I bumped into kk4vcz at Defcon in 2021. I was standing around, looking clueless, and playing with my Baofeng near the ham radio village. He approached me and asked if I could transmit on a particular frequency to help test his watch. I said something along the lines of "oh that's really cool, I've read that guy's blog and follow him on Twitter." He said something along the lines of "yeah, that's me."
He even gave me a couple GoodWatch boards. Nice guy!
This is delightful. I would love to start working on a project like this.
Side note, as someone who works adjacent to the RF and electronics industry, getting my Ham license was the best thing I could have done to help my CS brain understand the radio and electronics side of what we do. If you’ve ever been curious about getting your license, I highly recommend it!
Thanks for your enthusiasm. I'd been thinking about it and heard there's a group nearby, I've just reached out to them to begin the process and they have a training event in a few weeks' time. Looking forward to it!
What's Ham radio like these days? My grandfather was a ham and I have fond memories of him teaching me about radio waves (and early computer programming!) as a kid in his den.
I still remember that he was W4LMU, and searching on it finds this:
His gear was huge, still used vacuum tubes (already retro in the 1980s but he was a Ham), and consumed enough power to run a small neighborhood. He'd be delighted with this.
Personally, I had been thinking about getting my license, but finally did it as a extra skill for my SAR team application. As the younger guy with the rope skills, I got into infrastructure work. Towers and antennas and remote cameras and microwave links, etc.
People are into everything from mesh networking to digitally encoded communication methods to hiking to remote mountaintops and seeing how many people you can contact to building prepper type SHTF communication systems to contesting and seeing how many/how far contacts you can make to setting up data collection systems for scientific research to supporting public safety, large events, and emergency communications. And a lot more I'm not coming up with off the top of my head.
My local radio club was in an area with a lot of retired defense and aerospace type engineers but it also had younger folks from tech, media and anything else type backgrounds.
One big thing recently is POTA and SOTA where people go to parks and mountain summits to make contacts. The latter requires small radio, putting up your own antennas, and using Morse code.
People talking on the radio is sort of dead. HF is still popular. There is FT8 digital mode that let's make contact with low signal. I've reached Australia, Chile, and Russia from west coast.
There is a lot of hacking, but it doesn't seem to get into mainstream. But there are lots of things to build; I have little radio waiting to be soldered.
It's good to go into radio with an idea of what you want to do with it, then find a community of hams who enjoy doing that. People chase distant contacts, they practice emergency communications, they run low-power stations from remote locations, and many more kinds of activities.
Something really cool I stumbled upon recently - someone near me hosts a trivia show via ham radio once a week, and other folks in the area will listen for their callsign and then answer his questions
Makes me really happy to run across random unexpected things like that
The PoC||GTFO series, I only have vols 1 & 2, have to be some of the most fascinating books ever published. These and Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment are the most fun in my bookcase.
Are there limits on what can be done in a wristwatch? I mean in terms of RF reception? Like, is it possible in such small sizes to receive any frequency, or is there certain limits, say based on heat, or necessary component footprint or other constraints?
I think the primary constraint would be the antenna. Generally speaking, the longer the wavelength, the longer the antenna needs to be to efficiently receive it (or transmit it). You can still receive/transmit with a too-short antenna, but efficiency drops off very quickly.
[+] [-] the_plus_one|1 year ago|reply
He even gave me a couple GoodWatch boards. Nice guy!
[+] [-] wkat4242|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xavierstein|1 year ago|reply
Side note, as someone who works adjacent to the RF and electronics industry, getting my Ham license was the best thing I could have done to help my CS brain understand the radio and electronics side of what we do. If you’ve ever been curious about getting your license, I highly recommend it!
[+] [-] contingencies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] api|1 year ago|reply
I still remember that he was W4LMU, and searching on it finds this:
https://www.qsl.net/kq4pl/skeys.htm
His gear was huge, still used vacuum tubes (already retro in the 1980s but he was a Ham), and consumed enough power to run a small neighborhood. He'd be delighted with this.
[+] [-] jonah|1 year ago|reply
Personally, I had been thinking about getting my license, but finally did it as a extra skill for my SAR team application. As the younger guy with the rope skills, I got into infrastructure work. Towers and antennas and remote cameras and microwave links, etc.
People are into everything from mesh networking to digitally encoded communication methods to hiking to remote mountaintops and seeing how many people you can contact to building prepper type SHTF communication systems to contesting and seeing how many/how far contacts you can make to setting up data collection systems for scientific research to supporting public safety, large events, and emergency communications. And a lot more I'm not coming up with off the top of my head.
My local radio club was in an area with a lot of retired defense and aerospace type engineers but it also had younger folks from tech, media and anything else type backgrounds.
[+] [-] itomato|1 year ago|reply
Cheap, firmware hackable HTs are hawt, in particular the Quansheng UV-K5,K6.
Tons of SDR receivers out there to explore, and many extremely exiting transceiver projects out there also. Just so much:
https://github.com/jopohl/urh
http://websdr.org/
http://kiwisdr.com/public/
https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/
[+] [-] ianburrell|1 year ago|reply
People talking on the radio is sort of dead. HF is still popular. There is FT8 digital mode that let's make contact with low signal. I've reached Australia, Chile, and Russia from west coast.
There is a lot of hacking, but it doesn't seem to get into mainstream. But there are lots of things to build; I have little radio waiting to be soldered.
[+] [-] yock|1 year ago|reply
Mike - KE8ATC
[+] [-] engineer_22|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DominoTree|1 year ago|reply
Makes me really happy to run across random unexpected things like that
[+] [-] CraigJPerry|1 year ago|reply
The PoC||GTFO series, I only have vols 1 & 2, have to be some of the most fascinating books ever published. These and Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment are the most fun in my bookcase.
[+] [-] robxorb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anamexis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] supportengineer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 0_____0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yock|1 year ago|reply