Anyone else interested in or licensed for amateur/ham radio? Here's a post for open discussion about amateur radio activities, licensing, tech and/or questions.
I have a tech license but don't do much transmitting. The process of getting licensed and learning about the associated gear and activities did give me exposure to a lot of interesting aspects of radio, many of which have various practical applications. For example, a lot of the knowledge and hardware I collected was useful in monitoring and interpreting scanner activity during protests. There's something to be said for amateur radio tech as a supplement to things such as emergency planning, tactical communication, monitoring/intelligence and to extend other tech such as drones. It's also an interesting playground to work with RF, electrical engineering, programming, small scale manufacturing and other disciplines.
The wider community of hams has a lot of knowledgeable people but a culture that I find often infuriating. There's a fair amount of open racism/sexism, gate-keeping and condescension to newbies, chuddy prepper types as well as just general clubbiness and lack of diversity. At the moment, theres not many avowed leftists within that hobby/community, but plenty of interesting tech! So hoping we can have some discussion here among hams or those interested in radio.
Please keep in mind that posting your own callsign is self-doxing so I suggest you do not do that here.
I've got a tech license. Haven't been doing much radiating lately, but I've got a 100w shortwave rig hooked up to a 10 meter dipole in the attic of this apartment. Also a 50w VHF/UHF rig that's hooked up to a digital interface to do occasional SSTV/APRS stuff. My wife is absolutely not cool with guns, so I figured radios would be the next best thing for a SHTF situation. All of them are modded to operate outside the bands, of course.
Chapo.chat packet BBS when?
I've been interested in packet for a while, hosting a BBS or other terminal program (maybe a MUD?) over packet radio would be cool. All the packet stuff (excluding APRS of course) was really active up until the wired internet took off in the 90s, then basically dropped off a cliff. Reading about what hams were doing in those days makes you think about how the internet could have become something very different. There were even several satellites with packet BBSes. Wouldn't it be so cool to be shitposting by pointing a yagi antenna at an obsolete Soviet satellite right now rather than using boring terrestrial data center hardware? There's at least two orbiting BBSes still operational, although one is on the ISS and amateurs are discouraged from using it for unclear reasons, while the other requires 9600 baud packet hardware which is a little difficult to put together. One day I'd like to operate them!
As cool as it must have been, I get the feeling that we need something more nowadays. Just about everything digital that I'm aware of going on in the VHF and UHF bands are designed to operate over transceivers designed for FM voice at a ≈12kHz bandwidth, and the modems for these don't seem to want to push much farther than 9600 baud tops. APRS doesn't even push it that far, opting for 1200 baud instead, and there are still a lot of packets which don't make it through for various reasons.
I think practically speaking, the real future is more likely in the mesh nets being built out of tweaked 802.11 (WiFi) hardware. There's a lot more bandwidth to play with up in these bands, and a lot of consumer and commercial grade hardware already available. Efforts like the Euro Hamnet and AREDN are blazing a trail here in the imperial core, and I'm sure there are even more exiting projects taking place in the global south where radio regulations aren't as strict and people have no other choice but to build their own infrastructure.
Back to UHF though, I spoke to someone on Reddit a couple years ago who was trying to design their own cryptographically secure network stack to operate in extremely high latency, low bandwidth situations where the overhead of TCP/IP is simply too much to bear. I'm not sure if it will ever get off the ground, but it was a fascinating project. They called it Reticulum.
I definitely agree that mesh networks are likely more capable and useful than older packet technology. Packet is more of an interesting curiosity to me, a what-could-have-been of the early internet.
IMO the nature of amateur radio regulations (mostly the no-encryption thing) severely limits the usefulness of mesh projects operating strictly within ham frequency allocations. I understand the reasoning behind no encryption and it's ultimately probably a good thing. However, its always going to be a stumbing block in combining the modern 'net with amateur radio. Mesh-wise, I'm much more interested in stuff like NYCMesh that isn't really involved with ham stuff at all. Although to be fair I haven't looked too deeply into Hamnet and AREDN. Last time I was investigating that stuff I saw that some of the ham mesh projects had split due to typical ham drama and I was simply not interested in spending time to figure out which splinter project was more viable. I don't know if that's relevant at all to the state of those projects in 2020.
Also, how insane is it that we still have symbol rate limits on data transmissions for some portions of the ham allocation? Doesn't affect the 2.4GHz mesh stuff, but imagine all the cool digital modes we could play with on VHF or HF without that outdated limitation.
At the end of the day, the network effect still gets us, and these ham networks will remain dead as long as there's nothing interesting on them - and I totally agree that being able to use encryption and connect to the broader internet is basically a necessity in this day and age. I totally forgot about NYCMesh, but projects like this are much more useful from a practical perspective. Though I think there is a lot to be learned from the experimentation going on in the more ham-centric projects, I'm personally more interested in setting up a pirate internet than building infrastructure to help the cops when their own shit breaks lol.
Naomi Wu (@RealSexyCyborg) posts about pirate Baofeng and shitting on the old HAM community every so often.
Thanks for the info. I just picked up some bao fengs. Not licensed yet but yeah.
It's worth getting the license so you can test your gear - but yeah, the people on the local repeaters aren't always the coolest.
yeah, i think about most of my amateur activity as for training and testing purposes. i agree its worth getting licensed for that opportunity alone.
