
ARRL – The National Association for Amateur (Ham) Radio - peter_d_sherman
http://www.arrl.org/
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curiousfab
Ham Radio has seen a lot of interest during the lockdown, both because it's a
fantastic and extremely diverse technical and social hobby that you can spend
endless time on in isolation, but also because (especially in the US) ham
radio is now only thought of as a hobby but as a public service providing
emergency communication. Many radio amateurs who were licensed but inactive
for a long time recently came back into the hobby, causing a spike in
activity.

To those who think that amateur radio is a bunch of guys sitting in front of
glowing tube radios, hammering away on their Morse keys (which still exists,
and is great fun, too!), nowadays radio amateurs have a multitude of sub-
hobbies which include homebrewing equipment of all sorts, ARDF ("fox
hunting"), satellite communication (with lots of LEO satellites and the QO-100
geostationary satellite available), moon bounce operation, digital
communication schemes that work with extremely weak signals, software defined
radio experimentation, contesting (competitive radio sport events), ... the
list goes on forever. Frequencies from 137 kHz to hundreds of GHz are
available for experimentation.

In most countries nowadays the "entry level" license class is very easy to
achieve and I encourage everyone with some interest in technology to give it a
try.

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jhallenworld
I'll say this for the ARRL: it's more flexible than the NRA for cases where
one's hobby is causing problems with the wider community.

Indeed it's over regulated- that you can't carry the internet over ham radio
is one of the main reasons for its lack of popularity.

Can you imagine if hams and the ARRL held the first amendment in the same
regard that the NRA holds the second amendment?

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kawfey
> that you can't carry the internet over ham radio is one of the main reasons
> for its lack of popularity

This isn't exactly true; misleading at best. Internet via ham radio isn't
really that much "fun" whilst the scope of amateur radio is incredibly broad.
You can buy COTS 802.11 networking gear, update their firmware to operate on
ham radio channels, and transport TCP/IP at 1500 watts of power all day long
(sans encryption), but part 15 devices perform this service admirably. In
fact, it's a part of the amateur service to not use amateur spectrum if the
communication can be reasonably furnished with another service.

A majority of ham radio happens at VHF and below, where data transmission
speeds are very slow for TCP/IP communication, but fine for voice, other forms
of data like ASCII text or digital voice via FSK/BPSK/MFSK/GMSK/QAM etc
modulations. At HF, spectrum is very limited and shared, so wide-band
modulations are frowned upon or disallowed, but the phenomena of worldwide
propagation via ionospheric refraction is the main allure.

There are numerous forms of ham radio internet, like HamWAN, HamNET, BBHN,
AREDN, and adhoc mesh systems out there, that transport all kinds of
(unencrypted) data useful to the radio amateur, but there are far more Part 15
systems that deliver the Internet and other encrypted information to its
users. Allowing encryption on ham radio opens doors to illicit and commercial
use of amateur spectrum.

The fact you can't use encryption isn't killing ham radio's popularity, it's
that it's practitioners and organizations are having trouble keeping ham radio
relevant for the 21st century, and advertising/marketing the hobby to a new
generation of prospective hams.

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jhallenworld
Well you can do TCP/IP yes, but not the public internet- it would violate the
third-party traffic rule, non-commercial traffic rule and the no-encryption
rule.. I guess you could do it if you monitored all traffic.

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peter_d_sherman
Future To-Do: Learn everything that can be learned about HAM Radio...

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philihp
If you remember electromagnetics from your last physics class, with a little
bit of studying it wouldn’t be hard to pass the entry level technician’s exam.
It’s a 35 question test from a public bank of 200, and you no longer need to
do Morse code.

Radios are also inexpensive these days, and a Bao-Feng for $50 will usually be
strong enough to get you to a municipal repeater. In the Black Rock Desert, I
was able to get about 1.5 kilometers between two of these little radios. You
can’t legally broadcast from them without passing the exam, but anyone can
listen (that’s the answer to one of the questions on the exam!)

