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Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. With the advent of Amazon and cheap electronics anybody can now get into it without tinkering at all. Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
my experience, too. I did EW in the military and it was interesting-ish. decided to, a couple years back, get the license and play around, see if I could connect with some of the local Elmers -- and it was laaaaaaame.
by comparison, other meetup groups like for drones, linux, or other nerdy-as-hell topics was still pretty lively. I went to some LUGs in Australia that were a straight-up blast, Linux trivia night in bars, etc.
but ham was a snoozefest, and outside of doing some illegal-ass shit that the FCC would absolutely hammer me for, I can't think of anything cool to do with the license.
They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.
What can you do with a license? Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.
In California, you can get a license plate with your call sign. That's kind of cool, right? Maybe moreso if you have a punny vanity call sign.
For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.
Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.
It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.
Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.
The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.
Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives.
That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend:
2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz) VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters) HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters
That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air.
Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).
I suspect most tinkering is happening around digital modes these days. I got my amateur radio license four years ago and I have zero interest in talking with (other) old dudes where they're driving. I currently enjoy the hobby by watching the ISS flyover schedule and transmitting to the amateur radio repeater on the space station. It's fun! It's even more fun during the early evening highly visible passes. In those cases, I don't even have to look at a chart in an app to know where to point, I can just aim the antenna at the very bright dot zooming by in the sky. (Fun to see those visible passes anyway, even without a radio license.)
I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth.
This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.
I agree it is largely boring, particularly on the local bands where it's basically a local discord of people talking about traffic.
But if you get your General license you can play with HF and get geeky with antennas, try to make contact with people on low power (qrp) on protocols like JS8.
I was able to make contacts from Texas to South America and Canada, and even Europe I think, on 10w with a crummy EFHW antenna, a wire slung over a tree at 45 degrees.
As far as more geeky protocol hacking, I haven't gotten into it.
Your mistake may be doing things you find uninteresting with it.
There are experimental protocols and PHYs... you just don't (generally) find them on the VHF repeaters, which, I agree are super boring.
> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
Is this enforced by the HAMs? I didn't think it'd be possible to claim ownership of a slice of the amateur spectrum. Is it just a public shaming?
> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.
I was hoping to see some innovation after the FCC lifted the baud rate restrictions[1], but so far nothing seems to have changed.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397992A1.pdf
> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc.
https://m17project.org/ https://openrtx.org/#/ https://freedv.org/
These are a few projects that I personally think embody this well.
It sounds like you listened to rag chewers on 75 and came up with a knee-jerk impression that ham radio is boring.
Ham radio is far more than what you observed. I advise that you check out some of the following before you give up on it:
- QEX magazine
- MSK144 meteor scatter and similar modes
- CW Ops, CW radiosport
- FlexRadio, SmartSDR, PowerSDR
- The QDX transceiver, QRP Labs, etc.
There is a tremendously active community of experimenters and people doing really interesting things. It takes a little bit of digging to find it. Much of it is on email lists rather than traditional discussion forums.
A few weeks ago I heard the following exchange.
Canadian: Is this frequency in use?
...Silence...
Canadian: Cqcqcqcqcq...
MM: THIS FREQUENCY IS RESERVED FOR MARITIME MOBILE EMERGENCY TRAFFIC!
Me: What is the nature of the emergency? Can I be of assistance?
MM: no emergency, just you know, in case there's an emergency please stay off
A cultured Canadian: kindly fuck off.
MM: hey now you can't swear on the radio FCCs gonna jumpya...
Canadian: proceeds to make several contacts over the protests of MM lid calling out FCC profanity regulation numbers.
I got mine and have used it a handful of times, mainly helping my friend test his radios. it's all radio tests or talking about your radio. it is incredibly boring and I like boring technical stuff. SDR is where all the fun radio stuff is.
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring.
Well, that "recently" there in that sentence is likely the root of your problem. You've barely scratched the surface, run into a dickbag or two (which exist in EVERY community) and then decided to stereotype the whole culture. You have no idea how wide and deep the hobby is, and probably won't as long as you hold onto your false generalizations.
> It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to
And might I ask, who are you to judge what other people talk about on the radio? If you don't like what other people are talking about, spin the dial. Or go to another repeater/frequency and call CQ so you can talk about whatever interests you. Be the change you want to see in the world.
> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
I live in a metro area and have over 40 repeaters programmed into my radio. Most of the repeaters are owned by various clubs. I have never ONCE heard anyone get a stern finger wagging for using a repeater for a club they aren't a member of. Around here at least, the attitude is, the more the merrier.
> From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering.
It still is, you just didn't look hard enough. The past couple of years have seen interesting long-range weak-signal digital modes, mesh networking using commodity hardware, hackable handheld radios, and bunches of independent QRP kits. LEO satellite repeaters, POTA, SOTA, Field Day, designing antennas with cheap $50 antenna analyzers, these are just the things that I find interesting. I could go on forever.
There is more to explore in ham radio than you can fit in a lifetime. If you find it boring, that is not ham radio's fault.
You're barking up the wrong tree! Get into HF digital modes: the lowest hanging fruit is WSJTX, but there's so much beyond that if you want to tinker.
I can honestly say I've never plugged a mic into my transceiver, and I probably never will. And I have 500+ confirmed contacts across 40+ countries. Phone is boring :)
You can volunteer for comms at stage rallies, we always need volunteer hams. My first stage rally experience, over 10yrs ago now, was sitting around the campfire in the Mendocino forest with a bunch of hams the night before the event. They had good whisky, too. :)
Feel free to email me, email in profile.
>It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum
Yup and the grouchy boomers who LARP as emergency preparedness personnel.
My experiences with amateur radio people have been universally negative, and in my opinion the death of ham radio is squarely the fault of its participants.
Similar problem for me. It seems like most folks near me do a lot of contesting which I have neither the time nor the interest to do.
Uhm yeah talking with people is optional and only required to check how well they receive you when you set antenna up.
Buying off the shelf everything is not fun. Buy radio and try to build an antenna from metal wire or whatever else. Then try to see if old farts can hear your calls.
It is much more like fishing it is supposed to be boring unless you are really interested in the topic.
Yes there is Chinese vendor that you can buy antennas that will work much better than whatever you cobble up by hand but yeah YOU are the one to make it fun for yourself not old farts in your propagation range.
Just renewed my license for the first time. That means I've had it 10 years. Problems for me:
It's either really hard or really expensive to do basic stuff. Want to get on a repeater and chat? Great, a $20 baofeng radio can do it, but you have to get on the Internet to find the repeater frequency, offset, and tones, and then figure out how to program those into the radio. That either involves tedious button pushing on the radio, or getting a special cable, getting Chirp figured out and working with your laptop and radio and cable, and then figuring out the weird Chirp UI. You finally do all that, and then realize (as others have pointed out) that the conversations on the repeaters are lame.
And then the radio is portable, but you can't charge it with a USB cable like everything else, or put in regular AA batteries. You take it camping and it dies after a day.
Again, this is the most basic ham radio thing to do, lowest level of license required. It's not fun hacking, it's just annoying and discouraging.
The alternative radios to baofeng are literally 10 times the price or more, and it's not clear to me that they make any of that any easier. Gear for HF (longer range) is a hundred times the price or more. I haven't even wanted to go there.
Why isn't there a handheld radio that runs android and has a USB C data/charging port? Connecting to nearby repeaters based on GPS location could be automatic! You'd have all the young hams talking on the repeaters and things would start happening. That would be a radio that would actually be worth a license and a few hundred dollars
Buy a Quansheng uv-k5 radio. Is similar to Baofeng, but have a wider bandwidth coverage and you can charge with USB-C cable.
Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.
And it's such a broad hobby: you can make contacts just like your granddad on MF/HF CW today, and then on monster microwave arrays doing Earth-Moon-Earth with modern digital encodings tomorrow. You only need the one license.
> Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.
Can you share some of the broad categories of things you’ve learnt?
I'm glad to see that he mentions GNU Radio in his slides. It's amazing what you can do with it. I built a VOR receiver a few years ago.
I'll migrate it to the new QT based display sometime this fall.
How hard was to create a VOR receiver with GNUradio?
I really like the idea, but I found GNUradio very difficult to learn (and I have a master degree in Telecommunication Engineering). The basic things are easy, but when things becoming complex I am getting lost immediately.
My side project, still unfinished since years, is to create a WSPR decoder in GNUradio
I do agree. amateur radio, can be so useful for hacking on custom protocols, and transferring data. It does not all have to be talking on the radio if that doe snot interest you. I also feel like a new generation is blooming.
I actually have a little ambition but maybe one day if I have energy I'll pursue an amateur radio art installation of sorts. The space seems ripe for this sort of energy.
Tell me more
What always surprises me on the ham world is the huge number of possibilities. Beside having voice QSO in HF or VHF, there are many other options: QRP and SOTA/POTA, digital modes, DYI antennas and radios, SDR, EME, identifying unknown and misterious signal, etc.
What I don't like about the communities is that is mostly composed by grey hairs guy that are not really opened to change.
I've barely done any contesting or public safety or really any rag chewing, but I got my Extra for digital RF synthesis experiments and digital modes just in case I want to do something in those extra bits of the bands.
Lowfer people don't need licensed under a certain power and QRSS grabbers are an astoundingly neat thing for everyone licensed or not.
i'd never heard of this before... i'm allowed to transmit in the 600 meter band, this might actually be something interesting to do with that ability.
Meanwhile the RSGB won’t even let you take the foundation license test on linux, because they want to spy on potential members.
You can do it in a virtual machine, and people frequently do. The software can't detect nor escape it.
Unrelated (seriously), there's also OARC, the online amateur radio club. It's on discord (boo, proprietary), but it's got some of the most exciting projects and a really young crowd. I'd highly recommend it.
They want someone to invigilate the exam. That is reasonable, particularly since it appears as though in-person exams are still available.
I'm not sure what the situation is in GB but, in Canada, the question bank (and answers) were publicly available from the licensing body when I took my exam. Under such circumstances, it would be trivial to cheat. (It was also quite handy. I made an online test generator for the club I belonged to so people could take practice exams to figure out when they were ready.)
What does that mean? They want to use a cheat-discouraging browser?
I haven't seen much innovation in the HAM spectrum, but I do some fun stuff done with Lora, and mesh networks by flashing routers with custom version of OpenWRT.
Honestly I think the problem with the HAM spectrum is that it doesn't allow for (much) encryption and so much digital transmissions are hampered.
I read that licenses were some kind of security measure to prevent foreign spies from communicating using the radio back in world war 2.
What's the point of even having licenses in the modern day? If you have to go through red tape to get started, it's little wonder usage is declining.
it's like $12 and taking a 30 question test, administered by local hams. I don't really consider that "red tape"
usage is declining because radios are expensive because usage is declining. It's more fun to text and drive than talk on a walkie-talkie, smokey.
Because you don’t get free rein on the bands - there are frequency allocations, etiquette, power and mode limitations, safety to learn, etc.
Yes! RF is fun for hackers. Go get licensed. 73 de KQ4RLZ.
Of course hackers need to know how radio works. They need to know how to break into WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular comms, take over drones, break into RF-controlled industrial networks, spoof GPS, read RFID devices from a distance...
None of that is in the ham bands. Few hams have enough RF knowledge to do any of that. Hams are mostly still at CQ DX, CQ DX...