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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

#161

Post by alibarber »

mywittyname wrote: post #128
crocodiletears wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I've swerved off of getting into HAM. By popular perception (in my circles, and perception doesn't necessarily reflect reality) it's a chatroom for boomers (not necessarily a bad thing) waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), with a cost of entry of at least a hundred dollars for equipment that supports a fixed set of protocols with a very narrow use-case. Radio jus…

> waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), This is what always kept me away from HAM Radios. Everyone I knew that was into it was a huge stickler about the rules and would talk about all the bad stuff that should happen to rule breakers. It was pretty unnerving.

Their bark is worse than their bite most of the time. Anecdote: One of the most often repeated exam questions in the UK is 'if you don't update your license every 5 years ... all manor of trouble will happen'. Well, life happened and I didn't do anything for over 15 years and then I wanted to get back in to radio and of course I expected to have to grovel and take the test again and whatnot, but no, the actual government body, Ofcom (UK FCC equiv.) didn't really seem to care and after confirming that I was still alive all was well, in fact it was completely automated I think.

Like most things in life, if you're not actually actively causing trouble things will probaby be ok. But yes, some amateurs do seem to be a rule loving/enforcing bunch. Anyone would think they were regulating something actually dangerous, like getting a driving licence.

(Note, I'm not belittling the importance of being a responsible amateur - just that a lot of the time the general tone seems a bit 'DO NOT DO' more than 'do...')

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

#162

Post by gaze »

gaze wrote: post #157

Ham radio, the way boomers practice it, is very expensive and gatekeepey. I don't have money for some fancy expensive SDR. Also, I'm sorry, but the ham radio community these days is not actually that technically savvy. Most largely know enough to get their license. There's a weird crossover between the free energy community and preppers and ham radio. A lot just get their license and get expensive rigs and compare th…

Basically if I want technical questions answered, I'll post on EEVBlog. If I want to talk about how these dern kids and political correctness blah blah blah (I don't), I'll go on ham radio general/technician bands.

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

#163

Post by wila »

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?

You can even get started without buying anything, there's an SDR website where you can experiment with a remote SDR. It's in the Netherlands.

Just browse to here: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

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

#164

Post by m0xte »

paulirwin wrote: post #159
m0xte wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to hear some of the crap I hear on 2m in London UK. I dumped my HT in the end so I don’t get annoyed. CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.

I love FT8/FT4. It's a safe place for introverts and those turned off by the vitriol on phone to experiment with propagation and get awards. But I want phone to be a safe place, too.

Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

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

#165

Post by nucleardog »

raziel2701 wrote: post #105

Not being confrontational, as someone that knows very little about ham radio, what is the appeal? My impression was that crusty old guys were into it and they'd speak all kinds of technical stuff and I was just not vibing with that whole scene.

If you're into RF as a hobby or want to use RF gear in your projects, it's the cheapest, easiest, and most straightforward path to getting access to a whole bunch of radio spectrum and the ability to use a whole bunch of power.

With a basic license you can run a 250W transmitter. With an advanced license you can run a 1kW transmitter. You have access to allocations pretty much across the entire spectrum[1]:

  * LF: ~136kHz
  * MF: ~476kHz, 1.8-2MHz
  * HF: 3.5MHz-4.0MHz, 7.0-7.3MHz, 10.1-10.15MHz, 14.0-14.35MHz, 18.068-18.168MHz, 21-21.45MHz, 24.89-24.99MHz, 28.0-29.7MHz
  * VHF: 50-54MHz, 144-148MHz, 219-220MHz, 222-225MHz
  * UHF: 420-450MHz, 902-928MHz, 1240-1300MHz, 2300-2310MHz, 2390-2450MHz
  * SHF: 3.3-3.5GHz, 5.650-5.925GHz, 10.0-10.5GHz, 24.0-24.25GHz
  * EHF: 47.0-47.2GHz, 75.5-81.0GHz, 122.5-123.0GHz, 134-141GHz, 241-250GHz
An amateur radio license (depending on your locale, specific class may be required) allows you to build and operate your own equipment without any required pre-approval by the FCC or whatever your equivalent is. The license is attached to you personally. You can buy, build, or cobble together any equipment you'd like and operate it legally and take personal responsibility for ensuring you're operating within your assigned bands/modes/etc.

It's basically an experimenter's license for radio.

You can use it to talk to some old guys, participate in emergency preparedness stuff, work communications as a public service for events... but at it's core it's really just a license to use a huge chunk of radio spectrum.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_alloca...

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

#166

Post by rsync »

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…

"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."

... which I don't find surprising and seems to fit, but what I was very surprised by was the tremendous amount of submission, and appeal, to authority that pervades HAM communities.

FCC regulations are not to be questioned. Even to discuss other, possible regulatory regimes or changes to rules is met with incredulity and sometimes outright hostility. God forbid one bring up issues of circumvention, etc.

I find it surprising because it is such a contract to the UNIX/FOSS community which places such a high cultural value on freedom and exploration of the gray areas of systems.

It's an odd cultural aspect of the HAM community ...

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

#167

Post by bityard »

riffic wrote: post #132
paulirwin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're being downvoted because of the terms you're using, but you're not wrong. Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in dero…

Radio is public. These people need to be named and shamed. An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.

That's an understandable reaction but it's the wrong one.

People like that say the things they say for the attention it attracts to them. They are not ashamed of their dumbass bigoted opinions otherwise they wouldn't be transmitting halfway around the world in the clear. If you engage them in any way, even to try to shame them, you have already given them what they want. They are the trolls of amateur radio.

The right thing to do is what most of us hams do: spin the dial and find someone more pleasant to talk to.

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

#168

Post by jokit »

As people begin to understand that centralization is pursued to have a central point of corruption, there becomes a push to decentralize. How many times have we seen in the last decade some regime attempting to block/constrict communication?

It's not the abuse of power that is the problem but the power to abuse.

The solution is permissionless, decentralized, alternatives.

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

#169

Post by bityard »

detaro wrote: post #10
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…

Two additional things from someone who has considered getting a license a few times, but never quite made the jump because it wasn't clear what for in the end: - a bunch of interesting radio things are available without a license today - e.g. hunting for various signals with a cheap SDR receiver. Which could potentially be a way for ham communities to then get people deeper into it, but the communities seem quite dis…

I can't say I disagree with you. I got my ham radio license in my late 30's because radio has always fascinated the hell out of me, even as a kid. But when I was a kid, being able to talk to someone far away without incurring the cost of a long-distance phone call was still a novelty. The ubiquity of the Internet and smart phones took away that particular novelty.

I still have a radio (several, actually) and one day when I have a larger piece of property I may even set up a reasonable HF station to participate in contests and the like but right now it's hard to justify spending time on a hobby that has little productive value at the end of the day.

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

#170

Post by riffic »

bityard wrote: post #167
riffic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio is public. These people need to be named and shamed. An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.

That's an understandable reaction but it's the wrong one. People like that say the things they say for the attention it attracts to them. They are not ashamed of their dumbass bigoted opinions otherwise they wouldn't be transmitting halfway around the world in the clear. If you engage them in any way, even to try to shame them, you have already given them what they want. They are the trolls of amateur radio. The righ…

There was a good thread on reddit about this recently and I firmly agree with this comment about how useless "spin the dial" is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/iatqth/a_lot_...

social ostracization and penalty has its time and place, and this is one of those occasions. Same reason cars have number plates.

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