How ham radio endures - and remains a disaster lifeline

I don't think smart phones are conventional communications. The are smart. They are still the "tech of tomorrow".
Smart phones use conventional communications to do very clever things. But those clever things are range limited and require specialised equipment. They also have absolutely no "hackability" without specialised equipment (easy to get, sure... But still pretty much single purpose)

AM is literally a couple caps, inductors, resistors (edit: and diode) then an amplifier (a couple transistors and resistors). And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
It's just that it takes some experience to operate on these frequencies, and their bandwidth is limited.

Smart phones do away with the experience requirements, and trade higher frequencies & higher data rates for range (and I guess trade digital encoding for simplicity)

I see parallels to software.
People are nervous to "side loading apps" on their phone, but have no issues downloading and installing an exe on windows.
Smart phones give you the "this is how" kind of experience, and abstract away the sheer amount of technology they leverage. Which is amazing, and is what makes them smart!
But the underlying technology is phenomenal. And I feel it's a shame that the majority of people don't have any understanding of "installing an app" or similar (like calling internet access "WiFi".... 2 distinct things!)

Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level) and passes a test to acquire a license. Some of the equipment can either kill you or cause way too much interference potentially killing others indirectly
- Not for nothing but I got my novice and tech license in grade school.
  I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Looking back it was basically brain dumping (and learning code well enough to pass the 5WPM test).
  Ended up getting 13WPM and general and advanced in 7th grade.
  I still have my license, just renewed it a couple months ago. But haven't keyed up in maybe 15 years. Ain't nobody got time for that. I just got a little handheld transceiver on temu and haven't used it at all.
- killing others indirectly
  Huh. I wonder how you do that. If the wind knocked down a tree and the tree killed someone, would the wind indirectly have killed someone? That’s kind of like the old adage “speed doesn’t kill, it’s the sudden stop”
- Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level)
  No, not really. You just need to memorize a few symbols, remember like two equations, and know metric prefixes. You could learn it in a week or so just doing practice tests.
"Fragility" is the typical descriptor for this sort of thing. Advanced technology is very powerful, and that is obvious to see, but it also tends to fail readily without long-term planning, in disaster and war, of course, but also in more benign ways, like when a consumer becomes reliant on the technology for a way of life, and a corporation abused their unique ability to maintain the technology, and the consumer has no recourse.
And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
Weren't there some hobbyists that communicate via bed springs and a few Watt from Australia to USA?
On the other hand. Actual ham radio needs exotic and antiquated equipment, and for all of that you will get a clunky walkie-talkie that can't do the walkie part and has extremely limited bandwidth, that would collapse if even 0.1% of the population tried using it.
If you do have all the gear and license and just tried to find how to send even 2400 bits per second to another ham radio operator, it would take weeks just to find one another and setup this feat of engineering.
Modulations are obsolete, not even QAM64. There has been no attempt beam forming on HF so there is only very few channels that can be used concurently.
All in all it's like CB but with extra steps.
A hobby, not a reliable, practical method of mass communication and very stuck in its ways where preserving the spectrum is more valued than communication.
- You kinda made my point with the whole "try and find another operator to send 2400bps to" part. The digital communication is not conventional, it's revolutionary.
  Analog communication is conventional. And radios and their components aren't exotic.
  Yes, modern communication is fantastic. But analog will still be more reliable

Folks, if you're interested in this hobby I highly suggest you start studying for your technician license right now on hamstudy.org. it's a great site and free. You can use it as a guest if you don't want to make an account. The reason I say this is because it can take a few weeks to find a place to take your exam and then get your license. The waiting period sucks. Especially when you want to get into it right away.

Just listening is free and requires no license.

The exam is ~$15 depending on where you take it. The FCC fee is $35. The license lasts 10 years.

Some entry level radios I think are good enough to just mess around with before seeing if you want to dump more money into the hobby are:

Baofeng UV-5R. ~$20. The original cheap handheld. You'll see folks shit on it, but that's about it's overall quality, not quality for the price. Obviously a $100 radio will be better. It's good enough for seeing if you want to pursue the hobby though.
Tidradio TD-H3. ~$30. Came out this year I think. It's basically the UV-5R on steroids. It can receive way more frequencies and be programmed over Bluetooth. The Bluetooth programming app is annoying to use but it's still a nice feature. Supposedly it can be programmed via USB C but I couldn't get this to work. Other people have. It could be that all the USB C cords I have are power only.
Quansheng UV-K5. ~$30. Also known as UV-K6 and UV-K5(8). They're only cosmetic differences. I personally haven't used this. The thing that makes this cool is that the firmware can be flashed with custom firmware! I know there are a lot of techies here on Lemmy so this might be a cool one to get.

Most of these come with accessories. Most of them are garbage. The longer antennas are nice. The programming cable is very important. Once you get one they seem to work with everything. You really need one, especially if the custom firmware on UV-K6 interests you. There is a program called CHIRP that lets you program them. It's very useful.

What I find unfortunate is that it seems a lot of amateur radio software, especially for like the DMR radios, are all windows only, and I am exclusively a Linux user.
- I don't have a lot of experience but I was able to get Baofeng's GT-18 programming software working and programming on wine. If I was already an experienced wine user it would've been easier. It's the first time I dove in. Even the serial programming worked fine, I just had to see which /dev/ was linked to which COM. Still, native Linux (or CHIRP support) would be better.
- I don't remember how I did it, but I could swear that I got chirp to run on Mint

I’m really close to being ready to do the test for my HAM license. It’s been enlightening to see all the applications and components tied to it. For anyone interested, even just getting started with a simple SDR setup can get you going on learning the basics about the various bands and intricacies involved.

I saw the most amazing thing. You know those meshtastic devices? Well, apparently, somebody has made something like that. Exactly for amateur radio operators, and you can text message and location share, etc. with one watt of power. I think the meshtastic devices are probably limited to 0.1 watts of power. So that would be a major, major improvement. You just plug this tiny box into the USB Type-C port on your phone and it becomes a one-watt HT with voice and text capability. Or at least I think it said it had voice.
- Oh that’s really neat. It would be extremely helpful for situations like the hurricanes in the US these past months.
In preparing to get my ticket in 2020, I hopped on the Utah WebSDR and even got a shortwave listener (SWL) QSL card from a guy in the Cook Islands (E51JD).
Earlier this year I made a two-way QSL (contact) with him using my rig and 100W.
There’s a ton to learn, do, or accomplish if you want. So many facets to amateur radio.
I’m working on CW now!

I was actually surprised to know that data transmission is doable on ham radio. Not sure why I was surprised since data transmission is possible through pretty much any protocol but it was cool to know the versatility of what many see as pretty basic radio.

Used to work with a radio enthusiast on sailing ships, he’d make posts to social media and check his email literally 1000 miles out to sea via radio.
- Where do I start for this rabbit hole? That sounds mind blowingly cool.
Oh yeah, there are modes like DMR and YSF that are completely digital data. That really helps a lot because with analog, the further you got away from the repeater you are using, the scratchier your voice would become until you just weren't understandable. With digital, you either make the system or you don't. There's no real in-between. You're either able to be heard or you're not. But if you are not able to be heard, your radio immediately notifies you.
Check out "slow scan tv" if you haven't already. I have my amateur license and was surprised to learn all of the ways in which radio waves can be utilized
- The International Space Station was transmitting slow scan TV pictures last week. You can receive them with a handheld radio and the stock antenna on the high elevation passes, but a handheld yagi antenna works much better.
- I first learned about SSTV over a decade ago from Portal! I remember I had to get a two sided 3.5mm audio cable to plug my computer's speaker. https://youtu.be/DlIvnc-AZJQ (Video of someone decoding it.)
- Im seeing more sstv memes lately and im all for it, about time I say.

I always say this when someone asks why I am interested in radio, when you can make phone calls for free from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else.

One day, all that infrastructure may be switched off, or just gone. But I'll be able to take a piece of wire, hoist it into the air and have a two way conversation with people thousands of miles away.

It's also just very interesting I think, the way the signals are propagated differently at different wavelengths at different times.

Exactly. Knowing how to use and repair the underlying technology that we rely on is really quite frankly amazing.
Number one reason why I don't like all the analog broadcasts and use of frequencies are slowly being killed off around here.

Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think. You can get fairly inexpensive (comparatively anyway) Chinese software defined radio by Xiegu, and literally just stick a long wire in the back as an antenna and since the radio has an auto tuner, all you need to do is get that wire as high in the air as possible. I don't have that radio so I use a manual tuner but a setup like that is the only way I can get on the air from my current house.

Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think.
Also because the sun is in the middle of some kind of ~10 year cycle that means a ton of sun spots! That makes propagation go further.
- Yeah, we're not too too far removed from the last solar minimum either, so we got a good deal of solar cycle left before the next minimum too. I say this all the time but hams are the coolest sun worshiping group I've ever been a part of.
What will the auto tuner in that radio handle? I have an ICOM 7300 and it will handle 3 to 1 SWR and I think it will handle 10 to 1 with lower power in an emergency mode setting. But I use a manual tuner myself.
- Ive heard people say that they can get their random wire antennas fed right into the g90 with little issue, I don't have the tech specs but Id assume its near 9 to 1 if their random wire is working, and that's made me curious to try the unit since I don't have any SDR yet. The unit only pumps out 20w max so thats probably a factor. On my Yaesu ft 891where I can run 100w easy I use an external LC tuner and a counterpoise to mitigate rf buildup on the chassis though.

Are there any active communities for ham on Lemmy? I recently got into the hobby. The only one I found is !amatuer_radio@sopuli.xyz but it only has two posts, one of them mine.

https://lemmy.radio/c/amateur_radio
And
https://sh.itjust.works/c/amateur_radio
- OMG, thank you. This was one thing I'd recently returned to Reddit for.