to learn to hack it together. Same thing with a lot of radio stuff.
And at like $30 bucks for a baofang and about a week or two of study for the technician license it's not a lot of cost or effort.
So what would I do with it? Aside from a backup when hunting, just talkin w/ folks -- I'm in central Canada, so it's a far apart place with spotty internet access -- and I consider messing with radar tracking and even something more like a look-down-shoot-down style of radar, mostly as a hack to see if I can do it.
Lot of demand for Radio Engineers if you want to do full-time cell phone or wifi stuff, too.
A question for the international crowd, I want to take the license exam. I live in France, and the closest exam center is like 300 Km away, exam dates always on weekday, so I'd need to take a day off for that. I live near Monaco, had a look but I can't find anything regarding exams, some people hold licenses but they don't answer to my emails asking about it. Is there a comfortable way to obtain the license around he…