It's an incredibly broad hobby. I just got my first award by downloading digital images (SSTV) from the ISS using a $35 handheld radio, and that didn't require any talking at all.

There are tons of things you can do, so many that it's hard to sum up. It also combines well with other hobbies. Or it can be a symbol or inspiration of its own kind, an objective reminder that more science in your life is a good thing.

One of the biggest advantages is the practically free education. If you upgrade your license you'll learn a lot of really fascinating stuff. I really wish I knew about propagation and differences between the various bands and band schedules back when I was a kid, fooling around with my dad's Patrolman radio. I also learned how effective logging can be, and have applied that in just about every area of my life.

Finally, there's just something about breaking the silence and making that call when you're out in the middle of nowhere. Even if you're the world's biggest introvert, you might end up helping somebody by keeping your radio turned on and tuned in.

https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/9c9n0q/my_for...

> I also learned how effective logging can be, and have applied that in just about every area of my life.

This statement really piqued my curiosity. Would you mind expanding on it?

Sure, as a radio operator, even just a listener-operator, you quickly find that A) you are expected to keep a log, and in many situations _must_ keep a log (contests are a good example), and B) a log easily runs circles around your memory. As it turns out, logs also provide a helpful context for bridging the gap between the subjective and objective lenses, both of which are helpful and needed for solving problems, reaching goals, etc. no matter the activity.

In many areas of life, I knew I was really far too subjective due to my research into my personal psychology (I'm a professional coach) and wondered about different ways I could be _more_ objective without actually becoming an external sensing-measuring device. :-) Reading about logging tools like SINPO[0] helped me intuitively identify new ways of logging & spreadsheeting my way through different activities and situations.

As an example, when I get sick, I now engage this logging skill rather than just feeling my way through the illness, and I get to see some really cool emergent properties of this new personal system. I usually monitor my vitals in addition to writing down some subjective 1-10 ratings of how I feel in terms of general wellbeing, nausea, depression, and anxiety as the day passes. I have an autoimmune condition and while I can't just take a pill and cure that, my logs have shown me the peaks and troughs of amplitude within every passing hour of severe illness, when those illnesses come. I discovered that as I watch this data I can be more nuanced about the way I treat my sick time, and ended up actually getting productive work done that I _wanted to get done_ while "sick", by recognizing the high points and patterns in rest and energy buildup. "Riding the waves" with more precision, so to speak. There is also the analytical side of this, where I'll occasionally look back through my logs and see icons like a circled "!!!" which means "wow you tried something new here and it worked amazingly well, please add this to your toolkit for this activity from now on."

Because you're effectively engaging more of your "sensor suite," you kind of feel more like the space ship that can navigate the asteroid field vs. the one that really gets banged up. When you fold in the analysis step, it's like you're now better able to approach even more treacherous asteroid fields--your machinery is getting upgrades over time.

Incidentally, when I meet up with a doctor, I can be much more accurate about what happened and when.

I do the same logging thing at work, and now keep logs as part of just about every project. In some cases this is a literal mini-blog on a web page, and in other cases it's a text file tucked somewhere 15 folders deep, and in still other cases it's a small mark in the margin of a paper journal page.

I also discovered that this helps with other hobbies. I run RPGs for my kids and develop my own table-top RPGs, and keeping a log is a huge tip for a really effective campaign. Later on the log can become a published, written narrative (e.g. Record of Lodoss War), or mined for new ideas.

I used to struggle to keep a personal journal, but I've since found that I can more easily approach the practice by starting from the "Stardate" mindset and being a tad more robotic regarding current circumstances than I can by trying to keep the personal history that used to come to mind when I'd consider journaling.

Another thing I've learned is that we are extremely brittle about this practice, as a society. Our thinking about keeping logs tends to be black & white (a common sign of lack of education on the matter) and we hesitate or think in terms like "OCD" when people around us really leverage this practice[1]. IMO this is really unfortunate.

Anyway I hope this expands on it a bit!

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINPO_code

1. https://qz.com/507727/a-man-who-recorded-his-every-sneeze-fo... (example)

Just to chime in, I saw an old-timer keep a daily work log in a text file, and that appealed to me so I started it too. This was in 1998, and to this day I still keep writing new entries to that same text file pretty much every business day. Old test account credentials, notes on what got done, ticket numbers, ideas, unfinished todos, the works. It also helps with time sheets at the end of the month :-)

Consistently recording logs is the importannt factor. You don't need fancy tools, a simple text-editor is all you need to have.

In Emacs one has org-mode, in Vim, vimwiki, even for plain Notepad, one can easily create a time log by pressing the F5 key. It will fill in the time and date automatically. Create a text file like day_log.txt, open it at the start of your day and press F5 key to fill the date and time. Just add couple of words on what you want to note. Done.

Rather like back in the day people like Jefferson would keep a daily journal. Hand-written in a paper notebook of course, and still available 250 years later, without worrying about hardware and data conversion issues.

Let's not be too dramatic, ascii and utf8 will be readable in 250 years, that's a certainty.

As for the hardware issue, his notebook was kept because he was an important person. Average Joe's notebook had a much greater chance to go into the landfill.

That's the same for today persons' digital files: Average Joe laptop goes to landfill but I'm sure presidents and whatever's files are archived by State or their families, same as they did for the paper notebook back then.

How big is that file now, out of curiosity?

I used to do this but now I just review my git history

> Another thing I've learned is that we are extremely brittle about this practice, as a society. Our thinking about keeping logs tends to be black & white (a common sign of lack of education on the matter) and we hesitate or think in terms like "OCD" when people around us really leverage this practice[1]. IMO this is really unfortunate.

That's some wisdom

How does radio provide advantages for logging purposes? I log a bit, not as extensively as you seem to (but I'm always looking to incorporate more data and improved workflow ideas), but I can't clearly envision (due to my ignorance of radio, likely) the advantages radio would provide over just entering info into my laptop in a text file (including keeping clocked time, timestamps, etc).

The amateur radio community emphasizes logging all contacts. It builds a habit, especially since a lot of community interaction is around (friendly) competitions of who can make the most distant contacts, etc. All informal, but it teaches the habit through cultural acclimation.

Additionally the FCC mandates certain station records be maintained, so it's not entirely a community initiative.

I think you're on to something. I'd love to dig even deeper about this topic maybe with some examples of your logs, as well as the time commitment this practice requires.

Maybe not quite the same, but very similar, is the bullet journal fad that's going on right now. Lots of people have found bullet journaling (which is essentially logging) very useful in their daily life.

> Finally, there's just something about breaking the silence and making that call when you're out in the middle of nowhere. Even if you're the world's biggest introvert, you might end up helping somebody by keeping your radio turned on and tuned in.

Words to live by.

care to explain how to download from ISS via radio ?

Sure, when the ISS passes over (and is transmitting SSTV--check the ARISS blog or issfanclub.com), tune your radio to 145.800, turn squelch off, and hold up your speaker to (for example) your smartphone which is running a decoder like Robot36. That's just one specific way...the app will auto-save an image to your phone when it's done. Example video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAHJfE7EBlI&t=12s

You can use an app like "ISS Detector" to get alerts when the ISS is over; that one also has an IAP that will show you any amateur radio satellite that's over your head, as well as the uplink and downlink frequencies. (Last time I was listening to cubesat AO-92, my social "nerd antenna" apparently went up to about 1 MW transmitting and I ended up pointing into the clear blue sky a lot while explaining to interested random passers-by why people still use ham radio. :-))

That's so cool, and single-handedly just convinced me to take the plunge and buy a radio to learn more. I've been tempted for a while but had no idea you could do this. I liked the idea of talking to people from far away, but being able to receive stuff from ISS is just next-level awesome.

Right on! You picked a great time in history, with a ham operator (Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor) currently on the ISS and making contacts. It's exciting stuff. :-) Here's one operator's contact from this last Saturday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwm-6tf7KCs

(That amazing feeling post-contact...funny that he left in those clips, but I definitely identify with the adrenaline rush. :-))

Be sure to check out #hamradio and #hamr on Twitter, and /r/amateurradio on Reddit. Edit: And your local club, too! And welcome!

I can't figure out why, but that clip really made my day. Thanks for sharing it.

here's an example of the decoding process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkH5yV4__3U

Back in the 80’s, before there was Iridium satellite, my uncle would use HAM radio to keep in touch with us while sailing his boat between Hawaii and California.

Even though my household weren’t HAM’s at the time, he’d “call” us every few days through a “phone patch” to give status updates in the middle of the Pacific.

Basically, he’d make connections to various HAM’s somewhere, trying to find someone who could do a “phone patch”. That person would then connect the audio to their phone, call my house collect, and we could have a two-way conversation. Pretty cool stuff.

Back in the 90’s when I had my license I thought packet radio was cool as hell. Checking your email in the middle of a field? Amazing. Of course that’s all obsolete now.

And then just for the ultimate geek factor. You know what the very first communication satellite was, right? The moon! HAM’s still do “moonbounce” communications to talk to people on the opposite side of the planet by bouncing signals off the moon. Requires very directional antennae, and brings with it the ultimate latency. But that’s some serious geek cred there.

My good friend WA2AAX, now a silent key, told of a visit he once made to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. During a lull in operation they let him traverse the catwalk spanning the 'dish' (a spherical mesh 1,000 ft diameter built inside a natural sinkhole) as the moon reached its zenith. Scanning his VHF HT he was able to hear many moonbouncing HAMs and even voice traffic from repeaters in the US. With a standard offset he was even able to make a brief contact with someone on a faraway VHF repeater before the celestial mechanics drifted out of alignment. A 2,000 mile QSO on VHF with a handheld, via the Moon. He considered it his finest Geek moment.

One of Arecebo's missions was to listen on Soviet and Sino transmissions, or nuke tests, via moon bounced transmissions.

(From Steve Blank's "Secret history of Silicon Valley" talk. https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/10023411/steve_bla... )

Great story! That’s sort of the Ham equivalent of the XKCD with the “real programers use a butterfly”[1]

[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/378/

> Checking your email in the middle of a field?

Checking mail on the BBS on the MIR space station. Kids these days trying to get an extra 10m range out of their wifi...

I used mine for telemetry radios on very large model rockets at the rocketry club.

I was "the radio guy". Which was good because my attempt at being the "motor guy" didn't end so well.

There's a story here you need to write down for us somehwere. :)

Yes, please do: what did being “the radio guy” entail?

Was it more software or hardware? I write software for a living so that’s what I’m more interested in; don’t know about parent comment, though.

I can comment on this as I'm kinda that guy at my rocket club as well. Basically many RDF or GPS Trackers in the hobby rocketry community operate over 70cm and require a license for legal operation. Add to that many people buy trackers and yet don't fully familarise themselves with their operation. So you'll have someone with a GPS tracker that has no idea how to get coordinates "out" of the system or what to do with them when they have them. And GPS is the easier system to use as RDFing a tracker (foxhunting) is more readily described as a skill or even an art. It definitely takes practice to become proficient at these types of things. Add to that the fact that many GPS systems are different from an operating perspective and you have a bit of a steep learning curve.

My dad was an amateur radio operator. That's exactly what he did. If you can imagine, back in the 70's and 80's normal people didn't have access to the internet. So all of the discussions that we normally have with strangers (like this one!) were basically impossible, except by radio in publicly accessible bands. I'm not that familiar with the how things worked, but I remember my dad spending at least an hour or two a day, chatting in morse code with people. They even had a kind of news service (I guess a bit like Usenet, except by hand) where they would relay messages around the world. It looked like a cool hobby, but I got access to a computer at a very early age and was instantly obsessed by it ;-)

Another thing to remember about the 'old days' (80's and earlier) is that in addition to there being no public Internet for (most) people to hook into[1], was the expense of actually using the phone. Except for local calls (pretty much people in/near your city), everything was metered: we had zone calls where calling someone more than ~5-10 miles away incurred per-minute costs (iirc, $0.10-0.20/min), long distance calls (>30-50 miles) were more expensive (iirc, $0.30-0.50/min), and international (esp. overseas) calls were insane (you would typically try to keep conversations very short as the costs would start at $1-2/minute.)

So amateur radio was a very cost effective way to communicate with like-minded people with very rapid payback. That said, a lot of people just liked chatting with strangers from far away places.

[1] There were commercial services and BBS's but they were also relatively niche until the late 80's largely due to the actual cost of the phone call as described above.

Learning morse code well enough to be able to decode 25-30 word per minute code in your head is incredibly satisfying. Also since transmitting a narrow sine wave takes much less power than a wider bandwidth voice signal you can get much further or operate on a fraction of the power.

I've talked (in morse code) to people on the air that are former US Navy radio telegraphers, submariners, Air force mechanics etc. That generation is heading into their golden years and many of them will be gone in 10-20 years. It's interesting to hear about their lives in their own words.

I've made contacts to Moscow Russia on 100 watts, Asia, most of Europe and most of the States in the US.

I've also built the tiny QCX in that article by soldering and hand winding toroids. Fired it up and made a contact several hundred miles away on a tiny amount of power. I used an arduino to create a scratch built keyer with all my own circuts and code. Then I hooked it up to my paddles, set the speed and used it for tons of contacts.

In short, it can be a very satisfying hobby if you are nerdy enough.

I was fortunate and got licensed through a club that had a healthy mix of students, people in industry, and retirees. Some of the stuff that we were doing was amazing. Some of the stuff that we talked about was even more so.

Just after the turn of the century we had a fully functional station for long distance terrestrial communications (HF) and satellite communications (including amateur satellites and the ISS). Much of the station could be disassembled and relocated for operations in the field, specifically Field Day. Members had various technical projects ranging from building the station (antennas, feed lines, and radios), to software defined radio. Other people had tangential interests which fit in well with the group. In other words, there was a lot of experimentation.

Amateur radio is a lot like computers: there are those who build the tools and those who use the tools. Both groups serve a purpose (many of the users are involved in community service and emergency communications). What you choose to do largely depends upon what you are interested in.

You nerd out about radio technology, and you see what you can do with it (bigger ones, smaller ones, distance and quality of transmissions, etc).

It's a feeling of power and independence that is very lost with the Internet to me. With the internet - I'm connecting to something very very large. With ham - I'm building my own. I'd see it as the same draw as setting up your first website in the late 90's/early 2000's, with the visitor counters and comments sections. Each interaction is a treasure.

The license is only needed if you want to transmit. If you are not interested in talking to random people, there is a lot of fun to be had from just picking up signals and listening. There are hobbyists who enjoy picking up distant AM radio stations, listening to all kinds of voice or machine traffic on shortwave, tracking aircraft by their beacon signals, or just listening to local police on scanners.

As a listener myself ("SWLer") my next project is to make a radio to pick up telemetry from small cubesats.

One caveat: at least in some locales, a license is required to own (or perhaps carry) a police scanner.

Kentucky is one of those states -- if it's in your vehicle -- but, it's a "Secondary offense," and I've been told that they haven't cited anyone for that for 10+ years.

Scanners are legal in all 50 states. In some states its illegal to use a scanner while breaking the law ( this I find funny for some reason )

https://www.zipscanners.com/resources/are-police-scanners-le...

Recursive law-breaking. Using the scanner while breaking the law is breaking the law, so by breaking the law while using the scanner, you're also breaking the law...while using the scanner.

Kinda like using a gun in the commission of a felony...is a felony.

Or being arrested and the only charge is resisting arrest.

I think of it more as computing something in "two passes". First, decide if the person committed a crime not in that "tack-on" category. Then, evaluate which "tack-ons" are applicable and possibly make those charges.

Profit motive in the legal system is blatant isnt it ?

In Indiana it’s illegal to possess one while committing a crime, so even speeding with one installed, whether you’re using it or not, invites more legal difficulty.

pretty sure public service bands don't overlap with ham bands so a ham license wouldn't help even _if_ a license was required for this

It’s a state code question not a technical one.

See Indiana’s law: https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-35-criminal-law-and-proce...

> Do people just talk to random people on the radio?

Some do, just like the internet. You're random to me, and we're conversing. Remember "chat rooms" and similar (IRC)? Mostly anonymous people talking to each other. Yes you might have some people you "know" in there, but there are strangers as well.

My problem with ragchewing is that here, I can respond to random comments as they interest me, and I can carry on a short conversation if I wish to, but I’m really not interested in shooting the breeze with a random stranger. Or frankly, even people I know.

I don't ragchew - but the newer digital modes are great for seeing how far your signal can reach. And sites like PSK Reporter are great for having passive validation of how far your signal actually goes, without even having to make a two-way contact.

I got my license (KE0RYU) a few months ago partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to mess around with software-defined radio. So far I've volunteered for communications at a major half-marathon and done a little bit of storm spotting for the NWS.

It seems like the majority of serious amatuer radio hobbyists are retired man, many of whom have a background in military communications or electrical engineering.

I've fantacised that back before the web was ubiquitous, radio could serve a similar role. That feeling of pure joy and curiosity exploring beyond the city limits of your hometown. I remember wandering the internet as a young teen. Finding my way into IRC was eye opening (in amazing and terrifying ways). I wonder if having a radio was like the early version of that.

i'm a CERT member. I use it to help local police. I use it to help manage safety at running races (marathons, 5ks etc.) I would also use it to help if called out on a search an rescue. These frequently involve multiple police departments and they can rarely talk with each other on their radios, so Hams fill in between departments.

At marathons and such the Hams are the ones with the antennas and the frequencies to get around the physical terrain and help bridge police departments.

I can also use it for communication when the cell networks go after a few hours without power (new england ice storms).

When 911 happened we had massive communication network failures and the Hams were the ones that were desperately needed by emergency crews to get messages in and out.

I used to have a CB and it was fun to talk to mates on there and muck around. At the time I liked the idea of HAM radio because you could go longer distance, and the idea of speaking to someone in another country was really cool. However now with the internet etc. it may seem a little less cool. (The internet was around when I was young but was pretty expensive to get connected).

I remember a time when someone on the CB got 64kbps connection to the internet through packet radio, faster than dial up!

It's a bit like how mucking around with microcomputers was very cool back in the day, but now why would you bother when you can run a C64 in an emulator? But there is something nostalgic about it that makes me sometimes want to buy and old computer.

> but now why would you bother when you can run a C64 in an emulator?

Once you dive into Retro-computing, you'll find loads of us getting and keeping old kit running, with a whole host of strange old and new add-ons, with new bits of kit being designed and built everyday. It's a really fun (but expensive) hobby!

After I got my license I also got a Skywarn license (that has to be renewed every 2 years) so I can do storm spotting. It's basically a volunteer effort for the National Weather Service. Licensed spotters get called out to go spot severe weather and report back in on the ham bands to the Weather Net. I installed a ham radio in my car for this very purpose.

There are a million different areas in this hobby. Chatting with random people is just the most obvious (and boring) one.

voice reports over radio seems a rather strange way of collecting weather data? A text-based form on the web seems more practical?

Voice reports have a few major advantages:

They can be made while your hands are otherwise occupied (driving, flying, etc.)

They don't require web access (can be done while in the middle of a forest, or 10,000 feet above the ground)

They lessen the chance of being DDOSed by a bored teenager

Doing them while within range of the internet may be less efficient, but they're also not limited by the internet.

I required to get my technician's license before I could take the family truck when I was in high school. And not answering up on 2m when my dad called was a groundable offense.

Although I found it interesting, I never planned on getting a license until recently... I was looking at POV racing drones and one particular model required a HAM license for the video transmitter.

How about a grassroots Internet?

http://hsmm-mesh.org/just-starting-read-this.html

I know one person who volunteers at the local marathon as a radio operator. (Not sure why standards mobile stuff hasn't replaced it.)

I volunteer as a radio operator at some sport events. The main reason we use radios instead of cell phones is that it's faster to relay information and works well when you have many field stations talking to a single base station. There's quite a lot of overhead involved in making a cell phone call, and it doesn't work well when you need to relay lots of short messages without tying up the line for everybody else. With a radio you can key up and start talking immediately.

I'm curious about how this works - Do you personally own a stack of handheld radios that work with your radio operator rig? Does the sports event hire handheld radios and a base station that you operate? Presumably they need to be license-free if you're issuing them to unlicensed volunteers? How do you respond to reports distant stations aren't receiving messages?

in addition to what m4x said, radio has some HUGE benefits over cell in a marathon scenario. If the person you need to talk with is on the phone with someone else you can't get through. With a radio you can. Additionally, everyone (terrain permitting) hears what you have to say so the information propagates out much faster.

On a well run event you have "net control" which is basically a central point that you pass messages to and they pass them out. They're usually an experienced ham set up with a good antenna, and a reasonably powerful transmitter, at a location that can hear from and speak to everyone even if people with handhelds can't hear each other because of distance or terrain. There's a convention for getting permission to speak and how messages are conveyed and passed on.

In my particular case, we set up an antenna for ham frequencies and public service frequencies, officers from our town are deployed, and can talk to us on their police radios but frequently can't speak with each other because we're not in our home town and don't have our repeater (other towns use other frequencies). So I relay messages between officers and I relay messages to and from net command.

Also, if you think about what happens when an emergency (like the Boston Marathon Bombing) happens... imagine how much slower and more disorganized the response would be if all the departments had to make cell calls to each other and wait for each to get off teh line... the central point would call one police dept. Then they'd call the fire. Then they'd call.... and now people are dead because you can't communicate with more than one person at a time.

it's just WAY more efficient than cell phones.

We are all licensed amateur radio operators and just use our own gear. Not sure what you mean by a stack of radios - we all have our own radios in some form, and they are all interoperable by their nature (not much point in hams using radios that can't communicate with anybody else!).

We normally have somebody free who can travel to any field station if they have equipment problems etc.

Most events pay a small fee for our help, which goes to the local club.

Ah, I see. Thanks for your answer!

What I mean by "a stack of radios" is at the two races I've marshalled that had radios, they had half a dozen license-free walkie-talkies like [1] which they handed out. The "stack" was figurative, as they wouldn't have stacked up very well.

I assumed you'd be the only license holder and you'd somehow co-ordinate between the license-free radios. If you could get half a dozen license holders, obviously it's a different matter!

(The license-free radios didn't work at either race)

[1] https://www.radio-solutions.co.uk/motorola-walkie-talkie-xt1...

You don’t need a stack of radios, it’s usually 2 meter and everyone is licensed and operating on the same frequency. There is a net operator managing the traffic, probably with a base station, but it’s their equipment always, it’s purely volunteer.

Hopefully some young amateur radio hobbyists will become radio engineers dealing with GPS, 3G, 4G, satalite beams etc.

There is tremendous demand for people with RF engineering and SDR skills.

Which companies do you mean? Mobile network operators?

Broadcast memes to aliens obviously.

The hobbyists find many different kinds of satisfaction in amateur radio. In my early days, my knack was building antennas and chasing dx down on HF. Later, I was into VHF: more antennas, preamps, hacking FM limiter - detector circuits, chasing tropospheric dx. Radio math as better hardware.

That was all before the arrival of software defined radio. Radio math as computer code.

Some of my nerdy friends can't stand analog voice and CW, preferring instead to push bandwidth limits on the microwave bands, doing mesh networks, etc.

Hehe, we can't all be hardcore HF/AM godfathers like Timtron WA1HLR. Big signals from home, big signals from WBCQ :-)

I have talking to people and we exchanged postal card (QSL card), that confirm each communication, quality, etc.

That was a lot of fun, each country contacted. The far you go, the more you are happy :)