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 license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials!
That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects.
I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!
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 maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.
There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.
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 derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people.
In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.
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.
not mad at all. My take is that radio is not an ephemeral medium. These transmissions can be slurped down by an SDR, recorded, stored, analyzed, tagged, fingerprinted, indexed, et cetera. By keying up you are effectively making a statement of public record.
At the moment there isn't a financial incentive to perform this at any reasonable scale, but this doesn't mean that it can't be done at all.
This is a very extreme and authoritarian response to a very vocal minority. Who decides what isn't "compliant" with the rules you want to shame them for?
Got it, you want to make it all but the punishment towards suppression of speech.
Mention about the independent country of Taiwan or the autonomy of Hong Kong on radio.. well you've enabled the punishment of said behavior on a very real level. (In this case that would be invoking the national security letters recently introduced)
Is this really worth it for a few people with terrible opinions?
My stance:
Let people have stupid opinions, let them blow off steam, recognize that you don't agree with them, don't be their opinions.
Again, you seem to think that radio is ephemeral. It's not, and there is no expectation of privacy or anonymity when you key up. Perhaps you misunderstand what amateur radio is about.
You already have to drop your call letters every few minutes while you're on-air, by FCC regulation. HAM radio transmissions are also subject to FCC restrictions on "obscene or indecent" language.
If it crosses the line where it wouldn't be allowed on over-the-air TV, it's not allowed on HAM radio spectrum. You can report it, and with evidence it can lead to nasty fines and/or revocation of license.
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.
Yes. There are different people with vastly different values out there.
> Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it.
You're feeding into their behavior. IMO We're seeing a huge conflict in culture: one side that is authoritarian against unpleasant language and the other that doesn't accept that (or the suggested changed). (That's a very simplified view of it)
To be honest, I see this more as a baby boomer thing than a Gen X thing. Gen X who are into technical things tend to be into digital things. I mean hey, give me a commodore 64 hooked up to a modem and I'm gonna have a good time. Other digital modes are all the same to me. I'm Gen X and I'm 50, and I'm gonna whine more about k-pop than digital modes.
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.
Funny things these "generations" are. It's just as if someone were drawing an arbitrary cutoff line every two decades, picking a random characteristic from the overall zeitgeist, and proclaiming it to define the people of that "generation"...
More realistically: people playing with computers in the 80s/90s didn't complain enough about this being considered "nerdy", and now instead of "bicycles for the mind", we're stuck with digital toys designed to the lowest common denominator.
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.
Ham radio (the human component) seems to suffer from the DnD 3.5 problem.
A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.
Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?
Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.
Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.
Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.
Good lesson for organizational engineering. Longer tenures in a job tend to increase risk aversion and technical conservatism.
So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.
> continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?
Why would you gatekeep on something that is mostly a hobby and for volunteers. Putting a continuing ed requirement on that is just going to piss off people. People who build these networks are mostly volunteers and they put a lot of effort into this. I think there should be a bit of respect given for that.
I got involved with amateur radio ~20 years ago as a teenager Handled radio traffic for various marathons.
Was a bunch of 60-70+ people and a few teenagers.
Got briefly involved a few years ago. Still dominated by 60-70+ year olds. Me and a friend in our early 40s were the “kids”
I got a technician license at 16 and joined the local club. I was surprised at how hostile the majority of the members were. Since I didn’t learn code, I couldn’t use the HF bands and talk to people a little more tolerant. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the hobby in general.
Yep, and in my experience the older people definitely lean towards the "law and order" and "follow the rules" side of things, which is very disappointing from a "hacker" sort of "question authority" ethos. You'd think the Venn diagram between trendy maker spaces with 18–40 year olds and amateur radio groups would be close to a circle, but there's hardly any overlap at all.
With the improvements and rising affordability of cellular networks, satellites, wifi, IoT protocols, etc. — not to mention to overall transition from analog to digital — will amateur radio even stay relevant?
> 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.
An important aspect of Ham radio culture, which I think underlies this discussion around the morse requirement, is the degree of self-reliance that you have to demonstrate in order to get a license.
What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?
I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.
"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 ...
I agree with you that there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing possible regulatory changes. But it's a different story if what is really going on here is that they want to follow the regs and you want to explore their "gray areas."
In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.
I’m not a ham but I totally agree with the old guard on rejecting digital. MAKING your own equipment is an essential aspect of why amateur radio is worth preserving — it makes the network very resilient. In a world where digital electronics become very hard to acquire, hams can still maintain essential communication by tearing out components from microwaves and landfills. No such chance if everyone’s dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay.
If ham radio goes digital then it’s just people wasting spectrum on something they could be doing on the Internet.
Being around after the collapse of civilization is neither the only nor the primary purpose of ham radio, and there's a world of difference between "not rejecting digital tech" and "everyone's dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay".
I've been to ham radio clubs and the age gap is real. I go to the meetups in the Chicago land area and only see about one or two people my age. The people my age are usually sons or daughters of the older people.
The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club.
This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique.
I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!
I got my license at age 15 in 1999. I'm 36 now, and still among the "young" people in the local club. That said, ham radio has been a huge, important part of my life, and is what inspired me to be an engineer. The people I've met through it, both young and old, have been really great.
I got my license 25 years ago and now I’m 50+. Even then the population skewed much older.
I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.
I'm just about ready for my ten year renewal and almost 50. Same for me. I got it for the ability to use APRS and other higher power options for high altitude balloon tracking (project never got off the ground hurr).
Yeah I've been licensed for 25+ years and I'm still one of the younger hams here.
I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles.
Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.
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 distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities)
- online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through)
A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory).
EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!
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.
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 just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
Mid 20's Extra here... Experimentation is totally allowed. Either the FCC will ignore the complaint, or you are actually outside the (very lenient) experimentation rules.
> 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.
One of the express purposes of the amateur radio service is to facilitate experimentation and innovation in radio technology, and the FCC grants special licenses for that purpose all the time. There's a significant amount of harm you can do with a radio, so willfully causing interference to other radio services will earn you a hefty penalty. You should definitely get into amateur radio if you have an interest, and maybe look into some of the instances the FCC actually issued fines - if you're not out to cause harm you have nothing to worry about.
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...')
Well here's the thing. Most hams seem to be retired engineers. They are used to knowing and following rules and will fall over themselves in an attempt to correct even the slightest error in understanding or application. Not unlike many of us on HN.
However, the rules are actually not that hard to follow and part of getting your license is learning about those rules. The FCC views amateur radio as largely self-policing and will quite literally never go after an individual until they have had multiple complaints, issued several warnings, and have a documented pattern of intentional, malicious violation of the rules.
Nothing wrong with following rules. But if you think you're going to be surrounded by legalists waiting to spring government fines on you for every slip-up, you might be incensed to turn back.
I would agree that online there are a bunch of loud "get off my lawn" type voicer (I remember a published article on one of the bigger ham forums, where the guy bemoaned that a local ham club advertised a event as a "maker" event to appeal to young people, to him maker was for women, i.e. home maker.)
But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)
Here in the UK, we've seen a huge surge in people - especially younger people - getting licensed since lockdown, in large part because it's now possible to take your license exams online. I think that the RSGB (our ARRL) had severely under-estimated the amount of friction in the old examination system and the amount of pent-up demand created by things like RTL-SDR.
That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help.
Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.
My dad is/was a ham. My experience growing up with ham radio in the house was so negative that it's just kinda a turn off for me. Going back to the early 90s, for a lot of those old boomer types ham was mostly just a way to out-do eachother by showing off their rigs. It's kind of disappointing to me that they have this awesome technology they could have been taking to the next level but instead just spend hours whistling into the mic and bragging. In addition I got a sense that many of the old guys were actively working as gatekeepers as a way to stroke their own egos.
These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.
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/
Thanks for your work. JS8Call seems really cool, but I can never make any contacts with it. Maybe bad luck, but every time I try on 20m through 80m there's nobody on the other end. (FT8 and friends working fine.)
Hey Jordan, fancy running into you here! W7RLF here, miscdotgeek.com. We've talked before on FB and groups.io. I must say, if it weren't for JS8 I'd be off the air right now. Soooo much life stuff going on.
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.
Interesting - in the UK we have a 'Foundation' license which is effectively just that. Sadly I don't think you could take it and use it abroad (i.e. outside the UK) though.
You can't. I passed my foundation this month and am moving to the Republic of Ireland later this year, so I won't be able to operate from there. Ireland has a Class A/B licence a bit like the old City & Guilds exam, so there's a massive gulf between foundation and a Class A licence.
There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down.
As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
Yeah I'm kinda in the same place (not literally, but I'm not a UK resident - Finland now) so I leveled up to intermediate but I'm still waiting on Full (which gives you HAREC, so a reciprocal full in most of the world) before I start transmitting, do hope the RSGB set it up soon :)
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.
Ah, sorry! I misunderstood what you meant. You are correct.
You're likely aware that you can get CB/MURS/FRS type radios without a license, but that wouldn't help that much. It would be nice to have a small slice of each ham band that would be available to non-licensed folks, but the hardware would be tricky, you'd have high physical capability (and cost) but it would have to be locked down to basically a 'slice selector', speaker and microphone...basically what you get with FRS radios.
Yeah, I just think it would be nice to have a "non-custom equipment" license. Allow me to buy the BaoFeng equipment with a license based on radio etiquette, laws, etc.
And avoid all the test questions about amplifiers, and antenna configuration, etc.
The other month in Canada we had a huge outage of 3-4 cellular service providers and home internet issues due to a MPLS failure. Being work from home due to COVID I had no idea how to determine if this was a local level event, or a larger event. I turned on my trusty AM/FM/LW/SW radio. However in the fashion of today's radio landscape they're all multicast of national programming etc. Nothing about a huge outage.
Had I a license there are a few HAM guys I know 60 minutes down the road and it would have been a decent check to see the severity of the outage.
If the draw is just talking to people, you may be very disappointed. Unless you are the specific target demographic for 2m repeater crowd or the "broadcasters" in the HF, you will be shunned at best.
But hey, you may be entertained by hearing old farts complain about immigrants!
TBH as someone licensed in Canada, the basic exam is just that. I have an EE background and it is not needed for the basic license exam. There are a number of apps that have all the possible questions for studying. Would recommend using that to study.
Having an EE background definitely helps with the advanced exam though
My 12-year-old son will be taking the basic exam next month -- studying for it has been his quarantine/summer project. It's been fun teaching him the basics of electronics, but there is some cramming required, especially for the questions related to legal matters.
Yeah, definitely just straight memorization on a lot of the questions. I did a couple practice exams on my subway ride to work each day and after a month it was no problem.
The overwhelming majority of hams are male, white and old (like me). Just take a look at most of the photos in QST or glance around a hamfest sometime. There is some synergy happening with the Maker crowd but it doesn't seem to me that it will be enough to keep ham radio alive.
I would guess that Digital Mobile Radio gets held back by the fact that most of the internet is now SSL/TLS. And that you aren't supposed to (outside of emergencies) pass encrypted traffic over Ham.
COVID has been a shot in the arm for Ham in the UK in my opinion, the best thing being remote exam invigilation. Now it's possible to study in your own time and take the exam when it suits you - not just a couple of times a year, or in a place miles away!
Indeed, there's a lot to be said for meeting up as a club - like anything really, but the logistics of the exam system seemed like a vicious circle in the past: Not that many people are going to do it, so it's not worth setting one up and booking a facility and all the paperwork that often, so fewer people are going to be able to take it...
I did exactly that, passed my foundation online at the start of this month. I've been on my local 2m net a couple of times, but still setting up my rig.
I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next. This is more that people studying online aren't part of clubs. I'm still learning etiquette and I think we'll end up with a lot of new passes ignoring it in 6 months time as behaviours become ingrained.
Good point - I am optimistic that people will naturally find other local hams / clubs and join or establish communities and meetups and things. But it'll be interesting to see...
Must confess that I don't actually live in the UK any more so I am having to hold out for the Full to become available online before I get back on the air so I haven't been listening in or transmitting. For me though I'm really keen to just build analogue circuits and QRP stuff, so I've been enjoying studying this lately.
I think what you're describing is what the RSGB have been attempting to mitigate through the Beyond Exams schemes, wherein they've gamified different activities you could do on your own or with a club to further your knowledge of amateur radio. https://rsgb.org/main/beyond-exams-building-experience/
> I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next.
That's the problem I had in Canada. I passed my exam, showed up to a local club meeting, and was like "Now what?" "Whatever you want." "I don't know what I want." "Whatever you want!"
Myself and one other young member of the club tried suggesting some local events we could offer services to to provide members a public service opportunity, their answer was "We don't go to them. They come to us." (Spoiler Alert: They don't come to us.)
I've sinced moved somewhere that has a very active emergency communications group that's well tied in with the city's emergency response plans and the police and works proactively with the city to provide communication for many large public events. That very quickly evolved into getting much more into the hobby as there was suddenly a _purpose_ to what I was doing. Testing equipment, fixing and maintaining equipment, solving problems _with_ radio (we need to link point A to point B -- what do?!) practicing emergency communications, etc. And once you get in to the hobby, it's much easier to branch out into adjacent areas as opportunities come up.
I think a big part of getting more people actively involved could just be... providing things for them to do. Where I used to live the question "Why should I get an amateur radio license?" was hard to answer. It's an incredibly easy sell where I am now to get people interested and involved as part of an emergency preparedness and public service group. It's all the feel good of volunteer work with all the fun of playing with a bunch of electronics and technical stuff. There are a lot of people that appeals to.
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 communications going on around us. For a few hundred dollars, you can transmit things back. All on frequencies that require no license with equipment that is very cheap compared to ham radio.
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.
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.
I see that raised a lot as a concern but I can’t imagine it has any legs nowadays.
Previously, in the 1980’s, yes I could see a Taxi/Plumber/etc using amateur radio equipment as a cheaper workaround for their business, but now it’s so much cheaper (and better) to use cellular or, if you really needed business radios they aren’t crazy expensive as they once were.
There's a ton of people using BaoFeng radios without a license. Every once in a while, some ignorant middle manager at a larger company buys a bunch and the FCC cites them.
I’ve actually seen baofengs with little stubby antennas used by various government employees without licenses, for instance workers at the DEQ near me. I’m not a dick so I’m not gonna call the fcc on them, but it’d be funny to see that.
The reason for the rules against commercial activity on the ham bands was originally to keep hams from competing with commercial services, not the other way around.
However, as an ham radio license holder, I would still not want to see our amateur radio frequencies, which are purposefully set aside by the FCC for hobby and experimental use, used for any commercial purposes at all.
Commercial radio has its own spectrum and rules, and the cost to use it is not insignificant. Many businesses in my area still use radio because it is more reliable and controllable than the services provided by mobile operators. A lot of these would absolutely jump at the chance to use the ham bands and ditch their expensive commercial equipment, regulation, and fees if it were legal to do so.
For non-local communications, HFT companies have been looking at the HF bands for years to shave a few milliseconds off their micro-arbitrage transactions (compared to wired networks) and ham radio has the largest chunk of spectrum after the military.
I remember last time it was talked about on HN a bunch of people argued with me that there was no reason for encryption. When I started talking about mesh networks and control systems I got answers about how I could do that without encryption so what was I complaining about... The other thing I wanted is to be able to fly things outside of line of site (I mean why else would I use HAM to fly it?). Though it looks like you can apply to do that now.
As to the Russian Spies, tech has changed so much that anyone who would still argue this is fooling themselves.
As I understand it, the idea is that it's a "sandbox" or "test" network. Confidentiality implies a "production" use case, and HAM doesn't want to be the venue for those. You can play around with encryption if the keys are public but you can't actually keep secrets. Even if the secrets are non-commercial. It's a place to play with radios, not a personal communications network.
I have a couple of NESDR Smart dongles from NooElec [1], that have worked very well for me. I run them on a Raspberry Pi 3 and pipe audio output to my desktop or laptop with PulseAudio.
Aside from SDR# on Windows and gqrx on Linux, there's also GNU Radio [2] and a variety of lightweight applications that can run on, let's say, a Raspberry Pi Zero [3]. Oona Räisänen has a fascinating blog that touches on digital signal processing as well, applicable to SDRs as well.
Specifically you're talking about RTL-SDR, a hacked soundcard that can receive a lot of frequencies. The channels you can legally transmit back on for a few hudred dollars more are FRS/GMRS family/business radio channels. (Speaking about USA only here, since that's the only radio location I know about).
tl;dr for the rest of my post: ham radio is the best type of radio for hackers.
Undoubtedly you can have tons of fun with a $30 RTL-SDR and basic antenna, but there are lots of things you can do with ham radio once you grow tired of that, or if you find yourself being interested in how radio works generally, but more fundamentally, you can actually talk to people who are _actively hacking on the same types of things you are_ using projects you've both worked on, maybe together.
Regarding FRS/GMRS walkie talkie frequencies: these are UHF (Ultra High Frequency) frequencies, which means a couple of things: range is limited to well under a mile in most conditions, and building a radio to work on FRS or GMRS would be _possible_, but would require a lot of specialized equipment and maybe an engineering degree. Additionally, power is extremely limited on these radios, so you might be able to transmit back, but you'd better be near the business's parking lot to do so legally. Again, as far as a hobby goes, try breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant's recitation of someone's waffle fry order to ask whether you're coming in clearly on your home-built radio.
Ham radio has a community that's thriving and full of fun for new and/or young modern hackers. You just have to know where to look. For starters, consider Ham Radio Village at DEFCON (https://hamvillage.org) or the online Young Amateur Radio Club (https://yarc.world/) (an inclusive and active club centered around a Discord channel full of people interested in the latest tech in ham radio), or Ham Radio Workbench Podcast (https://twitter.com/HamWorkbench) (a podcast focusing on the latest in ham radio with a focus on new technologies and the intersection with the maker sphere). Hackaday frequently hosts new, fresh takes on ham radio hacking as well.
I think ham radio is back to its roots. With the resources of the modern maker movement, it's possible to learn about radio and hack something together that puts you on the air with people as excited as you are.
You could build a radio that transmits on FRS frequencies, but it would be illegal unless you submitted a radio to the FCC and received type approval. FRS radios must be type approved, limited power, and with non-removable antennas.
I think GMRS radios must also be type approved, but they can have removable antennas. You need a GMRS license to operate one legally. FRS does not require a license.
"...breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant..." Seriously? Come on.
Other than those nits, you do have a lot of good information in your comment, so thank you for that!
Yep, you are right. Apologies for the misinformation there - I had misremembered.
Good to know about FRS and GMRS. Those things just underscore how really limited experimental transmission privileges are without a ham license.
About the Chik-Fil-A thing, that was a silly way to say that even if you do transmit on FRS or GMRS, it's not like there's a community of other experimenters making it fun to do so.
I went through a radio phase a few years ago and got my extra. Then I had kids, then work got busy. We moved a few times.
I still have a quite a bit of gear left, mostly 2M stuff but the fact is I don't really have anyone to talk to and the biggest reason I got into radio (public service/storm spotting/emergency prep) have not been very active here. We do radios for parades, but they haven't activated storm spotters here in nearly 2 years.
If I had more people to talk to, I'd be on it more. But it's hard to get kids 3 kids 6 and under... to get interested in it.
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 end result promise was something like: "You can bounce a wave off a cloud and talk with someone in Ukraine!"
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.
Even moreso now - there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc. I see no reason that anyone would mess with HAM.
Your last paragraph is exactly the reason I enjoy being a ham (it's not an acronym, BTW). I get to tinker and constantly stretch my knowledge and technical skills.
It's a gigantic hobby that touches a lot of different nerdy things.
First of, there's a wack-ton of science you can just dive straight into, with a lot of literature around because ham's been around for a long time.
Are you in to EE and hacking? Cool! You can build your own radios!
Are you into pushing boundries? DX (chasing long distance contacts) is for you.
There's QRP (super low power) where you can talk to an amazing amount of people over morse code with just 5 watt and a deadnuts simple transmitter. It's like making a cellphone with a 9v and an altoids tin and talking to someone halfway cross the country.
There's also the civic duty aspect, there even folk with just handie talkies (walkie-talkie-sized ham radios made for shorter-distance trasmission) can do their part in a natural disaster.
But above all that, there's a really hands-on feel to making something out of bits and bobs and suddenly someone is talking to you!
> there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc.
It used to be that one of the public services that amateur radio operators performed was weather spotting. Before the age of cell phones that was a vital service. Now if I see severe weather I can text a GPS-tagged photo directly to the NWS.
Mentioning RaspberryPi and amateur radio: I've been interested in combining weather observation stations with packet radio and a truly open database of weather observations that, from the beginning, is dedicated to weather and climate research and will NEVER allow the data or sensor network to be acquired (like Weather Underground). The idea of sticking a weather monitoring station somewhere remote with a PiZero, solar panel, battery, and transceiver to send weather observations to a weather research database... that would hit the sweet spot of combining amateur radio, hardware, cloud architecture, and contributing to science and the public good.
>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.
Ham radio is all about governments getting in the way. You can't do anything without asking a government's permission, and that permission gets revoked if you try to hide what you're doing by encrypting something. Also, don't even think about broadcasting without giving your license number, which is tied to your real name and address in a public database.
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.
Over half the ones I'm friends with have built a radio, but I have no idea if my friends are representative of the community as a whole. Also, it depends on what you mean: I bet a very strong majority have built their own antennas, but building radios is certainly not as common.
AFAIK bouncing off clouds isn't a thing. :-) But lots of other types of bouncing for sure: the ionosphere, ionized trails from meteorites, the edge between air masses of different temperatures, mountains, the moon, satellites, repeaters....
I'll be honest, I've been into the hobby for 16 years now, and have actually been on phone no more than a few times. To me, all the fun is building things, tinkering, just generally understanding and overcoming the technical challenges. And then when I get things working I prefer CW or digital just because it makes me a little self conscious blasting my voice out for all the world to hear.
Sure you can tinker with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos... but come on, what could be cooler than building your own radio and antenna system, and using it to make contact with some dude in Kazakstan without any Internet, or undersea cables, or satellites, or anything. Just two guys on the planet with wires strung up some trees. :-) How cool is that?!
For as long as I can remember there have been people worried about the Old White Guys Club aspect of ham radio. "ham radio is dying!" they say. Well, the old guys keep pushing daisies and younger guys (not always young!) come along and do things. It's how it goes. And not all of us are club affiliated ARRL card carrying robots. I eschew all of that in favor of just having fun doing my own thing, and one thing I've learned: There are a lot of hams just like me.
Learning about ham radio was one of my new "pandemic hobbies" and I got my license in June. I don't think it's dying at all; in fact, to me it's much more exclusive than Internet chatting or playing with Arduino. Both because of the licensing requirement, and because you need to learn something about electronics. That exclusivity is a draw! Similarly, learning CW (morse code) has become more popular since they dropped the requirement -- people like to learn things that are a challenge!
I have kids aged 9 and younger, and their friends are starting to get cell phones. I'm hoping I can get them to earn their technician licenses so I can give them cheap radios instead; then they can have their own "social network" without all the harmful stuff a smartphone gives access to.
TAPR [1] is a ham radio club that has a focus on digital stuff, it’s fantastically interesting geekery and should appeal to the HN crowd. The monthly newsletter, the Packet Status Register [2] is a great read, with projects typically involving radio, electronics, software and mechanicals. The TAPR Digital Communications Conference (virtual this year) is in just a few weeks [3].
It’s one of the few Amateur Radio clubs I know that has a Github repo [4]
Some of the growth is due to the rise of drone communications. In drone racing you are supposed to have a HAM license to operate your video transmitter on certain frequencies and powers. I'd bet a good chunk of the growth is from that.
There's more than 500 MHz of spectrum allocated to amateurs between 400 and 7 GHz in most jurisdictions. 420 - 450 MHz, 902 - 928 MHz, 1240 - 1300 MHz, 2390 - 2450 MHz, 3300 - 3500 MHz, 5650 - 5925 MHz are amateur bands here, and I think in the USA.
It's also generally very illegal as a hobbyist to build and operate your own transmitter, except with an amateur radio licence. If you're more interested in how the phone works and building your own, than just using it, that's what amateur radio is for.
i can simultaneously receive and transmit a 200MHz wide part of band
in frequencies between 400MHz an 7GHz
with my mobile SDR 5G phone after flashing custom firmware.
so what channel spacing do you use on your ham radio?
My interest lies mostly in building my own SDRs. I'm not quite sure what you're asking as I don't even have a traditional voice transceiver. I got my licence so I can build radio equipment.
Your phone, in combination with an appropriate license, would /be/ a ham radio in this context?
You're railing against a small thing I'm not even engaged in. Your phone is not more powerful than something like the USRP, for example, and that's quite popular among hams these days.
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.
Regarding attracting a newer generation: appearances are important! The first image on the page should not have people sitting on a toilet in what is obviously a bathroom. It's kind of crazy someone thought that was a good idea. Fear of being a loner who eats lunch in a school bathroom stall keeps kids away from electronics and hobbies like these.
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 before being allowed to speak. The proposition value that Ham is not an "old IM client" and instead a toy for analog protocol nerds took a long time to understand.
I remember somebody saying Ham is just a bunch of grumpy old retired guys complaining about the government. Someone else said wait, we aren't all retired!
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.
Our club/repeaters don't have any obvious "cultural" norms or rules. Announcing your call sign as required by FCC ham rules is about the only obvious rule.
Depends on the country I guess. In the US you can watch videos from Ham Radio Crash Course and sit for a license online. The quiz is easy and you can then move on to learn more advanced stuff. The only focus should be on not breaking things (like interfering others or causing electrical havoc)
In Argentina you only can sit for an exam after 30 2.5 hour lessons, that is several months listening to things you would better read/study out of a webpage.
And the attitude if you try to suggest a simpler process is "you are a criminal wanting to circunvent the laws!" (this attitude also comes from guys in the US if you suggest things like asking if you could license on a country and operate on a different one.
I'm better off using marine band, off road VHF frecuencies and GMRS as I please.
I became a ham out of love and respect for my deceased father, who held a General license, knew Morse code and had been a comms tech in the Air Force. I keep the license in case of emergencies. But neither of those (good) reasons are going to pull new people into Ham.
I remember trying to get into HAM a couple of years ago, I followed the standard advice of joining a local group - after emailing to enquire I received a reply which can only be described as rude, the exact opposite of welcoming. Kind of left a sour taste, a shame really - I should give it another go.
There is a movement/revolution in ham radio occurring, led by young people online. Large youth-oriented groups like YOTA (in IARU region 1[0], 2[1] and 3[2]), YARC[3], YACHT[4], ILYH[5], and others. The advent of SDR and software-based radio peripherals has really opened the ham radio door up into the hackerspace, such that it's increasingly common to see radio-related articles on Hackaday. Remote operation is also growing immensely and giving young people a lot less barrier to entry into the real fun parts of HF operating.
I have high hopes for the future of ham radio, especially after emailing with the new ARRL CEO [6]. He has a lot of plans and visions to fill the void where youth advocacy and modern marketing led by ARRL have fallen short.
Im trying to get into HAM, My country South Africa, seems a bit disorganized with respect to HAM. The few emails Ive sent to the local (national) ham organisation has gone completely unanswered :/
I wished we had the USA's books and exam guides. It all looks like such a smooth licensing process. In South Africa - there only seems to be two licensing opportunities per year and I think I need to travel to another province to take exam. I have an uncle that is quite deep into the hobbie and he is also an E.E. He has this basement lab full of electronics and radio gear that just makes me a software dev giddy with excitement :) Think dexter lab !
ps. Any hams in and around Cape Town that wants to give me a quick intro or hands-on experience :) ??
Ps2. SideNote: Ive been trying to get into old school irc again. Had some good friends and community back in the 90s there.
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 communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?
Because ham radio is fun. It's a different hobby than the other myriad ways of communications which you describe. It's a radio service explicitly dedicated to the personal enjoyment of radio. It is not a personal communication service in the likes of FRS, GMRS, or even part 15 (wifi), microwave, or cellular networks.
Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked.
It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation.
There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed.
Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.
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 excitement when a rare callsign weakly breaks through, the frenzied pile-up of operators jostling to get their QSL. The bizarre geopolitical madness of 7055kHz.
Hardly anyone needs to use amateur radio, but it can be a tremendous amount of fun.
> I see a lot of anecdotes of special distaster cases when HAM was the magical solution, but I don't remember normal communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?
I'm in North America somewhere densely populated that you could reasonably expect a massive earthquake to hit.
Nobody realistically expects that this will be an issue any time soon. It hasn't been in the past 30 years, and hopefully won't be for the next 30. The government here _does_ prepare for it because it would be irresponsible not to. It's at the same level as maintaining a stockpile of medical supplies to prepare for a one-in-a-hundred year pandemic. Looks silly until it doesn't and tens or hundreds of thousands of people die following a disaster due to a lack of preparedness. And in this case, "preparing" is basically letting a bunch of volunteers provide these services largely for free.
I volunteer with an organization that is integrated into the disaster response planning at multiple levels of government and with the local police. The group spends a lot of time building out and maintaining backup communication infrastructure throughout the area as an integrated part of the emergency response plans. Not just with amateur radio, but with satellite phones, the police radio systems, some of the regional backup radio systems the government maintains, some of the city departments' independent radio systems, etc. We're tied into it all. There's another group here that maintains a microwave link from within the city to 250 miles outside of it that provides communication outside of the potentially impacted area.
Our systems are the _only_ point to point communication systems left in the city as far as I know. Every city radio relies on a repeater or system of repeaters. The police radios are all cells with a physical back haul between sites. We have systems tied in at most main city services, community centers, the regional staging areas, etc and plans for how to get the appropriate information where it needs to go and people trained to do so if it ever needs to be turned on. The tie-ins with the other radio systems at points throughout the city allow us to act as a backup route if for some reason part becomes segmented and direct communication isn't possible. No matter how bad the physical damage, our system will be working as long as there are people still alive.
Some people volunteer at a soup kitchen or animal shelter. Myself and a couple hundred others use our technical skills volunteering to maintain a resilient communication backbone for the community.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadMillenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials!
That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects.
I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!
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 maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.
There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.
Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.
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 derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people.
In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.
An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.
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.
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.
At the moment there isn't a financial incentive to perform this at any reasonable scale, but this doesn't mean that it can't be done at all.
Not discriminating here, just want to make it easier to correlate statements to the public record with public call signs.
Mention about the independent country of Taiwan or the autonomy of Hong Kong on radio.. well you've enabled the punishment of said behavior on a very real level. (In this case that would be invoking the national security letters recently introduced)
Is this really worth it for a few people with terrible opinions?
My stance: Let people have stupid opinions, let them blow off steam, recognize that you don't agree with them, don't be their opinions.
It's called freedom of speech and applies to ALL views. Even pro-censorship conformist ones like yours.
Even though I disagree with your post I don't down vote it or attempt to censor it. It his RIGHT to spout off nonsense just like it is yours.
If it crosses the line where it wouldn't be allowed on over-the-air TV, it's not allowed on HAM radio spectrum. You can report it, and with evidence it can lead to nasty fines and/or revocation of license.
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.
> Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it.
You're feeding into their behavior. IMO We're seeing a huge conflict in culture: one side that is authoritarian against unpleasant language and the other that doesn't accept that (or the suggested changed). (That's a very simplified view of it)
We were too young to object at the time, and now we're stuck with it.
And we spend all day on Slack at work so clearly the Amateur Radio version of Slack/IRC has to be called "Apathy"!
A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.
Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?
Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.
Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.
Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.
So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.
Why would you gatekeep on something that is mostly a hobby and for volunteers. Putting a continuing ed requirement on that is just going to piss off people. People who build these networks are mostly volunteers and they put a lot of effort into this. I think there should be a bit of respect given for that.
Got briefly involved a few years ago. Still dominated by 60-70+ year olds. Me and a friend in our early 40s were the “kids”
With the improvements and rising affordability of cellular networks, satellites, wifi, IoT protocols, etc. — not to mention to overall transition from analog to digital — will amateur radio even stay relevant?
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.)
What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?
I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.
... 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 ...
In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.
If ham radio goes digital then it’s just people wasting spectrum on something they could be doing on the Internet.
The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club.
This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique.
I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!
I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.
I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles.
Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.
- 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 distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities)
- online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through)
A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory).
EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!
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.
Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
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.
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...')
However, the rules are actually not that hard to follow and part of getting your license is learning about those rules. The FCC views amateur radio as largely self-policing and will quite literally never go after an individual until they have had multiple complaints, issued several warnings, and have a documented pattern of intentional, malicious violation of the rules.
But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)
Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.
These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.
If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call
And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o
It's great, I love it and have been enjoying it for the last few months - thank you so much!
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.
There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down.
As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
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.
I'm welcome to being corrected, however my understanding is that I'd need a full license to legally broadcast on those bands.
You're likely aware that you can get CB/MURS/FRS type radios without a license, but that wouldn't help that much. It would be nice to have a small slice of each ham band that would be available to non-licensed folks, but the hardware would be tricky, you'd have high physical capability (and cost) but it would have to be locked down to basically a 'slice selector', speaker and microphone...basically what you get with FRS radios.
Neat idea though!
And avoid all the test questions about amplifiers, and antenna configuration, etc.
The other month in Canada we had a huge outage of 3-4 cellular service providers and home internet issues due to a MPLS failure. Being work from home due to COVID I had no idea how to determine if this was a local level event, or a larger event. I turned on my trusty AM/FM/LW/SW radio. However in the fashion of today's radio landscape they're all multicast of national programming etc. Nothing about a huge outage.
Had I a license there are a few HAM guys I know 60 minutes down the road and it would have been a decent check to see the severity of the outage.
But hey, you may be entertained by hearing old farts complain about immigrants!
I agree, that today it likely is a monoculture of older people who really like radio equipment.
Having an EE background definitely helps with the advanced exam though
Hope it goes well for your son!
I think the online side is good (and the free Essex Ham course is brilliant) but once you pass there's nothing pointing you a what to do next. This is more that people studying online aren't part of clubs. I'm still learning etiquette and I think we'll end up with a lot of new passes ignoring it in 6 months time as behaviours become ingrained.
Must confess that I don't actually live in the UK any more so I am having to hold out for the Full to become available online before I get back on the air so I haven't been listening in or transmitting. For me though I'm really keen to just build analogue circuits and QRP stuff, so I've been enjoying studying this lately.
That's the problem I had in Canada. I passed my exam, showed up to a local club meeting, and was like "Now what?" "Whatever you want." "I don't know what I want." "Whatever you want!"
Myself and one other young member of the club tried suggesting some local events we could offer services to to provide members a public service opportunity, their answer was "We don't go to them. They come to us." (Spoiler Alert: They don't come to us.)
I've sinced moved somewhere that has a very active emergency communications group that's well tied in with the city's emergency response plans and the police and works proactively with the city to provide communication for many large public events. That very quickly evolved into getting much more into the hobby as there was suddenly a _purpose_ to what I was doing. Testing equipment, fixing and maintaining equipment, solving problems _with_ radio (we need to link point A to point B -- what do?!) practicing emergency communications, etc. And once you get in to the hobby, it's much easier to branch out into adjacent areas as opportunities come up.
I think a big part of getting more people actively involved could just be... providing things for them to do. Where I used to live the question "Why should I get an amateur radio license?" was hard to answer. It's an incredibly easy sell where I am now to get people interested and involved as part of an emergency preparedness and public service group. It's all the feel good of volunteer work with all the fun of playing with a bunch of electronics and technical stuff. There are a lot of people that appeals to.
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.
Previously, in the 1980’s, yes I could see a Taxi/Plumber/etc using amateur radio equipment as a cheaper workaround for their business, but now it’s so much cheaper (and better) to use cellular or, if you really needed business radios they aren’t crazy expensive as they once were.
However, as an ham radio license holder, I would still not want to see our amateur radio frequencies, which are purposefully set aside by the FCC for hobby and experimental use, used for any commercial purposes at all.
Commercial radio has its own spectrum and rules, and the cost to use it is not insignificant. Many businesses in my area still use radio because it is more reliable and controllable than the services provided by mobile operators. A lot of these would absolutely jump at the chance to use the ham bands and ditch their expensive commercial equipment, regulation, and fees if it were legal to do so.
For non-local communications, HFT companies have been looking at the HF bands for years to shave a few milliseconds off their micro-arbitrage transactions (compared to wired networks) and ham radio has the largest chunk of spectrum after the military.
As to the Russian Spies, tech has changed so much that anyone who would still argue this is fooling themselves.
First a receiver and fascination with all the signals I could find. Then the discovery that for a couple hundred dollars I COULD TRANSMIT TOO???!!!!!!
Except that my receiver was a “police scanner” and my transmitters were various “walkie talkies” (first CB, then 2m amateur repeaters.)
What you are describing IS radio as a hobby.
If SDR had existed back then, I would have totally tried it out. It’s just Moore’s law making insanely advanced technology accessible.
I love living in the future!
“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.
Or this nicer one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011HVUEME/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Zl...
Sdr# for Windows. GQRX for the others. For a blog with help and project ideas check out http://www.rtlsdr.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23468796
Just browse to here: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
Aside from SDR# on Windows and gqrx on Linux, there's also GNU Radio [2] and a variety of lightweight applications that can run on, let's say, a Raspberry Pi Zero [3]. Oona Räisänen has a fascinating blog that touches on digital signal processing as well, applicable to SDRs as well.
Me? No ham license, but that may come someday.
[1] https://www.nooelec.com/store/
[2] https://www.gnuradio.org/
[3] https://osmocom.org/projects/rtl-sdr/wiki/Rtl-sdr
[4] https://www.windytan.com/
tl;dr for the rest of my post: ham radio is the best type of radio for hackers.
Undoubtedly you can have tons of fun with a $30 RTL-SDR and basic antenna, but there are lots of things you can do with ham radio once you grow tired of that, or if you find yourself being interested in how radio works generally, but more fundamentally, you can actually talk to people who are _actively hacking on the same types of things you are_ using projects you've both worked on, maybe together.
Regarding FRS/GMRS walkie talkie frequencies: these are UHF (Ultra High Frequency) frequencies, which means a couple of things: range is limited to well under a mile in most conditions, and building a radio to work on FRS or GMRS would be _possible_, but would require a lot of specialized equipment and maybe an engineering degree. Additionally, power is extremely limited on these radios, so you might be able to transmit back, but you'd better be near the business's parking lot to do so legally. Again, as far as a hobby goes, try breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant's recitation of someone's waffle fry order to ask whether you're coming in clearly on your home-built radio.
Ham radio has a community that's thriving and full of fun for new and/or young modern hackers. You just have to know where to look. For starters, consider Ham Radio Village at DEFCON (https://hamvillage.org) or the online Young Amateur Radio Club (https://yarc.world/) (an inclusive and active club centered around a Discord channel full of people interested in the latest tech in ham radio), or Ham Radio Workbench Podcast (https://twitter.com/HamWorkbench) (a podcast focusing on the latest in ham radio with a focus on new technologies and the intersection with the maker sphere). Hackaday frequently hosts new, fresh takes on ham radio hacking as well.
I think ham radio is back to its roots. With the resources of the modern maker movement, it's possible to learn about radio and hack something together that puts you on the air with people as excited as you are.
You could build a radio that transmits on FRS frequencies, but it would be illegal unless you submitted a radio to the FCC and received type approval. FRS radios must be type approved, limited power, and with non-removable antennas.
I think GMRS radios must also be type approved, but they can have removable antennas. You need a GMRS license to operate one legally. FRS does not require a license.
"...breaking in on the Chik Fil A drive-thru attendant..." Seriously? Come on.
Other than those nits, you do have a lot of good information in your comment, so thank you for that!
Good to know about FRS and GMRS. Those things just underscore how really limited experimental transmission privileges are without a ham license.
About the Chik-Fil-A thing, that was a silly way to say that even if you do transmit on FRS or GMRS, it's not like there's a community of other experimenters making it fun to do so.
I still have a quite a bit of gear left, mostly 2M stuff but the fact is I don't really have anyone to talk to and the biggest reason I got into radio (public service/storm spotting/emergency prep) have not been very active here. We do radios for parades, but they haven't activated storm spotters here in nearly 2 years.
If I had more people to talk to, I'd be on it more. But it's hard to get kids 3 kids 6 and under... to get interested in it.
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 end result promise was something like: "You can bounce a wave off a cloud and talk with someone in Ukraine!"
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.
Even moreso now - there's a million things to tinker with on the hardware side raspberrypi, Arduino, etc... even more on software etc. I see no reason that anyone would mess with HAM.
First of, there's a wack-ton of science you can just dive straight into, with a lot of literature around because ham's been around for a long time.
Are you in to EE and hacking? Cool! You can build your own radios!
Are you into pushing boundries? DX (chasing long distance contacts) is for you.
There's QRP (super low power) where you can talk to an amazing amount of people over morse code with just 5 watt and a deadnuts simple transmitter. It's like making a cellphone with a 9v and an altoids tin and talking to someone halfway cross the country.
There's also the civic duty aspect, there even folk with just handie talkies (walkie-talkie-sized ham radios made for shorter-distance trasmission) can do their part in a natural disaster.
But above all that, there's a really hands-on feel to making something out of bits and bobs and suddenly someone is talking to you!
It used to be that one of the public services that amateur radio operators performed was weather spotting. Before the age of cell phones that was a vital service. Now if I see severe weather I can text a GPS-tagged photo directly to the NWS.
Mentioning RaspberryPi and amateur radio: I've been interested in combining weather observation stations with packet radio and a truly open database of weather observations that, from the beginning, is dedicated to weather and climate research and will NEVER allow the data or sensor network to be acquired (like Weather Underground). The idea of sticking a weather monitoring station somewhere remote with a PiZero, solar panel, battery, and transceiver to send weather observations to a weather research database... that would hit the sweet spot of combining amateur radio, hardware, cloud architecture, and contributing to science and the public good.
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.
I'll be honest, I've been into the hobby for 16 years now, and have actually been on phone no more than a few times. To me, all the fun is building things, tinkering, just generally understanding and overcoming the technical challenges. And then when I get things working I prefer CW or digital just because it makes me a little self conscious blasting my voice out for all the world to hear.
Sure you can tinker with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos... but come on, what could be cooler than building your own radio and antenna system, and using it to make contact with some dude in Kazakstan without any Internet, or undersea cables, or satellites, or anything. Just two guys on the planet with wires strung up some trees. :-) How cool is that?!
http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
I have kids aged 9 and younger, and their friends are starting to get cell phones. I'm hoping I can get them to earn their technician licenses so I can give them cheap radios instead; then they can have their own "social network" without all the harmful stuff a smartphone gives access to.
It’s one of the few Amateur Radio clubs I know that has a Github repo [4]
[1] https://tapr.org/about/ [2] https://tapr.org/tapr-file-archive/ [3] https://tapr.org/2020-dcc-schedule/ [4] https://github.com/TAPR
So yes, HAM is DYING because outdated legislation is denying me same goodness in my mobile 6Watt radio.
It's also generally very illegal as a hobbyist to build and operate your own transmitter, except with an amateur radio licence. If you're more interested in how the phone works and building your own, than just using it, that's what amateur radio is for.
so what channel spacing do you use on your ham radio?
and im saying, my phone in my pocket is more powerful and more capable then any ham radio equipment on the market.
my phone can realtime decode 50 streams of packet radio, and im not even using integrated DSP processor inside my ARM SOC
packet radio is invention of 199x, we have DOS programs on pentium4 machines to decode almost all of the modes (GMSK, Olivia etc)
so where is invention, where is some improvement on these 25+ YEAR OLD technologies used by HAMs?
You're railing against a small thing I'm not even engaged in. Your phone is not more powerful than something like the USRP, for example, and that's quite popular among hams these days.
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.
Edit: added radio model, fixed price
Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?
Our club/repeaters don't have any obvious "cultural" norms or rules. Announcing your call sign as required by FCC ham rules is about the only obvious rule.
That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.
That's a great phrase.
And the attitude if you try to suggest a simpler process is "you are a criminal wanting to circunvent the laws!" (this attitude also comes from guys in the US if you suggest things like asking if you could license on a country and operate on a different one.
I'm better off using marine band, off road VHF frecuencies and GMRS as I please.
There is a movement/revolution in ham radio occurring, led by young people online. Large youth-oriented groups like YOTA (in IARU region 1[0], 2[1] and 3[2]), YARC[3], YACHT[4], ILYH[5], and others. The advent of SDR and software-based radio peripherals has really opened the ham radio door up into the hackerspace, such that it's increasingly common to see radio-related articles on Hackaday. Remote operation is also growing immensely and giving young people a lot less barrier to entry into the real fun parts of HF operating.
I have high hopes for the future of ham radio, especially after emailing with the new ARRL CEO [6]. He has a lot of plans and visions to fill the void where youth advocacy and modern marketing led by ARRL have fallen short.
[0] https://www.ham-yota.com/
[1] https://youthontheair.org/
[2] https://www.iarur3yota2020.com/
[3] https://yarc.world/
[4] http://yacht.younghams.org/
[5] https://ilyh.org/
[6] http://www.arrl.org/news/board-of-directors-elects-new-arrl-...
https://miscdotgeek.com/qrp-saving-ham-radio/
if anyone cares to read it.
I wished we had the USA's books and exam guides. It all looks like such a smooth licensing process. In South Africa - there only seems to be two licensing opportunities per year and I think I need to travel to another province to take exam. I have an uncle that is quite deep into the hobbie and he is also an E.E. He has this basement lab full of electronics and radio gear that just makes me a software dev giddy with excitement :) Think dexter lab !
ps. Any hams in and around Cape Town that wants to give me a quick intro or hands-on experience :) ??
Ps2. SideNote: Ive been trying to get into old school irc again. Had some good friends and community back in the 90s there.
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 communications infrastructure not being available for the last 30 years. Perhaps this is more of a thing in sparsely populated countries?
Just like people who own old motorcycles and tinker with them and join biker gangs. Similar idea
Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked.
It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation.
There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed.
Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.
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 excitement when a rare callsign weakly breaks through, the frenzied pile-up of operators jostling to get their QSL. The bizarre geopolitical madness of 7055kHz.
Hardly anyone needs to use amateur radio, but it can be a tremendous amount of fun.
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
I'm in North America somewhere densely populated that you could reasonably expect a massive earthquake to hit.
Nobody realistically expects that this will be an issue any time soon. It hasn't been in the past 30 years, and hopefully won't be for the next 30. The government here _does_ prepare for it because it would be irresponsible not to. It's at the same level as maintaining a stockpile of medical supplies to prepare for a one-in-a-hundred year pandemic. Looks silly until it doesn't and tens or hundreds of thousands of people die following a disaster due to a lack of preparedness. And in this case, "preparing" is basically letting a bunch of volunteers provide these services largely for free.
I volunteer with an organization that is integrated into the disaster response planning at multiple levels of government and with the local police. The group spends a lot of time building out and maintaining backup communication infrastructure throughout the area as an integrated part of the emergency response plans. Not just with amateur radio, but with satellite phones, the police radio systems, some of the regional backup radio systems the government maintains, some of the city departments' independent radio systems, etc. We're tied into it all. There's another group here that maintains a microwave link from within the city to 250 miles outside of it that provides communication outside of the potentially impacted area.
Our systems are the _only_ point to point communication systems left in the city as far as I know. Every city radio relies on a repeater or system of repeaters. The police radios are all cells with a physical back haul between sites. We have systems tied in at most main city services, community centers, the regional staging areas, etc and plans for how to get the appropriate information where it needs to go and people trained to do so if it ever needs to be turned on. The tie-ins with the other radio systems at points throughout the city allow us to act as a backup route if for some reason part becomes segmented and direct communication isn't possible. No matter how bad the physical damage, our system will be working as long as there are people still alive.
Some people volunteer at a soup kitchen or animal shelter. Myself and a couple hundred others use our technical skills volunteering to maintain a resilient communication backbone for the community.
And I mean... it's fun?