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.
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.
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.
One natural disaster is solar storms, which can take out sattelites; another possibility, to dial it up to over 9000, is that sattelites will be a likely target in WW3.
Finally, sattelites and the tools to communicate with them are relatively expensive, while you can get e.g. a Baofeng hand radio for $20-$30.
As one example, satellites won't help in situations such as marathons. The problem with marathons is the number of devices that are trying to access a limited spectrum. A satellite station will have bandwidth limitations as well, as its most likely use is through WiFi.
The example in the QRPer article above indicates a different limitation. He did have a satellite dish for internet access, but there was no way to distribute that signal over multiple mile radius, which is what he did with both FM simplex and at some point with 2 meter repeaters. For such communication to work, all parties would need a dish.
He invited neighbors to come over to use his internet service so they could make wifi calls to family.
His daughters and wife staffed the FM channels, keeping the local net alive.
Will such a system handle a sudden demand nearing the maximum capacity of its terrestrial counterpart? That's really the crux of the issue: in an emergency public networks can be overwhelmed.
Many county government agencies don't work with hams anymore because they have sat links and other communication available to them. I'm sure as technology progresses and it becomes feasible and affordable to give individual first responders satcom abilities, but I'm not sure that every person with a cell phone will be able to stabily access satcom in an emergency for a while yet.
>> 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.
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?
> 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.
Absolutely no disagreement! But I think that use-case is more-or-less dead. (The tool is perfectly good... it just doesn't have the network effects and usability of the other tools, and a combo of sats and FRS is good enough almost-always).
> 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.
True. But we are at the point where (a) satellite communication is extremely cheap, (b) authorities can be accessed via satellite as easily as 911 (or easier), and (c) people who can help but not official responders but in a place to help are WAY more likely to have satellite+FRS than Ham. (Eg most SAR teams either stick to FRS or deviate but don't even both licensing...)
> If the message is encrypted, how can anyone tell whether it is commercial or not?
I seriously don't think this will be a huge problem.
1. What's the point? There are cheaper and better solutions. Abuse will be minimal because infinitely simpler solutions just aren't that expensive these days. This was a very valid concern in the 80s, but it's not anymore.
2. Still require a call-sign unencrypted. Huge volumes from lots of different sources w/ the same call-sign such that it's ruining the amateur purpose of the use should be easy enough to investigate. If stations don't identify, well, that problem already exists and so do the solutions.
BUT, if it does become a problem, you can solve it in a variety of ways. If congestion really becomes an issue after the rule change, it can be rolled back. Or the rules could be written with "automatic triggers" based on congestion. Or you could pre-empt by putting a maximum number of minutes per callsign per day. Etc.
> 1. What's the point? There are cheaper and better solutions. Abuse will be minimal because infinitely simpler solutions just aren't that expensive these days. This was a very valid concern in the 80s, but it's not anymore.
I would like to point out that there has recently been an interest in HF spectrum for use shaving milliseconds off the ping of high-frequency trading firms, since skipping off the ionosphere on HF bands can be slightly faster than more reliable microwave or fiber links. There is licensing trouble (a good rundown of this is at https://computer.rip/2024-10-12-commercial-HF-radio.html) and I'm sure they would love to just use ham spectrum, even if it means paying a fine later after they've cleaned up in the markets. If this works, there will be more than enough demand for such connectivity to swamp the ham bands in encrypted digital junk.
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.
Just to be clear, saying “Vital” is overselling it, but it’s a nice thing to do. Being a ham operator is unpaid volunteer work, so over praise and “thanks” and calling it “vital” is really just being nice to a service someone provided that probably took 10-20 hours of their time for no compensation.
It’s nice for an emergency response team to reach out to a local ham emergency group and just delegate to them “hey why don’t you operate this net on this repeater and let us know if anyone reaches out to you? hit us up on XYZ frequency when that happens? Ok thanks”.
That’s one less task for a busy group to worry about. And if it saves or helps 1 person, then “it was vital in the rescue effort”. Heck, even if it doesn’t do anything “well it saved us from having a dedicated resource to just man a UHF/VHF repeater and keep announcing a net every 10 minutes, so it was ‘vital’ by freeing up 1 team member”
In an emergency situation you can take any person off the street and give them a 5-minute primer on how to operate a radio. That’s really all it takes. They don’t need to know FCC rules, band plans, how radios are made, RF propagation properties, antenna theory, or any of that crap. “Tune to a frequency, push to talk, any questions?”
"how to operate a radio", so when the station on the other end is like "change to 146.58" they'll definitely rememeber how to do that after a 5min primer during a regional disaster? Or when interference comes in (perhaps from a similarly-5min-trained rando), will they just toss the radio on the table and forget about it? Heck, how many vital comms will the person stomp over by not giving enough time for responses or urgent messages?
Ever listened to nets and comms during disasters? the experience and expertise of the station operators is immediately clear. it's not something the average person can get the hang of in a few minutes.
Non of that really applies to running an emergency net. A remote station isn’t gonna ask an emergency net operator to change frequency. In interference you would just politely ask the interferer to piss off. Most complicated scenario you’ll have to deal with is an asshole jamming you and switching to a backup frequency.
Obviously experience helps, but you can also summarize 95% of what needs to be done in 5 or 10 minutes. And you don’t need 95% of what you usually study or learn for a ham license
One of the motivations for the Chicago Marathon group to reach out to the ham club was was that in a previous year a runner died due to inadequate communication. I would call the prevention of that or even less serious health consequences Vital.
> That’s really all it takes.
I would put a strong disagree about this as well.
You are leaving out a lot of the protocol for operation. This takes a bit of training and experience to be able to handle lots of situations, like when to talk, when to listen, and what to do if you are unsure if your communication has been received or not.
That’s the difficulty of it right? We’re just talking about what qualifies as “vital”. Is saving 1 life “vital”? I’m sure you, I, and most people would say yes. What else could you say? But it’s not likely to “move the needle” per se in a broader rescue effort. Ham radio is “vital” in emergency situations in the sense that it “could” help some people. But if it was really a needle mover, why is it left to volunteers and community best-effort to do? Why are we not demanding publicly funded rescue services to hold these roles instead? Because the ROI in terms of moving the needle of a rescue effort is just not there.
An emergency net operated by amateur ham operators can last for hundreds of hours answer 800 questions, 780 of those are “how is it lookin’ out there?”, “any updates when this neighborhood is getting power back”, “this is Victor-Tango-7-Kilo-Kilo-India happy to help out folks if you need anything just holler”. Maybe 15 of someone actually reporting some useful update for a given value of usefulness and maybe 0-1 actual emergency stuff. It gives people with radios a place to vent without tying up actual rescue group resources answering and re-answering mundane questions.
I've done Ham Radio operator stuff at a major metropolitan marathon multiple times and the Hams are really just there for data collection. Cell phones have no problems operating in ultra-dense environments any more. You could say "what if the phones go down" but in an emergency situation the professionals have their own trunked radios to use.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>"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...
>"Stations with internet access can automatically upload their reception reports to a central database called WSPRnet, which includes a mapping facility.":
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.
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.
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.
One natural disaster is solar storms, which can take out sattelites; another possibility, to dial it up to over 9000, is that sattelites will be a likely target in WW3.
Finally, sattelites and the tools to communicate with them are relatively expensive, while you can get e.g. a Baofeng hand radio for $20-$30.
As one example, satellites won't help in situations such as marathons. The problem with marathons is the number of devices that are trying to access a limited spectrum. A satellite station will have bandwidth limitations as well, as its most likely use is through WiFi.
The example in the QRPer article above indicates a different limitation. He did have a satellite dish for internet access, but there was no way to distribute that signal over multiple mile radius, which is what he did with both FM simplex and at some point with 2 meter repeaters. For such communication to work, all parties would need a dish.
He invited neighbors to come over to use his internet service so they could make wifi calls to family.
His daughters and wife staffed the FM channels, keeping the local net alive.
Will such a system handle a sudden demand nearing the maximum capacity of its terrestrial counterpart? That's really the crux of the issue: in an emergency public networks can be overwhelmed.
Many county government agencies don't work with hams anymore because they have sat links and other communication available to them. I'm sure as technology progresses and it becomes feasible and affordable to give individual first responders satcom abilities, but I'm not sure that every person with a cell phone will be able to stabily access satcom in an emergency for a while yet.
>> 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.
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?
> 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.
Absolutely no disagreement! But I think that use-case is more-or-less dead. (The tool is perfectly good... it just doesn't have the network effects and usability of the other tools, and a combo of sats and FRS is good enough almost-always).
> 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.
True. But we are at the point where (a) satellite communication is extremely cheap, (b) authorities can be accessed via satellite as easily as 911 (or easier), and (c) people who can help but not official responders but in a place to help are WAY more likely to have satellite+FRS than Ham. (Eg most SAR teams either stick to FRS or deviate but don't even both licensing...)
> If the message is encrypted, how can anyone tell whether it is commercial or not?
I seriously don't think this will be a huge problem.
1. What's the point? There are cheaper and better solutions. Abuse will be minimal because infinitely simpler solutions just aren't that expensive these days. This was a very valid concern in the 80s, but it's not anymore.
2. Still require a call-sign unencrypted. Huge volumes from lots of different sources w/ the same call-sign such that it's ruining the amateur purpose of the use should be easy enough to investigate. If stations don't identify, well, that problem already exists and so do the solutions.
BUT, if it does become a problem, you can solve it in a variety of ways. If congestion really becomes an issue after the rule change, it can be rolled back. Or the rules could be written with "automatic triggers" based on congestion. Or you could pre-empt by putting a maximum number of minutes per callsign per day. Etc.
> 1. What's the point? There are cheaper and better solutions. Abuse will be minimal because infinitely simpler solutions just aren't that expensive these days. This was a very valid concern in the 80s, but it's not anymore.
I would like to point out that there has recently been an interest in HF spectrum for use shaving milliseconds off the ping of high-frequency trading firms, since skipping off the ionosphere on HF bands can be slightly faster than more reliable microwave or fiber links. There is licensing trouble (a good rundown of this is at https://computer.rip/2024-10-12-commercial-HF-radio.html) and I'm sure they would love to just use ham spectrum, even if it means paying a fine later after they've cleaned up in the markets. If this works, there will be more than enough demand for such connectivity to swamp the ham bands in encrypted digital junk.
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.
Just to be clear, saying “Vital” is overselling it, but it’s a nice thing to do. Being a ham operator is unpaid volunteer work, so over praise and “thanks” and calling it “vital” is really just being nice to a service someone provided that probably took 10-20 hours of their time for no compensation.
It’s nice for an emergency response team to reach out to a local ham emergency group and just delegate to them “hey why don’t you operate this net on this repeater and let us know if anyone reaches out to you? hit us up on XYZ frequency when that happens? Ok thanks”.
That’s one less task for a busy group to worry about. And if it saves or helps 1 person, then “it was vital in the rescue effort”. Heck, even if it doesn’t do anything “well it saved us from having a dedicated resource to just man a UHF/VHF repeater and keep announcing a net every 10 minutes, so it was ‘vital’ by freeing up 1 team member”
In an emergency situation you can take any person off the street and give them a 5-minute primer on how to operate a radio. That’s really all it takes. They don’t need to know FCC rules, band plans, how radios are made, RF propagation properties, antenna theory, or any of that crap. “Tune to a frequency, push to talk, any questions?”
"how to operate a radio", so when the station on the other end is like "change to 146.58" they'll definitely rememeber how to do that after a 5min primer during a regional disaster? Or when interference comes in (perhaps from a similarly-5min-trained rando), will they just toss the radio on the table and forget about it? Heck, how many vital comms will the person stomp over by not giving enough time for responses or urgent messages?
Ever listened to nets and comms during disasters? the experience and expertise of the station operators is immediately clear. it's not something the average person can get the hang of in a few minutes.
Non of that really applies to running an emergency net. A remote station isn’t gonna ask an emergency net operator to change frequency. In interference you would just politely ask the interferer to piss off. Most complicated scenario you’ll have to deal with is an asshole jamming you and switching to a backup frequency.
Obviously experience helps, but you can also summarize 95% of what needs to be done in 5 or 10 minutes. And you don’t need 95% of what you usually study or learn for a ham license
> Just to be clear, saying “Vital” is overselling
One of the motivations for the Chicago Marathon group to reach out to the ham club was was that in a previous year a runner died due to inadequate communication. I would call the prevention of that or even less serious health consequences Vital.
> That’s really all it takes.
I would put a strong disagree about this as well.
You are leaving out a lot of the protocol for operation. This takes a bit of training and experience to be able to handle lots of situations, like when to talk, when to listen, and what to do if you are unsure if your communication has been received or not.
That’s the difficulty of it right? We’re just talking about what qualifies as “vital”. Is saving 1 life “vital”? I’m sure you, I, and most people would say yes. What else could you say? But it’s not likely to “move the needle” per se in a broader rescue effort. Ham radio is “vital” in emergency situations in the sense that it “could” help some people. But if it was really a needle mover, why is it left to volunteers and community best-effort to do? Why are we not demanding publicly funded rescue services to hold these roles instead? Because the ROI in terms of moving the needle of a rescue effort is just not there.
An emergency net operated by amateur ham operators can last for hundreds of hours answer 800 questions, 780 of those are “how is it lookin’ out there?”, “any updates when this neighborhood is getting power back”, “this is Victor-Tango-7-Kilo-Kilo-India happy to help out folks if you need anything just holler”. Maybe 15 of someone actually reporting some useful update for a given value of usefulness and maybe 0-1 actual emergency stuff. It gives people with radios a place to vent without tying up actual rescue group resources answering and re-answering mundane questions.
I've done Ham Radio operator stuff at a major metropolitan marathon multiple times and the Hams are really just there for data collection. Cell phones have no problems operating in ultra-dense environments any more. You could say "what if the phones go down" but in an emergency situation the professionals have their own trunked radios to use.
We have a local SAR team that uses radios, and even emits APRS beacons. (I've received them several times.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
Ham feels a little like the internet did in the 90s.
As someone that just passed their general class this week, this post is very timely.
nice, congrats!
>"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.