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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

#111

Post by wycy »

jimhefferon wrote: post #92
rib3ye wrote: post #53

A timely blog post for me: A close friend who is the same age as me (and an EE) has been trying to get me into Ham for over 10 years. I finally became interested and bought a $25 radio (BaoFeng UV-5R) on Amazon ... only to learn that I couldn't talk to my friend on Day 0 because 1. he lives >20 mi away, 2. no line of sight and had to learn about repeaters, and 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham b…

> 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?

There's no technical enforcement of this. I think this is just referring to the general conventions of the way people speak on ham radio, which is different.

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

#112

Post by stakkur »

I'm a ham. I don't think there's hard data on the 'average age' of hams--it's very anecdotal. Nobody really knows that, and the ARRL or feds don't have the actual age of licensees documented.

I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not.

More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?

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

#113

Post by justusthane »

jdietrich wrote: post #98
oneplane wrote: post #87

I'm curious as to why you would bother with HAM. It used to give you something that wasn't available otherwise, but that hasn't been the case for a very long time. There are plenty of ways to communicate with whoever you want, however you want, whenever you want and completely encrypted too! I see a lot of anecdotes of special distaster cases when HAM was the magical solution, but I don't remember normal communicatio…

Why do people buy vinyl records or ride horses? There's something completely magical about making an inter-continental contact with 5 watts and a wire in a tree, or bouncing your voice off an amateur-built satellite with a handheld yagi. There's an eerie beauty to the atmospherics on the HF band, the music of signal emerging from the noise. The anticipation of the dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah of a CQ call, the exc…

Thanks for linking, this is a fantastic taste of SDR!

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

#114

Post by RIMR »

hpoe wrote: post #68
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not. These rules were put in place to prevent spies from using HAM to exfil data during the Cold War. Really I think it should be something that should be revisited but I don't know how the 3 letter agency's would like a method of communication that they can't access.

You can send encrypted data over the Internet with substantially more ease, so I think it's safe to call these laws antiquated.

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

#116

Post by generalizations »

rib3ye wrote: post #53

A timely blog post for me: A close friend who is the same age as me (and an EE) has been trying to get me into Ham for over 10 years. I finally became interested and bought a $25 radio (BaoFeng UV-5R) on Amazon ... only to learn that I couldn't talk to my friend on Day 0 because 1. he lives >20 mi away, 2. no line of sight and had to learn about repeaters, and 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham b…

> I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak.

That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.

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

#117

Post by jodrellblank »

RIMR wrote: post #95

As long as radio waves can travel through the air, amateur radio will not die. Why would it?

In 1900-1940 you could talk to people far outside walking distance, miles away, without needing to pay a phone bill or choose one person to ring up and talk to, using some of the most advanced technology on the planet, to achieve things you simply couldn't do any other way, and explore phenomena nobody had looked at.

In 1940-~1990 you could talk to people internationally, places you could never go on holiday, watching valves give way to integrated circuits, lead acid batteries turning to NiCad, improving signal sensitivity, reliability, portability, take part in the hobby developing around the mass availability of personal cars for things like assisting at sports events, or disaster assistance and relaying emergency messages, competitions like radio contact from hilltops, taking part in the developing space industry - satellites!

Now you can't build advanced radios from scratch in your shed, they're massively complicated microcontrollers. There's no need to build your own power supplies, cheap and efficient and reliable ones are abundant. There's no need to build your own radios, for the same reason. And the internet exists; chatrooms where you can talk to random people around the world are abundant, internet broadcasts of airport control towers and such are available, smartphones make portable contact nearly ubiquitous. Exploring new things is fine, but when you can find hundreds of YouTube videos showing you that it really is explored pretty thoroughly by now, that damps the allure.

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

#118

Post by jpmattia »

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…

> it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.

Just to provide an example: I made a keyer in the 70s. The way to make a PCB was to get a 3x4 copper-coated board from Radio Shack, use a sharpie to draw your desired traces, then etch the board in an HCl bath. After that, you used an old-fashioned soldering iron to attach your components to the board. You became excellent at soldering ICs, to avoid the additional cost of using a plug-in socket.

(Now get off my lawn.)

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

#119

Post by mikece »

samatman wrote: post #108
rib3ye wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to agree with that line of reason. In my observation, GenX marketed themselves as the generation of apathy, and so eventually people became apathetic about them.

Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy, because we weren't impressed by their music. Richard Linklater was born in 1960... We were too young to object at the time, and now we're stuck with it.

> Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy...

And we spend all day on Slack at work so clearly the Amateur Radio version of Slack/IRC has to be called "Apathy"!

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

#120

Post by unnouinceput »

Quote: "Tell us why RHR would be a good fit for you"

OMFG! Really? This corporate BS question, that I get tired of it every time I find a interesting project to bid on, and the naive potential client has it hidden in there - it's here for youngsters? I usually just go with a snarky "because I'm awesome" or "because I'm the best you'll get" on my potential clients. Hope youngsters are replying to them with "It's not, I'm a masochist".

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