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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One factor that I bring up whenever the “ham radio is dying” discussion happen is the FCC public database and safety/doxxing, specifically for marginalized communities such as Trans individuals and Black folks. It, itself, is creating a safety concern in modern society for people that may want to join the hobby but fear doxxing and harassment.
If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup.
The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.
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]
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/
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!
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.
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!
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?!
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a ham. I don't think there's hard data on the 'average age' of hams--it's very anecdotal. Nobody really knows that, and the ARRL or feds don't have the actual age of licensees documented.
I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not.
More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?
I was part of my university's ham club. Getting people onboard by saying that you could communicate with Australia is not niche any more in the internet age.
I don't like how ham radio broadcasts are linked to your callsign under your legal name (deadname) and identity. It creates the potential for trolls who dislike like what you say to doxx you by sharing your legal identity and mailing address (taken from websites linked to the government database of licensees).
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.
I am always very suspicious of graphs that use a vertical scale that doesn't start at 0. It makes you think the ham radio population has doubled or tripled, while in reality it only gained a few percentage points.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] hibby|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] mikece|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
- 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!
[+] [-] abruzzi|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] jdietrich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brian_herman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crocodiletears|5 years ago|reply
Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.
[+] [-] bobloblaw45|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rthomas6|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrkronmiller|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iNate2000|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] nvahalik|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Heliosmaster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] facedeoderant|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wcfields|5 years ago|reply
If I give out my call sign on the Internet (or on the air) you now know my real name, address, and every past address I’ve ever used. So let’s say I registers as Bob Smith at 123 Fake St 4 years ago, and now I go by Susan Smith at 456 Example Blvd you’d know all that information with a simple lookup.
The only real semi-workaround is when someone first licenses (and you probably don’t know this at first) is to use a PO Box, otherwise any address change will be on record.
[+] [-] nickt|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jron|5 years ago|reply
If you want to skip the video, the design document gives a nice overview of the protocol: https://github.com/jsherer/ft8call
[+] [-] jsherer|5 years ago|reply
And a video walkthrough I did just a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz0Cpkaol-o
[+] [-] nipponese|5 years ago|reply
Edit: added radio model, fixed price
[+] [-] blnqr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimhefferon|5 years ago|reply
Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
That's a great phrase.
[+] [-] generalizations|5 years ago|reply
That just sounds like HAM culture hasn't yet had their Eternal September - which could be a really good thing.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] packet_nerd|5 years ago|reply
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?!
[+] [-] bluesquared|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikece|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justin66|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawoke083600|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] geocrasher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alibarber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _b8r0|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joeclark77|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stakkur|5 years ago|reply
I agree that ham radio is 'evolving', but I see that evolving as most often a shift to computer-operated communication and digital tools. It's hard to explain to folks outside of ham radio that this isn't a 'old technology' vs. 'new technology' problem, but more of a path of least resistance: computers are ubiquitous, ham radio equipment is not.
More simply, fewer and fewer folks want to communicate with each other by voice. This sounds trite, but I've found it to be true. Why bother, when digital/text is so immediate and simple?
[+] [-] ProZsolt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidanay|5 years ago|reply
http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
[+] [-] TomMasz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kawfey|5 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] marianov|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oneplane|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jdietrich|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] kawfey|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asperous|5 years ago|reply
Just like people who own old motorcycles and tinker with them and join biker gangs. Similar idea
[+] [-] nucleardog|5 years ago|reply
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?