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Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

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Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#41

Post by woofcat »

jcims wrote: post #21
woofcat wrote: post #4

As someone who has looked on into the hobby in Canada. I feel there needs to be another class for people who just want to use a store bought radio. I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment. Just my two cents.

You can definitely do that for the 2 and .75 meter bands. $30 off of Amazon for a BaoFeng. HF and the bottom half of VHF is where you start needing more (expensive) equipment and the antenna setup begins to really dominate performance. The other problem is that you'll go through all of the expense for a turnkey radio, get on the bands and all you hear people talking about is their radio setup.

>You can definitely do that for the 2 and .75 meter bands. $30 off of Amazon for a BaoFeng.

I'm welcome to being corrected, however my understanding is that I'd need a full license to legally broadcast on those bands.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#43

Post by bluesquared »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Someone help me understand what is the exciting thing about HAM cause this article doesn't do anything for that. My first exposure to HAM was back in ~2000 when I started working at a car stereo shop and the owner (NU5K) was huge into HAM. He was an asshole most of the time, but very knowledgeable and loved to tinker with different HAM components both benchtop and mobile. Everytime I would try and get interested the…

>Ok, well I can also do that on ukraine.bbs - and being able to choose my topic instead of whomever is actually on this random band at this random time.

I think this is one of the big advantages of amateur radio. No need for the infrastructure of the internet...it's just you with some TX/RX equipment, power, and someone else with the same. No ISPs, governments, servers, software, etc... getting in the way.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#44

Post by squarefoot »

I love the new technologies allowing what once was considered impossible, like long range bidirectional data links using milliwatts, however keep in mind that most of those ready made modules use closed sources protocols, and it's very hard if not impossible replicating their functionality using non proprietary parts. Does it mean they're of inferior quality compared to open source solutions? Absolutely not, but if the manufacturer decides to push another technology, all your beloved swarm of data transceivers sending sensor data back and forth becomes instantly obsolete.

Also, give youngsters some access to old tech as well. I don't have a ham license, but by experience could possibly repair a damaged analog radio after an accident, then send a distress SOS call by using a screwdriver to close two contacts. It's forgotten practice, still there's one probability over a billion times that it could turn out useful.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#45

Post by hibby »

jsherer wrote: post #35
jron wrote: post #3

When I first read about FT8, I immediately started looking at the code to see how simple it would be to handle more meaningful conversations. Fortunately I stumbled onto this video from Jordan Sherer: https://youtu.be/mZKhVcFOljY He had done all the work for me in JS8Call: https://bitbucket.org/widefido/js8call/ If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.c…

Glad you found me :) Here's the main site where you can learn more: http://js8call.com/ And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o

oh JS8 is your fault?

It's great, I love it and have been enjoying it for the last few months - thank you so much!

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#46

Post by lozaning »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #33
rthomas6 wrote: post #17

I think a lot of young(er) people like me who would otherwise get into ham radio are being sniped by SDR. You can buy a $30 piece of hardware and listen to planes talking to the airport, see weather imaging from satellites, intercept and read pager messages, listen to emergency and police radio, listen to all channels of consumer grade walkie talkies, and also just generally see the invisible world of wireless commun…

Any recommended resources to get started with SDR?

The sub $30 RTL-SDR and SDR# software, is more or less the defacto standard starting point.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#47

Post by iNate2000 »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #33
rthomas6 wrote: post #17

I think a lot of young(er) people like me who would otherwise get into ham radio are being sniped by SDR. You can buy a $30 piece of hardware and listen to planes talking to the airport, see weather imaging from satellites, intercept and read pager messages, listen to emergency and police radio, listen to all channels of consumer grade walkie talkies, and also just generally see the invisible world of wireless commun…

Any recommended resources to get started with SDR?

“RTL-SDR” is amazing!

“RTL” is from a particular chipset that has great support for hackability.”

There a few different apps that can decode signals from it.

I even got a USB-OTG (“on-the-go”) adapter and used my RTL dongle with an app on an Android phone. And that was 5ish years ago.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#48

Post by justin66 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Someone help me understand what is the exciting thing about HAM cause this article doesn't do anything for that. My first exposure to HAM was back in ~2000 when I started working at a car stereo shop and the owner (NU5K) was huge into HAM. He was an asshole most of the time, but very knowledgeable and loved to tinker with different HAM components both benchtop and mobile. Everytime I would try and get interested the…

It's pretty much the only way for a person to legally build a radio and operate it. Everything you're talking about has to do with using communications equipment, not creating anything.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#49

Post by Retr0spectrum »

mikece wrote: post #26
wrkronmiller wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who holds but doesn't use a Technician Class license, I completely agree. As someone commented below, sending encrypted data over HAM frequencies is not allowed (IANAL), which also rules out a lot of interesting projects and use-cases.

There is a proviso that goes with that. If you're doing a metro-area mesh network (some of the WiFi overlap with the 2.4GHz amateur band!) you can use WEP or WPA as long as the password for joining the network is "publicly available." Putting the current password on the website for the club/group running the project is sufficient to demonstrate, for FCC purposes, that the communications are open.

What happens if I use SSL over the top of such a network? Is that allowed? If the answer is yes, it seems more like a loophole in the rules than anything.

Re: Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

#50

Post by ssimpson »

mikece wrote: post #5
hibby wrote: post #2

I saw this shared on Twitter this morning, and had some thoughts: While the graph is good, it is specific to the US and ignores the fact that a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ - the hobby is healthy now, but there's an age crisis coming soon. It doesn't really reflect the health of the entire hobby, globally, just a specific subset. Millenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham lic…

> a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the m…

I feel like I am lucky, my club has a bunch of old dudes, but they are still learning and growing. A few years ago, I proposed adding a digital repeater, and it caused all kinds of trouble, but most of those folks left and now its great. We have awesome presentations on how to leverage raspberry pis, building portable battery packs, opensource VNAs, etc. But this is true, a lot of the hobby is very curmudgeon-y. Which is sad because there is so much cool tech.
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