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I am really curious what the future of Ham radio looks like. I have several times in my life tried to explore this hobby but mostly was turned off from it by the fact that it didn’t seem to offer much compared to what I could do on the internet aside from using public spectrum. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is cool and I see the use case for emergency response situations. But the idea of the community just never struck the cord with me how other communities have (mostly old white dudes, it seems).

Am I wrong? Is there a place for hams in the world where you can more quickly and reliably reach anyone from anywhere across the internet?

The Chicago Marathon has an association with the North Shore Radio Club to provide emergency communications. With so many people concentrated in a very small area, cellphones are not reliable. This has likely saved lives.

The recent hurricane to hit North Carolina had enormous support from ham radio as evidenced by someone who lost all power and internet: https://qrper.com/2024/11/helene-aftermath-update-insurance-.... There were many instances there of power lines not being down, but simply not existing any more.

A recently concluded event, called the CQ World Wide contest, had over 30,000 participants. A large station will make as many as 10,000 contacts in a 48 hour period exchanging basic information. Some countries call this "Radio Sport".

A US-based contest, called Sweepstakes had been going on since 1930.

A very fun event is called Field Day and takes place in June. It covers North America and participants set up emergency communication facilities as well as presenting ham radio to the public.

A recently-formed activity called Parks On The Air encourages setting up often very temporary stations in parks across the world. Activity on this is nowadays quite high with all manner of awards. See https://pota.app/ for details and index to activities.

A similar activity, called Summits on the Air (SOTA) has participants climbing peaks and putting them on the air. Some of the participants take up a challenge of building a portable station that weighs less than one pound, as some of the trails to get to the peaks require lots of hiking.

Some of the more capable hams spend significant time and energy building stations, such as K3LR: http://www.k3lr.com/. This is one of the biggest stations in the world.

One of the more significant challenges is to bounce signals off the moon and contact other hams. This is quite difficult and requires lots of RF power as well as serious antennas. The WSJTX set of protocols has made this easier, but not simple.

There are also satellites that support two-way ham radio communication. See https://www.amsat.org/ for detailed information.

There is an enormous amount of activity in building your own rigs, particularly low-powered rigs. See https://qrp-labs.com/ for example. There are many, as well as instructions on how to build them from components.

Many of these are not possible to do on the internet. For example, contacting 10,000 other stations in a 48 hour period with point-to-point communication. Or bouncing signals off the moon.

Adventurous souls often travel to nearly inaccessible locations to put them on the air. One recent example is an expedition to Bouvet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Y0J_Bouvet_Island_DXpedition. I had the fortune to go to Vanuatu in 2000 with a group from our club.

An activity that is declining in popularity is to collect contacts with US counties, of which there are 3,007 in the US. The emphasis in this is contact with mobile stations from the counties.

This is only a summary and there are many other activities and fields of interest in Ham Radio. It can simply do some things that are not feasible on the internet, and can support activities that the internet normally handles when thing go down.

If you look at K3LR's web site, you can see his support of youth.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up! My own interests are largely related to understanding EM physics and technology - Ham radio provided the conduit, pun intended.
OK, K3LR looks incredible. I found this video interview where the chap talks about their 14 antenna setups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MZmkRBhXLo
Yep. It is amazing. I have a friend who operates one of the positions during CQWW SSB.

Line noise and other RF noise is the bugaboo of ham radio operation, particularly in an urban area. Tim gave a talk at RSGB some time ago where someone asked him what the noise level was at his station. His answer was "S 0" even though he lives in a suburban area. He has excellent relationships with his neighbors.

With the advancement of satellite technology, which can provide cell service even during natural disasters when traditional terrestrial communication infrastructure is disrupted, I wonder if amateur radio use in emergencies will be superseded.

If I'm incorrect, I'd appreciate it if you could explain why. While I see amateur radio continuing to have value in educational and hobby contexts, I'm skeptical about its ongoing importance in emergencies , which seems to be a primary motivator for many enthusiasts.

I have a Ham license precisely because of the emergency response side of things: I live on the California coast where we get storms that can cut off electricity and power (at which point mobile internet inevitably stops working too, either because of no power to the cell towers or because it gets overloaded with everyone who would usually be on their home WiFi)... and we also live under the threat of big earthquakes.

So my wife and I got Ham licenses and joined our local ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) group.

(We also have a Starlink dish and a big battery.)

You’re not wrong. The space for ham enthusiasm has been greatly diminished by the internet. Since its inception in the 1910s until maybe the 80s or even 90s, saying “I contacted a dude in Thailand and another in Poland last night from my shack in Nebraska” would have been such a flex! It would have attracted the interest of many nerds and engineering/science minded folks.

Now a days it wouldn’t even make any sense to announce or mention that. You’ll have to qualify it with a lot of “oh but I didn’t use the internet, or any infrastructure. In fact I can do this with nothing more than a battery and my radio. Isn’t that cool?” And it’s cool, in a way, but only to those who are really care about the specifics.

The emergency response use-case feels SUPER contrived to me. I am not aware of any SAR teams in our area using HAM radios, and the only group I know of that does is... so old that they'd mostly be asking for help or needing to relay messages to people who (a) are physically fit enough to help but who also (b) don't listen on Ham spectrum.

I think from a technical perspective the emergency use case has faded a lot since the early 90s. Since then, two things have happened that make use of Ham in emergency communications more of an "excuse to use a cool toy" than an actual necessary component of a solution.

First, FRS / Part 95B.

Second, and maybe primarily, satellite communications have come a long way.

And even on the extreme off-chance that transmitting on Ham spectrum or using FRS outside of Part 95B is necessary... well... in an emergency situation... just fuckin' do it?

So Ham exists for fun and for education. But even there, it seems to be losing relevance. I think, at some point, the spectrum reserved for Ham should be bifurcated and a portion of it should allow for (non-commercial) encrypted packet radio. I think doing so would make Ham relevant again and significantly advance the "hobby/education/science/international goodwill" goals.

I'm not an emcomm whacker but I think that take is too dismissive. Ham radio was a much more viable for emergency communications before cell phones, Internet, and FRS/GMRS/MURS. But we still get news stories about hams who provide vital communications every time there's a major tornado outbreak or hurricane. E.g. https://www.wired.com/story/hurricane-helene-milton-north-ca...

Perhaps when all cell phones can reliably and routinely communicate with satellites, emcomm on ham radio won't have much purpose. But we're not there just yet.

> a portion of it should allow for (non-commercial) encrypted packet radio

If the message is encrypted, how can anyone tell whether it is commercial or not?

With all due respect… you’re wrong in the case of the vast majority of regions in North America that don’t have large city/municipal budgets and are mainly staffed by volunteers.

In my area SAR and even fire departments actively communicate with various amateur radio groups. While quite a few public services such as paramedics, police, fire, etc are using newer trunked/digital technology, they’re keeping analog VHF/UHF systems adjacent to amateur bands as a fall back. In the case of rural volunteer services they have nowhere near the expertise or hardware capability of an even half serious ham, and many in the scene are former military comms guys who love to help out.

It’s very rare that you’ll call on the 60 year old ham with his $25,000 station capable of using a rotating directional beam antenna to put out 1000 watts to relay a message to a team of emergency services who aren’t responding, but when you do and it saves a life you tend to see it as an advantage and not some guy waiting for an excuse to use his cool toy.

Edit: and I’m not sure where the FRS mentions are relevant since it’s pretty far from being anything hams or emergency services would go near. Type certified radios with intentionally regulation-nerfed antennas and max 2 watt output are the definition of toys, and as a result only reach their advertised range under perfect conditions on the salt flats.

It is not dead. Ham Radio was vital to the recovery of Helene, particularly in North Carolina.

Major city marathons use Ham Radio where other services are overloaded. For an example, see https://www.hamradiochicago.org/about-us.

Ham Radio was essential to the Red Cross effort in recovery from the 9/11 attacks.

I very much agree we could do better than ham for emergencies... But I don't expect an emergency hotline operator to be able to actually help anyone, that's not their job.

I think we should go even further though, and make half of 70cm into ISM band with duty cycle limits, no license, commercial use allowed. Or maybe allow commercial use, but only with open protocols, so you can make an encrypted business radio, but only if you let others make a compatible one.

Then hams could talk to their non ham friends. Getting a license isn't trivial if you're not already an embedded dev, and it's even more of a hassle now that it costs money.

Being able to give someone a $20 radio that they could just use would be awesome. I don't think spectrum crowding is as much of an issue since people use wifi and 5g if possible for everything, aside from ultra slow long range stuff where everything uses lots of airtime.

We have a local SAR team that uses radios, and even emits APRS beacons. (I've received them several times.)
>> Am I wrong? Is there a place for hams in the world where you can more quickly and reliably reach anyone from anywhere across the internet?

Amateur in this context just means non financial interest. It’s a hobby, maybe a bit like the technical (but not really the art-) aspects of film photography in a world of 100 megapixel digital cameras.

For me, it’s just a science based hobby - study of propagation, signals processing techniques - I’m fascinated by reliable signal transmission just below the noise floor. It’s something that just should not be possible, like seeing in pitch black, except this case we’re hearing a signal that’s drowned out by noise. Utterly fascinating (the short version would be that you don’t send one weak but narrowly concentrated signal like wspr in the article, but instead you encode the signal in such a way that you send a wide band pattern. On the receiving side, you look at all the noise and you try to find correlation in power levels across the band with the shared set of patterns that can be transmitted.

Amateur radio rules and spectrum were carved out by the FCC for the purposes of advancing the science of radio, international goodwill, and building one's own skills. By definition, it is deliberately not "useful" (with the exception of emergency communications, as you point out) and that is very much by design. Making it useful would mean it could compete with commercial radio services, which the FCC does not allow.

So we're left with, ham radio exists for science, fun, and the occasional rare emergency when all other communications are down. And that's okay! The hobby is deep and wide. No person can master it all. Every ham is on their own personal journey to dive down the rabbit holes that interest them. I'm personally about knee-deep in research for putting together a portable HF station that can operate a contest for the bulk of a weekend on just solar. I've put hours of reading into it and I still know practically nothing. And I'm loving every minute of it.

If you've only encountered "old white dudes" in ham radio, you haven't gone very far. (I challenge you to find any skilled hobby that isn't represented by some population of old white dudes.) Most clubs accept members from anywhere if they have online meetings or nets, and the more urban and college-town clubs tend to be pretty diverse. There are clubs just for young people, there are clubs just for women. There are online communities which tend to be pretty welcoming and intolerant of rude behavior (hello /r/amateurradio). But the ARRL doesn't promote them, you have to go looking for them yourself.

On the "old white dudes" claim, I noticed something funny during my technician exam: most (all white men) had glasses, plaid shirts, and worked in engineering or tech fields. Crew cuts. It was like a Twilight Zone episode of meeting people exactly like me at different ages.
RE: portable HF station, you might be intrigued by the portable rig I've put together over the past couple years[0]. It seems almost "obvious" after getting it all together, but it took a lot of reading and planning (and trying out setups) to settle on this configuration. So cool to have a singular self-contained "pouch" I can just pick up and take wherever - with a many-hour-capable battery to keep it running.

[0] https://matecha.net/posts/yaesu-ft857d-off-grid-portable-kit...

I took one of the last ham radio exams in the Netherlands that were taken by having many test takers in a room (now it's computer based, using the same infrastructure as the driver's license theory test).

Of thirty people, there were only men. Not all were old, but at least 70% seemed 40 to 50. Zero minorities. I fit the profile myself (a part from being German, not Dutch) but still feel grossed out by it

I recently got into Parks on the Air, where you go to parks with radio equipment and try to make 10 contacts. It's fun, gets me out of the house and can be an interesting challenge depending on atmospheric conditions. I built a small kit radio (https://qrp-labs.com/qmx.html) for use when visiting some of the parks that have longer hikes to interesting areas. Building the radio was a great lesson in electronics and exposed how horrible my soldering skills were. My curiosity about how the SDR stuff worked, especially the transmitting side, led me to reading lots of great posts and information about RF, modulation, etc.

The emergency preparedness side of things is an important side of amateur radio, but learning is an equally if not larger part of it.

Can relate with the learning part as the motivator. I would like to know whether you needed anything special for building the kit like e.g. an oscilloscope or other expensive instruments?
Well, with Winlink you can send emails to/from anywhere on the planet - I once sent an email via an RF relay in California (I'm in Vancouver, Canada). It could have been anywhere in NA though. Pretty sweet. There's a Winlink Wednesday "net" where people "check in" by sending a check-in winlink mail via RF to the net controller (organizer) who collects all the submissions and shares logs of all the participants. This is just one example. There's other neat weak-signal stuff like FT8/FT4 and JS8call, with which I've made contacts of ~13,000km with 5 watts of power for example.
> mostly old white dudes

Why is skin color important to you in this context?

I don't think the implication was about the precise color, but rather the lack of diversity.
This is about like asking if there's a place for model airplane / RC enthusiasts (commercial airplanes and airlines exist!). Or gearheads w/ cars (you can just take a bus, airplane, etc or drive on the highway). Or raspberry Pi enthusiasts (dell will give you a perfectly good computer). You get the idea.

It's the tinkering. If RF tinkering doesn't excite you, or if decentralized communication (truly decentralized - no other equipment but your own required!), then yeah, HAM may not be for you.

As for the future - I'm quite excited about digital, and I can imagine something like layering more and more functionality on tiny digital protocols. You can already route emails. I'd love to see delay-tolerant networking ported to HAM, so that you can have offline "couriers" of data that automatically re-transmit when they connect. Then you could set up your vehicle as a "mobile data mule" when you drive through cities or across the country.

You can build your own antennas and test them, you can build transceiver if you really want.

Hobby is not about talking with people, that’s just convenient way of testing your gear and knowledge of electromagnetic fields to have person from the other side to tell you how well they receive your signal.

I got interested in Ham radio after listening to this episode with NVK: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nvk/id1694064646?i=100...

Seems that the movement is going through a small renaissance now. Basically - yes, the internet made it irrelevant for a long time if you think about Ham as a way to form communities, meet random people on the other side of the planet...

But imagine having devices talk to each other without the internet. This is where it starts to become really interesting!

I'd draw an analogy with analog (ha! word pun) music enthousiasts; vinyl is outselling CDs nowadays, casette tape has its own niche again, that kind of thing. And they're all viable for their purpose.

That said, the internet relies on a lot of infrastructure, while ham radio works off batteries and / or generators. Spotify won't work when the internet is down, but vinyl records will.

I’m licensed in both the United States and Ireland. As a software engineer and electronics hobbyist, I find so many interesting things in ham radio circles. And if you’ve never experimented with RF stuff, you are missing out on a lot of fun. WSPR is one of many experimental modes worth trying. Home built and simple software defined radios like the ATmega-based https://dl2man.de/ (tr)uSDX put HF radio bands in your pocket for under $75. I’ve used digital modes on that radio to reach people on their computers 3000 miles away on 5 watts.

Give it a try and I think you’ll find it’s a lot of fun.

If you like (tr)uSDX I'm working on a somewhat similar transceiver at the moment https://github.com/vk2diy/adxi as a means to familiarise myself with radio. Key differences: one cable instead of four, no screen/buttons/blinkenlights, designed for a metal 'tiffin' enclosure, USB-C power only, built-in USB hub and USB audio chipset, modular frequency-specific late-stage boards, fully open design and design documentation including KiCad sources, components, calculations, etc.
Looks cool!
+1 DL2MAN rocks.
I have two WSPR beacons running, one in Sunnyvale CA and the other in Binyamina-Giv'at Ada, Israel. Both are running 200 mw into EFHW antennas just 6 meters off the ground. I can routinly pick up the signals between the two sites.

I get signal reports everwhere from a US military base at the South Pole, Australia, and throughout Europe and Asia.

The transmitters are homemade, a Rapsperry Pi Pico, and a small external circuit of a Si5355, a couple of MOSFETS and a lowpass filter -- maybe $30 in parts.

It's fascinating how the amount of electrons needed to light up a few LEDs can be heard around the world when modulated correctly.

Did you follow plans for your homemade transmitters? Or if not, have you written it up? I would definitely be interested in making some.
I based it off something similar to this https://blog.marxy.org/2018/12/minimal-wspr-transmit-with-ar... and moved it to Pico from arduino
We don't have cell service in areas I mountain bike so I carry a ham/gmrs radio and leave one with my wife. Helpful if I get a flat in the woods and need her to come pick me up.
I recently bought an RTL-SDR. I've had so much fun with it so far and learned so much, which was my goal. I designed my own antenna in Fusion 360 and built it. I'm currently developing my own SDR application with a custom spectrum display etc. So far I can demodulate AM/FM/SSB and I'm trying to get into decoding digital modes as well.

There is so much to learn and enjoy even without transmitting. I like to listen in on air traffic control and download weather satellite images.

>"WSPR transmits and receives but does not support normal types of on-the-air conversation. It sends and receives specially coded, beacon-like transmissions which

establish whether particular propagation paths are open.

Transmissions convey a callsign, station location, and power level using a compressed data format with strong forward error correction (FEC) and narrow-band, four-tone frequency-shift-keying (FSK)."

[...]

>"If you’ve wondered if a [ham radio, more broadly rf] band is open, WSPR can tell you."

WSPR sounds somewhat analogous to 'ping' or perhaps 'traceroute' -- but for HAM radio (or more broadly, radio, rf) signal propagation paths...

Related:

https://vkradioamateurs.org/introduction-to-wspr/

>"The program can decode [weak] signals with S/N as low as −34 dB in a 2500 Hz bandwidth."

https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/WSPR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)

>"Stations with internet access can automatically upload their reception reports to a central database called WSPRnet, which includes a mapping facility.":

https://www.wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map

The cool thing about WSPR is the weak signal aspect. I don't understand the math, but a receiver and the program to decode it can dig a signal out below the noise floor. If the band is open, you can literally transmit into a light bulb and have your signal picked up by dozens of receivers across the country. It's wild. And fun.
A friend and I were recently talking about working toward our General licenses! He put me on https://hamstudy.org and I already have a Baofeng UV-5R. I've used it to access some weather radio here in North Carolina.

I'm not sure about the community aspect, either, but I definitely can see the disaster preparedness value, especially after Helene's devastation.

Newly minted HAM here. HamStudy is excellent, but / and works very, very well with these "No Nonsense" guides: https://www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/

They are excellent - they're built around the exam questions, but structured in a way that you understand the mechanics behind everything.

I'd attempted my license before, but never managed. After finding HamStudy + those guides, got my technician, general and extra class within 3 weeks.

73!

sweet, congrats! checked in on any local 2m nets yet? hehe :)
As someone that just passed their general class this week, this post is very timely.
nice, congrats!
I remember reading about some guy claims using past wspr database ?timing? anomalies to find mh370 flight path (i.e a plane crossing line of communication causes measurable disturbance) though people have debunked it
Ham feels a little like the internet did in the 90s.