Amateur Radio

Amateur radio changed my life. In high school, I thought I was a nobody, maybe I wanted to be a truck driver, or a psychologist...who knows. Who cares? I was pretty depressed.<p>I&#x27;m 28 years old and I fucking love amateur radio.<p>I always had a curiosity about radio, being so interested in two-way radio that my parents had me tested for ASD. My mom had a police scanner and it had a button titled &quot;HAM&quot; [sic]. I found a repeater and no more than a few weeks later I was absolutely enthralled and was licensed in 2007.<p>I got a radio, an antenna, installed it, and I was absolutely hooked. It did not matter that the average age of a ham was around 50 or 60, and I was only 15. It was just so much fun and there was so much to do an learn using it. I studied for my General and got it a few months after my first Tech license. A few months after that, I got Extra. All the while, I ran a YouTube channel documenting my experiences.<p>I chose to go to Missouri S&amp;T (formerly University of Missouri - Rolla) because they had a ham radio club (W0EEE). I declined a full ride to Truman State in Chem or CompSci, and went to S&amp;T as undecided engineering. I naturally nestled into EE realizing a lot of the basic circuits knowledge was already covered under the Extra exam. Myself and one other ham became de-facto President and VP of the ham radio club, which we re-grew from near death.<p>I ended up working at an Electromagnetic Compatibility lab for a while, before having a co-op at the Very Large Array radio observatory in NM where I ran cabling, designed antennas, and worked on mitigation of RF interference. My manager specifically sought me out because I was a ham.<p>Acheving full time employment was also a no brainer. I applied to Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Garmin, Boeing, Honeywell, Black &amp; Veatch, maybe a few more, and had offers from everyone but Garmin (apparently proving my way around a smith chart dedicated to quiz grad students in the off-site interview, but choking at an unannounced op-amp circuit analysis by hand while two managers watched on-site wasn&#x27;t good enough for them!). And now I design antennas for a living! All because of ham radio.<p>Ham radio never ceases to entertain me. There&#x27;s science, there&#x27;s experimentation, there&#x27;s socialization, and there&#x27;s public service. I&#x27;m a advocate for youth in ham radio, and I&#x27;m starting to get into things like ARRL reformation and other politics, since - like the author says - ham radio has a bad image. Through programs like YARC[0] and YOTA[1][2] I&#x27;m trying to help change that.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yarc.world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yarc.world&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yotaregion2.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yotaregion2.org&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ham-yota.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ham-yota.com&#x2F;</a>

We desperately need new blood. If you like outdoor activities in areas where cell phone coverage is poor (camping, hiking, skiing, dense urban gatherings) or enjoy the idea of having unique access to spectrum for learning and experimentation, you need to look into amateur radio.<p>Some choice projects:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.winlink.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.winlink.org&#x2F;</a> Long range email over HF bands<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aprs.fi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aprs.fi&#x2F;</a> APRS real time position tracking map<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aprsdroid.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aprsdroid.org&#x2F;</a> APRS text messaging + tracking app<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wsprnet.org&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;wsprnet&#x2F;map" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wsprnet.org&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;wsprnet&#x2F;map</a> WSPR HF propagation map<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.princeton.edu&#x2F;pulsar&#x2F;K1JT&#x2F;wsjtx.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physics.princeton.edu&#x2F;pulsar&#x2F;K1JT&#x2F;wsjtx.html</a> Digital high performance HF mode application<p>I&#x27;m an extra working on developing classes for introducing modern radio to the next generation of hams. Feel free to ask about anything.

Why isn&#x27;t Amateur Radio a key part of STEM? What do ALL of us have in our pocket that operates on radio (you might even be reading this comment on one)? How many modern homes <i>don&#x27;t</i> have WiFi? What&#x27;s the magic that allows smart-meters and wireless doorbells to work? Heck, what&#x27;s the signaling mechanism on a <i>WIRED</i> communication? RF and radio is key to so much of modern life that unless your STEM program is geared toward training people to do basic research you&#x27;re using RF in some capacity along the way.<p>And not only teach RF but then apply across other things like robotics and flying. One of the major public service aspects of Amateur Radio is emergency communication. Rather than humans trying to word-paint what&#x27;s happening in a storm why not have a camera-equipped drone zoom out to a vantage point and shoot back HD imagery via 1.2GHz? How about weather stations communicating primarily via APRS instead of via WiFi directly?<p>So many possibilities... though without low-cost VHF&#x2F;UHF SDR radios much of this will remain a dream.

I see something missing in this thread. I suspect this is the audience which is highly technical and work focused.<p>This is a hobby. Bar the license constraints, the scope is amazing. And you don&#x27;t have to achieve anything major. You don&#x27;t have to change the world. You don&#x27;t have to create a service or act as a service for some cause. Sometimes it&#x27;s just about playing, a thing many of us have forgotten since childhood.<p>I myself like to climb up hills with homebrew radios and send and recieve morse code. There is no point in doing this at all. Not even one. I can&#x27;t think of any at least. Some people pretend it&#x27;s going to save them if the world ends so it gives them purpose. But really it&#x27;s nice to have no pressure, no deadline and no dependency on it at all and just tinker with things!

Here&#x27;s what ham radio really needs: transceivers that can be controlled by an easy to use Android or iPhone app. The current user experience is so far behind.<p>Oh, we also need handheld transceivers that can be charged with a standard mobile phone charger.<p>The Xaomi Mijia Walkie-Talkie has all of this, but in the U.S. you have have to side load a hacked Android app to get it. Not quite there

I could definitely be interested in amateur radio, the long ranges are very appealing. But I&#x27;m just not that interested in voice&#x2F;audio. Text&#x2F;data streams are cool though, I can do things with those even at 9800 baud.<p>For me, the ideal platform would have the following characteristics<p>* python programmable<p>* Easy to hook them together, and to hook them up to a real computer<p>* Consistent modem spec, with adjustable parity-checking levels<p>* Cryptographically signed streams, I should be able to verify the callsign&#x2F;origin of anyone on the network<p>* Streams should describe how to decode the data on them, maybe something like a mimetype injected into the flow every N seconds?<p>* Basic data types for voice and image<p>Notice at no point did I include &quot;packet switching&quot;. I think one of the issues with current digital amateur radio projects is that they look like they&#x27;re trying to reinvent the internet, but worse.

I highly recommend this site if you want to explore the spectrum: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901&#x2F;</a>

When I came up as a ham in the sixties there were gentlemen on 80 meter AM calling us teenagers lids, kids and space cadets. That animus has always existed in the hobby towards newcomers.<p>I think connecting with maker spaces is a real opportunity. I&#x27;ve been a member of the Lansing club since the sixties, although I rarely attend meetings anymore. Friends with the guys who started the local makerspace and they were genuinely interested in ham radio. I tried several times to setup a tour of the makerspace but the local club is run by a clique who made it clear they had zero interest in it. I still think it was a missed opportunity.<p>I was president my junior year of the Michigan State club and it was strong and vibrant. A few years back it apparently had declined to only a handful of members. The local faculty advisor started reaching out to freshmen in the fall and started classes to help those get licensed.<p>The program has been a huge success and now the club in reinvigorated. It only takes one or two people in a community to help out because the interest among young people is there as it has always been. Elmers are what ham radio calls people like that faculty advisor. What the hobby needs is more Elmers like him.

Funny: &quot;You can home-build a device that transmits a watt or two of power (the same amount as a fairly dim lamp) into the sky, and can be received thousands of miles away (imagine trying to do that with a torch, illuminating clouds so that their reflections in the ocean illuminate other clouds, so somebody with a telescope in a distant country sees it and picks up your message!)...&quot;

quite enjoyable, and agreed, a lot of stuff is about WHAT amazing stuff you can do, but very little is advertised HOW to do... kinda sad AM radio is basically dead, since it can be fun making a simple AM receiver at home, it&#x27;s even in a &quot;fun experiments&quot; kids book I have, I think it&#x27;s only like, about 5 components or such... on the other hand, with teens and above you can teach soldering with radio kits (obviously not the first thing, but possibly about 3rd or 4th kit) , some are nice having like, one surface-mount chip you have to figure out too, which would be a nice next-level one &quot;now you know the basics, wanna go beyond that?&quot; then there&#x27;s the massive amount of cool stuff SDR (software defined radio) enables which isn&#x27;t even mentioned to exist in the article...

I love the mystery in radio, even thumbing through AM stations on a long road-trip is enjoyable, but as a complete non-technical person, I&#x27;ve always been overwhelmed by amateur radio.<p>Maybe I will muster up some courage and dive into this.

The rich history of this topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=Amateur%20Radio&amp;sort=byDate&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=story&amp;storyText=false&amp;prefix&amp;page=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=Amateur%20Radio&amp;sort=byDate&amp;da...</a>

What a nice blog! I love reading about geeky families.

The presence of this story on the front page, I think, underscores how different HN is from the other technical venues I frequent. It&#x27;s a straightforward overview of RF and how it&#x27;s used and what that means to amateur licensees. At any of my other haunts, this would never get an upvote.<p>Imagine a story called &quot;The Command Line&quot;, a straightforward take on the core concepts thereof. I think everyone here is pretty familiar with that topic, and would regard such a story as pretty much the opposite of news or even interesting.<p>To my eye, this story is just as out-of-place because it&#x27;s a topic I just assume everyone here is already quite familiar with it. Am I mistaken? Or is HN just that different a crowd?

#1 problem: requiring identification. Sorry, I don&#x27;t want to provide ID. We are not in a police state yet.<p>#2 problem: the snitching mentality. HAMs sure love to snitch on those who don&#x27;t follow the rules to keep their clubs very exclusive and very obedient<p>#3 problem: banning a bunch of interesting uses. Can&#x27;t transmit encrypted - linked to #1 and #2 I guess.<p>Overall, a nice hobby for someone who aims to work at a FANG: if your life objective is to obey, serve and extend the order decided by the status quo, HAM is a nice matching hobby.<p>If it&#x27;s not for you, stay out of the snitchers band, and play on low power on the unlicensed bands instead. The smell of freedom is intoxicating.