The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is having its annual Field Day this coming weekend:
ARRL Field Day is the most popular on-the-air event held annually in the US and Canada. On the fourth weekend of June, more than 35,000 radio amateurs gather with their clubs, groups or simply with friends to operate from remote locations.
Objective: To work as many stations as possible on any and all amateur bands (excluding the 60, 30, 17, and 12-meter bands) and to learn to operate in abnormal situations in less than optimal conditions. Field Day is open to all amateurs in the areas covered by the ARRL/RAC Field Organizations and countries within IARU Region 2. DX stations residing in other regions may be contacted for credit, but are not eligible to submit entries.
Dates: Field Day is always the fourth full weekend of June, beginning at 1800 UTC Saturday and running through 2059 UTC Sunday. Field Day 2016 is June 25-26.
Bands: Any Amateur Radio band except 12, 17, 30 and 60 Meters.
I learned of the Field Day while reading the comments to a story appearing in Ars Technica: When everything else fails, amateur radio will still be there—and thriving which is subtitled: "Ham is now a full-fat fabric that can provide Internet access. Why aren't you using it?"
I found that article to be quite readable and informative. I did learn Morse Code as a teen, but never took it further than that. I understand that to get an initial ham license, the Morse code requirement has been dropped. Then I got to thinking about how hams and early computer hobbyists had a lot of overlap and thought there might be some hams in our community. Hence this story submission and now your chance to ham it up. =)
If you were or still are a ham: What got you started? What keeps you active? Or, if you have stopped, why? What are your thoughts on Software-Defined Radio (SDR) — do you use it and under what conditions would you recommend it? If you are in the USA/Canada, will you be participating in the ARRL Field Day?
Related Stories
Typing By Slamming Your Laptop Closed. Repeatedly:
Do you sometimes feel that your custom mechanical keyboard is not quite loud enough to proclaim your superior hacking powers? Or do you need a more forceful way shout in all caps at someone who is wrong on the internet? For all this and more, [Jesse Li] has got you covered, with a set of bash scripts that allows you to type by slamming your laptop closed repeatedly, using Morse code.
The scripts are quite simple, and work receiving the lid open/close events from ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), recording the open and close timestamp and converting the timing to dots and dashes. After slamming to the required rhythm, you keep the lid open to see the character appear.
Yes, I see no practical use for this. Yes, I think it is a neat "hack". Had an itch and scratched it. Any soylentils here done their own Morse transceiver? How about on your smart phone? Transmit by long- or short-press anywhere on the screen for dits and dahs. Receive by phone vibration. Nearly silent communication while never needing to look at the screen!
Previously:
(2020-02-29) Learning Morse Code The Ludwig Koch Way
(2016-06-22) Ham it up! 2016 ARRL Field Day is June 25-26
(2015-02-27) Verizon Issues Furious Response to FCC, in Morse Code, Dated 1934
(2014-05-11) First Covert Communication System with Lasers
(2014-04-03) The POW Who Blinked "Torture" In Morse Code
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @03:59PM
I took my kid to a local hamfest a few years ago and his most memorable comment was "Dad, can we stop by the hospital?"
I asked why and he told me he wanted to be checked for lung cancer. The entire "fest" site reeked of cigarette smoke and everything (and most everybody) had that nicotine-stained look.
He also wasn't thrilled with the attitude that permeated the building... the old farts, with their belts cinched up around their armpits, talking about the old days, etc. Can't say I blame him. The local "club" is a geezer-fest that looks down their collective nose at anyone who doesn't know (or use CW).
I do have fun with it by talking with people around the world.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 22 2016, @04:39PM
I've been going to fests in the 70s and it does ring true that either its a crowded disaster indoors or its outside and its either raining or 90+ degrees. Or both. Or that time we had a tornado warning during the fest.
Another funny hamfest stereotype (that may vary by state law). Beer sales start at 8am and yes there will be a line.
The thing now a days is every year less people show up because "forget it I'll go on ebay". So you're left with folks who want to hang out rather than trade and in all honesty it reminds me of my visits to HOPE con in new york or pix I've seen of defcon, minus the kids, I guess. Actually it reminds me near perfectly of the retrocomputing corner of the HOPE conference in NYC, although locally of course.
I did my licensing test after the FCC stopped doing them when volunteer examiners gave tests, mostly at hamfests, and the fest I tested at is cancelled for a decade or so now due to declining numbers. The county can't expect to extract $2000 of rent for the fair facilities when ticket sales are only $1900 or whatever the last fest was.
In the old days you had guys trying to sell S100 boards and XT compatibles for list price what they paid for 10 years ago. Today you have guys trying to sell arduinos and shields for list price, to an audience who all have ebay and amazon apps on their phones. So yeah, lots of optimism not much sales.
One funny club anecdote is I was in a club that met at the local uni that shared facilities with another club, and our club was all under 40 yrs EE CS type students at the uni mostly night school students weirdly enough all of whom had licenses and 2M HTs and were almost never active (including myself at that time, ironically) and the other club was all retired 70+ yr old HF SSB ops. And we met in the same room on different nights. And we never, ever mixed. So yeah there's a lot of variation in local clubs. And there's local clubs that do nothing but storm chasing, or public service/emcomm stuff.
You know who else doesn't mix? "makers". The makerspace and the local ham clubs may as well be on different planets. Which is hilarious because the makerspace is all 25 year old java programmers tweeting about trying to learn how to solder, and the ham clubs are all 75 year old techs and engineers complaining on 80 meter sideband about trying to learn java programming.
(Score: 3, Funny) by deadstick on Wednesday June 22 2016, @05:11PM
And we never, ever mixed
You could pretty well substitute "model railroading" for "ham radio" in most of this thread. O gauge for CW, HO for VHF-FM...except you'd have to turn the hostility up a notch or two.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 22 2016, @04:00PM
Half a dozen times, I've acquired the books to study from. But, I never went through with taking the test to get licensed. I DID get the CB license, way back when. Right at the beginning of CB radio's peak in popularity, they were talking about licensing all radios, and outlawing unlicensed radios. I sent in the card someone handed me, and a couple weeks later, I got a genuine license form back. Apparently, that went over like a lead baloon - next to no one ever used their call letter on CB radio, and soon after, it was decided that the licenses would be done away with. All of this was 1980, if I recall correctly.
But, the REAL license. Nope - never went through with getting one.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 22 2016, @04:20PM
What got you started?
3rd generation here, so I grew up watching my dad solder together the first VHF synthesizers for 2M, or converting surplus Motorola UHF vacuum tube police radios for 70cm ham band etc. My grandfather mostly had some VHF gear from back when everyone used AM (and vacuum tubes, think like the 50s and 60s and "benton harbor lunchboxes" and stuff)
Before all the comments start slinging stuff, there's a stereotype in ham radio that What I Do is Real Ham Radio and the hobby being bigger than most hobbies, they are, of course, completely wrong. So there's nothing wrong with VHF FM repeater or 75M SSB geritol nets or emcomm or DXing or contesting or VHF weak signal or morse code but whats certain is none of them are the "Real Ham Radio" because there is no such thing.
As for stuff I liked, I spent years around 1990 doing packet radio as basically a human layer 3 routing protocol hopping from node to node for hundreds of miles because it was hard and I was good at it. Then I got into building microwave stuff due to some similar stuff I had access to at work. Did quite a bit of weak signal VHF (horizontally polarized SSB on 6M, 2M and up). My only claim to fame was some international DX on 6M during the usual Es openings and I was in on one "famous" 2M Es opening (rather rare) and got written up in QST and everything for a 1000 mile contact. I was impressed at being in QST but my wife was like "whatever". And I've been doing HF digital on and off since the old days of multimode modem hardware and dumb terminals. I've built most of the cheap SDR kits and had some fun and minimal success with them. I enjoy the station building art of getting a whole system working optimally, which is hard for microwave stuff. I got into metalworking because I helped fix old radios. I got into woodworking because I got tired of my completed homebrew and kit projects looking awful.
As for stuff I did not like, I did FM voice repeaters on 2M for like two weeks in the 80s and was bored to tears, like can't I just watch paint dry instead? I hand built a trail radio because I like hiking and it turns out I don't like substandard antennas and trail radio, although I like hiking and I like radio. I've built enough homebrew and kit CW gear to outfit W1AW but I don't really like CW enough to ever get into it. I must have put 500 hours into a R2 / T2 stack in the 90s which was a weird phasing method of making a single side band transceiver but I never quite got everything working just right so its in a landfill right now, just everything about it seemed to go wrong. I've played around with D*star and being what amounts to a very expensive wireless mic for something like skype turns out not to interest me. As much as I love VHF+ contesting as an "activity weekend" type thing, I think I have like 5 SSB HF QSOs in my whole lifetime, "boring". Somehow at the very bottom of the last solar cycle or maybe the cycle before it, I won the ARRL 10M contest in my region by being the only entrant and making like two QSOs so I got a signed certificate documenting my heroic victory. So not being likely to beat that story any time soon in any other contest, I've retired from HF contesting LOL. When I became eligible for the QCWRA society I was like "nope" although those are some nice old guys I just don't fit in (yet). QCWRA is the quarter century wireless radio amateur society and "most" hams getting into the hobby around retirement most of those guys are like 80+ so those of us who got their ticket as teens (or lower!) are perturbed when we qualify and are permitted to hang out with G-Grandpa when our own kids are newborns. Nice old guys but I don't fit in. Ditto the emcomm guys, they're really nice guys yet I'm really not going to hang out with them, if I'm gonna LARP its going to be in a suit of armor not an orange vest.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @04:37PM
Ham radio is the most boring thing I ever got involved with. There is a largish community here, but the local repeater is completely dead until maybe 10pm on Mondays, when the stereotypical aged hams meet for an hour. My radio is more useful for listening to the police traffic; the funnest thing I did was send data via my computer's speakers.
The internet is a far more interesting tool for communication, world wide reach without having to spend $$$ and you don't need a license. I don't think I'll be renewing my ham license when it comes up.
(Score: 2) by goody on Wednesday June 22 2016, @05:15PM
It sounds like you're just on 2 meters and repeaters, so yes, that does get rather boring. 2 meter FM is a wasteland in a lot of areas. You should look into HF, satellites, moonbounce, 6 meter sporadic E, DSP, CW, PSK, RTTY. There's a lot more to amateur radio than VHF repeaters.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday June 22 2016, @04:37PM
I got into amateur radio as a teenager in the early 1990s and was pretty active for a few years, successfully convincing my parents to put up a couple of simple antennas on the roof. I was keen on DXing for a while, usually CW since it was easier to punch through with my antennas and relatively low power than voice. Once I left home, though, I lived in a succession of places where putting up an antenna wasn't possible, and just chatting with people from the same city through an FM repeater wasn't an appealing prospect. The rise of the internet made it much easier to talk with people from other countries and learn about the world. Indeed, I suspect that if I tried to go back to DXing, I'd probably be annoyed by how all the exotic foreigners would go on about their gear or other ham radio stock conversations, instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of culture and politics that I could learn some new things from.
A sobering thought is that nearly all the people at my local club meetings, and on its board, were in their 60s at least, and so are probably long dead at this point. From another comment on this SN post, however, it seems like a new generation of crotchety old geezers grew up to replace them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 22 2016, @05:13PM
would go on about their gear or other ham radio stock conversations
Your bad antenna and low power would likely work very well on modern digital modes. I'm biased because I like that aspect of the hobby, probably because my day job involves strange non-HF modulation modes.
Anyway there is an accurate stereotype about HF digital that the PSK-31 ops are all macro operators who only like hitting function keys to squirt prepared macros at each other, and there's kind of a sport among everyone else to "sorta troll" them by getting into actual ragchew conversations with them. "Oh you were a merchant marine radio officer, tell me about your favorite port?" and you can almost hear the fluster as they remove their fingers from the function key row to laboriously type real English back at you. I admit to doing a bit of that sorta-trolling where I know darn well the other guy is just a macro op, but often very interesting conversations result so its not REALLY trolling. But yeah everyone knows PSK-31 is only macro button pushers.
If you want actual human conversation on HF digital its all in the Olivia / Contestia and more obscure modes. I think most of my Olivia QSOs are at a SNR below 0, I haven't been recording that data. Thats a crazy mode, all you hear is static, there's no audible signal, but still perfect copy. Miracle of modern EE modulation technology and all that.
For contesting its all RTTY. Practically zilch latency. Contestia is not used for contests regardless of how it was designed for low latency, whatever. People used to actually use RTTY for real QSOs when I was a kid but its all "CQ CONTEST" now.
Hellschreiber or WTF its called is very interesting. Nobody used it ever until that one big QST article a decade ago. Like a cross between rtty and SSTV. I see a lot of that on 20M.
Another fun multi-mode digital amusement is AMTOR is rarely used on ham bands anymore but tune in the worlds coast guards and they still transmit weather and safety bulletins on SITOR-B (SITOR-A?) which is the same as AMTOR but in commercial bands. Its interesting to watch new reports of where to avoid real pirates. Weather FAX is technically legal on ham bands, also rarely heard, but the world's coast guards transmit some cool maps occasionally.
SSTV is sometimes like ham radio's 4chan as a semi-anonymous image board of questionable repute. I hesitate to recommend it. Once it awhile its very funny to watch when the "right" ops are on frequency. I honestly do think there are anons from 4chan hanging out on ham radio SSTV given some of the stuff I've seen.
So that's a summary of modern HF digital modes today-ish.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by stackOVFL on Wednesday June 22 2016, @07:12PM
If you think PSK-31 is macro land take a look at JT-65 or JT - anything. There is literally nothing but CQ, Sig Report, TU, 73 and that's it. I like the digital modes though and do have fun with them from time to time. It was boring until I decided to upgrade to extra class. The extra bandwidth make i more interesting to a degree. The real thing about amateur radio that folks miss is it's not really just about operating (although that is a big part) but understanding why something works or doing something new is where the real fun is. For example, several folks in SBARC are setting up a local mesh network using re-purposed wi-fi gear. I thought it was just a fad at first but boy was I wrong. They've got that network linked all over the area and are doing chart rooms, email, VOIP and a mess more stuff with it. Why are they doing it? To understand and master the concepts and technology not to mention is just cool and fun to do. It's not all old folks anymore either. At least not in SBARC. A new much younger group has moved in and really upped the bar technically speaking. SDR's are a norm for us. We're also standing up a new Yaesu Fusion (C4FM) digital repeater with WiresX. We should be taking all over the world with out FT-1D and -2D 2m/70cm HT's real soon. I could go on and on about all the interesting stuff modern amateur radio has to offer but, It's just like any hobby you get out what you put in. I still need to learn morse code though :P
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Wednesday June 22 2016, @05:57PM
If you were or still are a ham: What got you started?
My dad hangs out with several people he met through 2 meters. Those guys were all cool. I should mention that I was a youngster, so anybody who treated me like I was an adult instead of a kid that should be 'seen and not heard' was aces with me. They almost always had computers, something I was always fascinated with. Talking with them was interesting. Frankly I felt like I belonged in that group. My father and my grandfather were also Ham Radio operators, so naturally I wanted to be one as well. In my pre-teens I decided to try to get my license, ALL of those dudes stepped in to help. Some spent time with me on the phone to quiz me on the manual. Some drove me to classes while my dad was at work. A few practiced Morse code with me. They were all smart, technologically inclined, and they were nice guys. In fact, I recently described the Soylent crowd like this:
...but you can also see why I like the community here. In a way it reminds me of the Ham radio operators I hung out with in the 80's. I wish I could articulate the esteem I had for them so you could get the full effect.
I hope this gets a little closer to clarifying what I meant by that. I got to make my dad proud by earning both my Novice and my Technican license. Actually I made a lot of that community proud. One of them actually drove me to my high school orientation. I got in to an invite-only school, we got the big speech about keeping your grades up or go back to a public school. I remember on the way home he made it clear to me I would not f' that up. It was my pleasure to have lunch with him a couple of weeks ago when I went to my reunion.
Or, if you have stopped, why?
I moved away from home to start my career, so my preferred group disappeared. Right around then is when the internet became not only ubiquitous, but also always-on. I got big into IRC and, frankly, found that more interesting. I also started frequenting several forums pertinent to my career. Both socially and work-wise I was spending all my time on the internet. Next thing you know my license expired. I could have just filled out a renewal, but by the time that had happened I couldn't even remember what frequencies I was allowed to roam in. I decided to let it lapse. I think I let my dad down, but I felt like if I couldn't remember something like that then I really didn't belong on the air. I mean you study pretty hard to get that license. I'm not sure that was the right choice but I do feel that when I'm ready to do that again I'll study it all over again, those Hams showed me how to do it and, frankly, I find it way more interesting than I did when I was a kid. (most of that was memorization...)
I miss those guys.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @06:28PM
I had a Gemtronics 40ch SSB I modified with switches wired to the PLL chip which gave me another 20 channels, and there was a rheostat inside you could adjust to triple the power output. Also had a Marko 75w and Palomar 100w tube amp for talking to Australia from Socal. I gave it up after solar conditions wiped out reception. I recently bought an SDR Airspy & Spyverter hooked up to a longwire antenna for listening to shortwave broadcasts. I'll be tuning in this weekend hopefully hearing more than religious broadcasts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @08:40PM
I still have the postal Q cards we used to trade back then, we only used a P.O. box so uncle charlie couldn't find us.
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday June 22 2016, @09:41PM
There is always Radio Havana.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @11:11PM
So far I have about 70 freqs bookmarked between 3 and 20MHz, most of them are religious, China, and Radio Havana. Nothing like it was in the 70s.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2016, @08:08PM
I was first licensed about 25 years ago and kept my Novice call sign, even though I'm now General class. (And I received my General back when you had to pass 13 wpm morse code, whoop-te-do.) A couple years ago I took the Extra test, without studying, and missed it by two questions. I regret having bought the study manual, now outdated again.
So, why I'm still active.... I've gone through periods of inactivity over the years, in fact I've probably been inactive more time than I've been active. The reason I'm still (somewhat) active is that I have the gear and it still works. When my current gear breaks down I doubt I'll replace it. (Probably. Maybe...) Why....
.... there are four or five 2m repeaters within easy range. Only two of them ever have any traffic at all, and 98% of that is nets. If I'm stupid enough to put my call out, I'll get silence 95% of the time. The other 5% will be one of two people who are so desperate for human contact they'll jump all over anyone who calls if they're monitoring. I don't hate them, but I don't like them well enough to want to converse with them much. (They have reasons they're that desperate.) And I know nobody else will answer.
.... I've done voice and digital HF, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of explaining to the neighbors for the umpteenth time that their reception of me is because their equipment is improperly shielded / improperly installed / so cheaply-assed built it doesn't reject signals properly, and it is their responsibility and not mine because my equipment is operating correctly. (Plus any offer to help is seen as I'm accepting that it's my problem and said neighbors then feel justified in their belief that I should therefore stop operating.) And I don't want to have to erect a field station. And the place I now live doesn't allow outside antennas and again I don't want to screw with erecting an indoor antenna that the wife will want me to take down when I'm done.
Besides, it gets boring. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and burned it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMTkf7m4AkA [youtube.com]
"Hi, I have a HAM Radio!" "So do I!" "What's the weather like? OK Bye!"
Contesting? Meh. It might be nice to beat your own records, but a contest station that can win is an investment between twenty and one hundred thousand dollars. And I'm being conservative.
I am still active in ARES/Skywarn. That said, our ARES program has no real idea of how they'd support our one served agency. Our county EMA has rejected any meaningful integration of ARES into county or other local agencies. (Not to mention the joy that is having to learn the Incident Command System, which also pretty much means county EMA controls the shots on interagency coordination.) Plus, most served agencies don't want supernumerary communicators - they want general purpose volunteers that they can equip with cell phones (or radios of their own.) As for skywarn... I'll call my reports into the local NWS office via cell phone, and they're few and far between these days. I have my 2m radio along... for some reason.
As to disasters, yeah, I suppose when all else fails you can still use ham radio. And talk to... whom? (A little disingenous, as one can in fact send and receive text email via HF thanks to people who make that possible. In a pinch one could probably get a health & welfare message out via the National Traffic System. But I'm betting on my ability to be able to text even in the worst disaster by travelling less than 20 miles away and back again if need be. I doubt the need will be there to travel to text, but I'm prepared to do that. If I ever needed to travel further than 20 miles to get a message out, we've got a lot deeper problems than ham radio will solve.)
It costs me nothing (virtually, anyway) to keep renewing my license, so I will. The gear price (even used) isn't worth the entertainment value I get out of it, though. Amateur Radio is dying, as did telegraphy, heliographs, and broadcast shortwave. The corpse just hasn't quite got the message yet and it will be a long time before it is truly dead.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 22 2016, @09:37PM
I would agree with AC that local 2M repeaters, HF SSB, emcomm, and contesting isn't going to keep people around.
There's a weird barrier between 12M and 10M and the 10M and up contests are more like activity day party and tracking rovers for extra points and generally having fun. You can be cutthroat on 20M when there's 100 contesters per each 10 KC of the band but on the VHF contests you pretty much talk to everyone in the local area in a couple hours and then its pounding on Es openings or tracking rovers as they go in and out of grid squares. HF contesting is like gladiatorial combat with electrons but VHF is just fun.
Too late now but it might have been fun to question "what haven't you done yet or what do you want to try that you at least know about?"
I've screwed around with satellites, in the really old days like RS-10/11 era I copied and decoded their morse code telemetry. Those really old sats transmitted on HF! I'll do satellites really seriously someday rather than just screwing around.
Speaking of $100K contester stations, for many years the top of the line antenna for microwave dudes on 5 GHz was a $50 18 inch dish, something to do with the beamwidth being wide enough to be usable but the gain high enough to be fun. Microwaves are weirdly fun and someday I'll be active on all bands. 5 GHz is one band I've not messed with.
Also I've done nothing much above 24 GHz (as a ham part 97 at home) other than screw around and I'm going to try that in my infinite spare time. There's been some very inspirational articles in the "Microwave Update" conference proceedings. Yeah I'm one of "those guys" who never goes but always buys the proceedings. I love reading that stuff. That article a few years back where the guy makes a horn antenna for 136 GHZ band on his metal lathe and I'm like "I could so do that" I'm at least that good of a metalworker. I will do some of the exotic THz stuff, at home, someday.
The older I get the easier and cheaper it is to do EME. Now a days one really long boom beam antenna and a brick and the exotic digital modes and you're up on 432, I think there was a QST or QEX article about the just a month or two ago. I didn't like HF CW trail radio. I wonder if I'd like trail EME? Assuming someone else hasn't already done that. Hmm a lightweight rasp pi, a usb "sound card interface" a lithium battery pack to feed the hungry amplifier, I have a FT-817 to drive the amp... Maybe I could almost do "trail EME" now? Its an insane enough idea that it might work. Its just at the cusp of being technologically possible, mostly WRT battery power limits.
I've never done anything below 80M, too much interference noise, never lit my fire, whatever. Every month there's more news about LF and VLF allocations in other countries or experimenters licenses. The noise level would be staggering where I live, but maybe for the sheer heck of it when the FCC opens the 500 KHz band to us, or 136 KHz or whatever we end up with, I'll play there just to see what its like.
I've never made a homebrew radio that looks good. No compromise something I could put on the shelf on the living room and my wife wouldn't freak out. I've made things that no longer look embarrassingly bad. I could do the woodworking, probably, I just haven't yet. For 40 years I've paged thru QST magazines where they have some beautiful homemade radio as one of the front pix and I've never made one that nice looking. The truth of the matter is that nice clean workbenches and nice looking enclosures never work, the best performing stuff always looks like it was found in a dumpster (perhaps it was) unless you're paying aerospace prices. None the less I'll hand make something that looks nice some day. Hmm I have a tentec 20M to 6M xverter I built 20 years ago that works, and a bitx20 ssb rig laying around somewhere that drives it pretty well, and thats my semi-homemade 6M rig... put in a nice box, maybe?
Fun as it is to build ultra high performance microwave band stations that cost maybe a kilobuck if done right (or maybe a quarter that if only done half way right) then I keep coming back to "you know, I could design something like a benton harbor lunchbox for 3 GHz that could really boost activity by being only $50, although likely pretty awful performance specs compared to a real weak signal system" A crap but simple and cheap TRF rx section, a simple VCO and modulator for AM voice transmission, next thing you know you're on 3.456 GHz for like $50 if that. Maybe $10 of parts. I could build a terrible but cheap and simple walkie-talkie level of performance hand held rig that operates on 10 GHz, I think I could. In my infinite spare time. Rather than how high performance a microwave system can I make like most people do, how about how cheap of a microwave rig can I design that works and meets FCC specs? $50? $25? $10? $5?
I've never built a vacuum tube linear amplifier. At the rate SSPAs are developing in maybe one, two decades no one will ever build a vacuum tube amp again. I guess I best hurry up. There is some beautiful metalwork in some designs. Some VHF/UHF tube linears are works of metalworking art full of transmission lines as matching networks. In some ways its stupid to do something the "wrong" way just to have the exotic experience, but its a hobby, so why not? I'm not sure it makes sense NOW to build a vacuum tube amp, given modern RF FETs.
On a much smaller scale ironically I rationalized my milling machine purchase like 20 years ago as I'll be able to make my own waveguide flanges and do waveguide work, and you can guess how much of that I've done on my mill since its purchase. Maybe I'll write a program that outputs scad files and gcode files to make microwave flanges in bulk. ./flange.pl --size=WR42 --output=wr42.scad and here you go.
So almost three decades in and I still got stuff on my to do list to cross off. Maybe some of those crazy ideas will inspire you, who knows, 73, AC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2016, @01:26AM
I would agree with AC that local 2M repeaters, HF SSB, emcomm, and contesting isn't going to keep people around.
There's a weird barrier between 12M and 10M and the 10M and up contests are more like activity day party and tracking rovers for extra points and generally having fun. You can be cutthroat on 20M when there's 100 contesters per each 10 KC of the band but on the VHF contests you pretty much talk to everyone in the local area in a couple hours and then its pounding on Es openings or tracking rovers as they go in and out of grid squares. HF contesting is like gladiatorial combat with electrons but VHF is just fun.
Too late now but it might have been fun to question "what haven't you done yet or what do you want to try that you at least know about?"
No, not too late. ACs come back to threads as well to see if there are any replies. :)
VHF contesting does sound interesting, but all my VHF/UHF gear is FM only. And again... what price to participate? This is the common refrain, again and again: Yes, there's lots of cool things to explore. But I've yet to see, outside of VHF/UHF FM, where exploring means anything less than dropping $500 here and $1000 there. You mentioned $50 for a 5MHz antenna. Great! What's the transverter cost? You say you're going to homebrew and adapt an LNB? Great! You got all the test equipment you'll need to make sure you're compliant? (Oh, you're under the emission limit to be regulated... except that you failed to suppress your harmonics properly and now Verizon has gone and complained to FCC that you're interfering with LTE bandwidth. But I digress.) Once you've dropped the money on the equipment, you'll use it... until you get bored with it. And next year... there will be D-Star Mark II or whatever the big boys decide the suckers will spend more on. Now it's SDR, then it will be a PC with SDR built in.
The last thing that moved my chain.... building Ten Tec's digital shortwave receiver kit (1254.) Four days of soldering iron bliss over Christmas, complete to accidentally breaking the front control knobs (having been warned in the instructions about that, it happened anyway,) and my finding suitable replacement pots at Radio Shack and mounting them in a custom built enclosure covering the gaping holes where the original pots went. Plus inserting my own custom LCD on/off switches, both permanent and momentary, for reduction of the noise floor. ... Only to find out that international English shortwave broadcasting is now a thing of the past except for religious nuts and Radio Havana. Because Internet. And I haven't seen another discrete component kit since I've wanted to put together.
I'm sorry that I sound all crusty and old. I wish I had your resources and/or faith. But I fear that I'm done with investing money in ham radio, for the indefinite future. And I have other things which give a better entertainment (or knowledge) to dollar ratio these days. But hell, ten years from now I'll be telling you how amateur astronomy is dead since I'll have stopped investing in it. I really hope I was wrong about the above that ham radio is dying, I just don't have faith that I'm not. ;)
As a PS: There are multiple tornado warnings 120 miles north of us at the moment. Spotters have actually reported tornadoes on the ground. The storms look like they'll all pass north of us for tonight, but we're still under tornado watch until 1 AM. So I throw my call out on the two repeaters in town that get traffic, asking if anyone else is following the tornadoes north of us. No reply. Silence except for the repeater tones. :( You know, I really do hope that it is just that people don't like me. ;)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 24 2016, @12:47PM
Well, ham radio has always been about engineering a pretty fluid tradeoff between money and time... In some ways I think I had my most fun as a starving student doing dumb things cheaply.
Bad as it'll sound one of my famous automobile analogies applies in that the fun per dollar ratio is near a random number although its easy to identify ways to spend lots of money while at the same time lots of poor people have more or less functional cars...
There's a weird hobby cluster of ham radio, early home computing, model railroading, photography, sailing, maybe camping, and in all those weirdly co aligned hobbies, the same ratio of dollars to fun being a random number exist, along with the same dynamic of being able to suck up any arbitrary number of available dollars (or hours!).
Here's an example. The highest performance comes from using a $150K spectrum analyzer to tune the output of a microwave amp. Which I can use for free at work, and someone motivated enough could find someone. But when I was starting out the way to build a clean microwave power amp is 1) operate at a freq way above the cellphones LOL 2) Buy a filter from minicircuits or build one, generate and shove a -5 dBmW signal at the second harmonic thru and verify attenuation using a power meter, then install enough harmonic attenuation on the output of the amp such that if the second harmonic were 0 dB down from the carrier, it would still meet specs. Easier to do than you'd think.
Of course its faster to use a spectrum analyzer to verify, but its amazing how well hams can trade time for dollars.
Obviously tentec hasn't made that specific model transverter that goes from 20M to 6M in maybe 20 years now, but it was like $100 back then. The going rate today for 10M to 6M transverters is about $60 from this guy on ebay in the Ukraine who has a good reputation, or so I've heard. Of course you'll have to drop some time/money on a case and some connectors so lets say $100 (although with a good junk box and some time it would still be $60)
One way I sell this stuff to my wife/family is that $200 graphic card I bought two years ago is officially worthless today, but that $100 transverter sells used on ebay for $50 today which is pretty cheap "rent" per month or per hour of use, plus a modern equivalent or better replacement for that still costs $100.
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday June 22 2016, @11:07PM
When I was a kid the big deal was Project ELF over in Clam Lake which had 15 miles of antenna, 3MW of power and transmitted at 45hz. No one really knew what effects it had on the human body (even had an X-Files episode about it,) and it was a target for a soviet nuclear attack. That was when I started looking into how radios work. I only got back into it when I needed a radio for my bunker. I looked into getting a license but there was a part where I had to specify location and that was a deal breaker.
(Score: 1) by LVDOVICVS on Thursday June 23 2016, @12:28AM
And what a coincidence, I just passed my Amateur Extra test the day before yesterday. (I got my Technician and General last September.) The local club that I belong to is almost exclusively a bunch of old, fat white guys. But I've found them to be quite willing to help with questions and problems. They also go out of their way to encourage my kids, 9 and 12, to get on the radio and talk.
Winlink is one my current interests. It allows me to hook up a computer to my HF rig and send and receive email. I'm told this is the preferred method to use for communication when helping out with disaster relief.
There are a surprising variety of interesting things you can do with amateur radio. You can bounce signals off the moon to get to the other side of the planet. There are satellites for hams to use. The ISS has two stations too and if you're lucky you can talk to an astronaut as he passes overhead. You can use digital modes that will cover 5000 miles using about 30 watts of radiated power. Or you can just talk to people or even use Morse code. There's also amateur television, but that doesn't seem to popular, at least around here.
On the downside, equipment isn't cheap. And antenna's are a lot bigger hassle than I thought they'd be. But my first year into it and I'm still finding it interesting, the people nice, and lots of possibilities for new things to try in the future.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 23 2016, @01:57AM
Jeeze what a depressing bunch of posts.
Upshot is HAM operators on this site all agree: its Dead Jim.
So what's left, and where is it going?
Emergency Preparedness? I don't think so.
In an emergency, your cell phone will be everyone's first resort. Happened in Sandy. Priority was given to fuel for cell towers. But in a national emergency the first thing the government will grab is the telephone system and cell system. Your cell phone won't work.
The internet has a better chance of working than your cell. But again, that will be grabbed by the government in a national emergency, and too much of it runs only on the mains.
But local emergencies, fires, floods, wide-spread power outages, people will never think of of HAMs.
Americans have never really done that no matter how many HAMs volunteer. And in truth there aren't enough HAMs to make a difference in a large emergency. There isn't enough bandwidth to send the shortest of "we're ok" messages for friends and neighbors.
(Not slamming you guys (why is it always "guys"?), just telling like you've explained it above).
People will wait for cell service. And Cell Service will be there (at some level) long before anything else.
So do you guys have any future? Does the whole community have any real follow on beyond waiting for the Soviet Nuke Strike that never happened?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by LVDOVICVS on Thursday June 23 2016, @03:30AM
It doesn't really matter whether people "will never think of" amateur radio operators. That's the point; they don't have to. They're there regardless.
"Often unsung, amateur radio operators regularly assist in emergency situations. Hurricane Katrina was no exception. For the past week, operators of amateur, or ham, radio have been instrumental in helping residents in the hardest hit areas, including saving stranded flood victims in Louisiana and Mississippi." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9228945/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/ham-radio-operators-rescue-after-katrina/#.V2tVMbgrJhE [nbcnews.com]
"Immediately after the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti that killed 230,000 people, injured an estimated 300,000 more and destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, medical teams from the University of Miami Project Medishare program had sporadic communication with the United States and the nearby U.S. Naval Ship (USNS) Comfort’s Medical Treatment Facility — until teams of amateur/ham radio operators arrived, that is." http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Amateur-Radio-Operators-Communications.html [emergencymgmt.com]
"On October 29th, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in southern New Jersey and radio operators got to apply their training and knowledge in the real world.
Hams in all five of Connecticut's ARES regions were active during last weeks's storm, and groups in hard-hit areas along the Fairfield County coast assisted for several straight days." http://www.examiner.com/article/ham-radio-s-response-to-hurricane-sandy-is-reviewed-and-praised [examiner.com]
Ham radio has a very long tradition of operators innovating and creating new things. Here's an example of that:
"Broadband-Hamnet™ (formerly called HSMM-Mesh™) is a high speed, self discovering, self configuring, fault tolerant, wireless computer network that can run for days from a fully charged car battery, or indefinitely with the addition of a modest solar array or other supplemental power source. The focus is on emergency communications." http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ [broadband-hamnet.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 23 2016, @03:46AM
Yes, HAMs showed up. Some even wrote glorious stories about it, claiming to saving stranded flood victims in Louisiana and Mississippi. (Really? seems a tad heroic).
But re-read the threads above. Everybody is abandoning it. Bored with the whole thing. Who is going to run these radio nets when everybody walks away?
And mesh nets? Come on. Long talked about, and seldom ever implemented, and certainly not in the teeth of an emergency. And when they are, its by a rag tag bunch of computer hackers messing with off the shelf routers, car batteries, and Raspberry PIs. Seems HAMs avoid that bunch of unlicensed hippies.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.