[crb3]

Disagree.

I'm a ham; my kids aren't... but they grew up with me using Morse (my computers talk to me when they boot up, and when a 'kitchentimer' goes off, and...) so they were naturally exposed to the paradigm. Maybe that's a limiting factor, but...

With CW you're limited to two states: key and unkey. Knocking on a wall, you're not: you can go loud and soft as well. A dah has the same pacing as it always does (3 dits in length), but if its knock is perceptibly louder, at least twice as hard as a dit, in practice that seems to make it hold together as readable Morse, at least for us. Certainly our family signal, questionmark (..__..), is usable that way, so is each son's "call-letter".

[tnecniv]

This is off topic but I’ve always wanted to know what hams talk about on their radios (when not using it for emergency purposes)

[brians]

Ham radios. The weather. Space weather, because that affects ham radios. Growing old sucks; it's a hobby dominated by the aged. Antennas. Kids these days. We avoid religion and politics, mostly, though there's an increasing segment of MAGA wing nuts who no longer think of their hateful rejection of the majority of their fellow humans as politics. Fortunately, one can spin the dial.

It's the ARRL field day for a few more hours; check out http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 near 14100 kHz, looking for 2.7 kHz wide voice transmissions (USB), or near 7200 kHz LSB.

[lb1lf]

Anything but politics and religion, mostly.

Casual small talk, antennas and other ham gear, perhaps trying to speak a foreign language (ham radio worked wonders for both my Russian and my Portuguese!), family, other interests...

[teeray]

Some communications between hams are no more than call signs, signal reports, and 73s (“best regards”, ending the QSO (conversation)). This is useful for things like satellite communications, which are very time-limited opportunities for making contacts.

[kawfey]

This last weekend was ARRL Field day, a huge operating event designed to be "practice" for when the "stuff hits the fan" but also just gets a ton of people on the air using portable stations set up in public and austere environments (like in a park pavilion, not in a cozy basement or office).

I made a playlist of as many FD videos i could find on youtube [0]. There's a lot of examples of stations, setups, and the actual contacts - which are very short.

Field day is a sort of contest. In a nutshell, the more contacts you make, the more points you get. So, the contacts are short and have a bare minimum of information (callsign, operating class (#radios + power level) and US state/CAN province).

"Normal" voice and CW conversations are much different, and just sound like two people chatting about life, the weather, family, health, kids these days, or technical radio-related topics like descriptions of their station, propagation studies, or reports of the last hamfest they went to.

There's also "nets" which usually have their "check-ins" give a short report, or none at all (aka short-time). Some nets relay information about severe weather (skywarn / storm spotting), others relay official national traffic in accordance with the Incident Command System (ICS) to practice for wide-spread disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. The radiogram system still runs via ham radio too, and you can hear national traffic system (NTS) nets relaying messages the old-fashioned way.

Right now, the majority of amateur radio traffic on HF is currently FT8 [1]. IT's a low-speed weak-signal FSK mode, in which operators exchange only each other's callsign, signal report, location (4-char maidenhead gridsquare), and a few extra characters to say hello (CQ), roger (RR), or goodbye (73) in a 77-bit message.

Other stations might not even be hams talking, like APRS, WSPR, or signal propagation beacons. There are quite a few automated stations that perform a variety of tasks.

There's a TON of low-earth orbit cubesats that use amateur radio for telemetry and command/control, and a few operate as a repeater that hams use to relay a signal across wide areas. There are even hams aboard the ISS, as well as a repeater. So sometimes we say hi to astronauts. They don't say much since a lot of people are in line to get that highly-desired contact. Sometimes schools coordinate with radio clubs to have students ask questions directly to astronauts via ham radio. It's old-school, but it provides an excellent learning opportunity about the utility of radio.

Bottom line, hams talk about anything. And some don't talk about anything at all. And some aren't even people. Some are astronauts. It's a very broad, multi-faceted hobby so there's lots to talk about.

--N0SSC

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG8UQxewXrtbT9cBWL-3J...

[Johnythree]

> With CW you're limited to two states: key and unkey

This might be true for radio morse, but in the original Telegraph, each element was encoded by two clicks. One click when the morse sounder operated, and another click when the sounder released. In other words, each element is encoded via two clicks, but with different spacing.

see my other posts.