>I've actually seen hams go on a >20 minute rant about how digital is ruining ham radio.
Digital ruined a lot of things. Analog is/was just so much more open and ripe for hacking. Part of the advantage of digital was this security. However, going digital allowed us to do so much more, so it's a migration that could not be stopped.
The only time HAMs are paid any attention are in times of disaster. Nobody will notice the loss of HAMs until the next major disaster near them, and then everyone will look around and ask "what happened to all the HAM guys?"
It's true that the HAM clubs tend to put a cultural emphasis on emergency communications. But the primary value add is the community with its various memoranda and training/standardized way of handling emergency communications. The radio skill-set and equipment is more of a red herring, tbh.
Even being tuned into the amateur radio community and living through several regional natural disasters that knocked out cell phone coverage, I've never actually seen HAM radio operators turn out to be useful in emergencies.
I'm glad for the robustness provided by the HAM community, and I think allocating spectrum is a small price to pay for a set of volunteers who serve as yet another layer of "backup infrastructure". It's valuable to have that robustness.
But tbh in an actual emergency or natural disaster I'd MUCH rather have my inReach mini than my hand-held. The HAM emergency communications narrative is vastly over-stated (and, honestly, self-important in a way that's off-putting to pretty much all non-HAMs).
The spectrum is worth it for that alone.
Only 20 minutes? That's short for an RF guy rant! I used to work with ~20 mmWave guys. All older dudes, and MAN could they talk. There was one guy who's last name was "Park." We called it "getting Parked" when he would park his ass at your desk and prevent you from getting any work done for 1-2 hours at a time
I studied to take my Technician Class exam, when I finished and passed, I found out I could take my General Class exam right then if I wished. When I took that second exam and failed, the club members looked absolutely delighted. I don't look like them, and their smiles felt like them saying "we knew the freak would fail". It felt incredibly alienating.
Shoot for the general again and use one of the online testing groups, simple and no judgement.
The volunteers proctoring all three of my online exams were anywhere from polite to actively cheering me on (before the exam), and all congratulated me when I passed.
Goodbye Amateur Radio, you won't be missed.
Most of the hobby is not prepared to help with emcomm. And I think you (and a lot of people) overstate how helpful amateur emcomm is. In the past couple decades, local officials have gotten pretty good systems for getting high priority traffic out of the local area (which is what HF was previously for).
Amateur volunteers relaying things in the local area are helpful in keeping disaster logistics running smoothly. Radio skills are not a big part of it, for the most part.
I'm a teacher and passionate about radio. I don't know how to get my students into radio and make it into a good experience for them. They're way too likely to face hostility, racist political rants, etc. So I haven't pushed on it.
There are still lots of old guys in these parts of the hobby, but ones open-minded enough at least to learn new things, and I've not had any issues with them despite having a distinctly female first name.
WSPR is the best place to start, in my opinion - lots of results for really low capital investment (5W is high power), really lending itself to DIY.
Licensing is ultimately going to be important to transmit, etc.
WSPR is amazing, but there's a certain "so what"-- I can send a packet over there, too, via the public internet. Radio doesn't make sense to kids anymore: like they really don't get it.
As for emergency preparedness... No. Hams don't really play a role anymore. Satellite texting/Starlink, digital repeaters for agencies, generally available idiot-proof radios are all things that would have to fail. There's a reason that the volunteer SAR team near me just buy off the shelf stuff from Motorola instead of trying to recruit Hams. Even in some sort of failure like that, I would rather have an air band or marine band radio than a Ham radio.
Our local CERT makes big use of amateur emcomm. But it's the non-critical stuff: neighborhood liasions to go out and spot things, or volunteers in a truck to relay supply needs at peripheral stations.
It's a parallel line of communications (with a separate set of humans making a judgment of what's important to escalate), which is useful when administrative and decision-making capacity is constrained. And it has different failure modes, which is nice, too.
Even little things: visible volunteer patrols by amateur operators for fireworks laws violations just helped my city tamp down the normal dozens of fires to only two and hastened the firefighting response.
As a counterpoint, I once was involved with a backcountry emergency where, at a certain point, it made sense to have a non licensed person on a radio. We actually had the local grump hop on and tie up the frequency chastising them for using the radio. That felt very in line with the ham community.
Sure, Hams can provide utility in an emergency, but Hams also like to overstate just how essential they are in these situations (scroll up for evidence).
Volunteer fire patrols are great and all, but an independent radio network for the volunteers is not exactly required, or even more useful than a cellphone.
Cell phone networks will be down or at capacity when disaster hits.
Public safety networks will mostly be up, but they only have so many officers, etc.
> As a counterpoint, I once was involved with a backcountry emergency where, at a certain point, it made sense to have a non licensed person on a radio. We actually had the local grump hop on and tie up the frequency chastising them for using the radio. That felt very in line with the ham community.
I have said some negative things about the community here, but I haven't seen anything like that. We all pass an exam that makes it clear anyone can use any frequency in an emergency, and we all also should know that we can let unlicensed people under our supervision use our radio in non-emergencies. (With some exceptions).
> but Hams also like to overstate just how essential they are in these situations
That was my original point that you replied to, but your response felt too strong: I believe there is definite utility from emcomm, but it is not essential.
Ham EMCOM is mostly useful for relaying "Bill Jones says he's okay"-type traffic but otherwise it's just a LARP.
I don't think amateur is very useful for most SAR-- it's odd that you guys keep bringing it up. You guys can provision for typical needs; amateur is a benefit because of its elasticity.
> but otherwise it's just a LARP.
Don't be a dick. I think CERTs are important, and amateur radio is the lifeblood of CERT in many areas.
Doctrine here in Santa Clara County is that it's for things like:
- getting initial information and assessments from earthquakes in the first 20 minutes (a couple hundred people trained popping on nets saying modified Mercalli numbers and reporting the most urgent needs for assistance near them).
- coordinating distribution of relief supplies ("we need 100 more flats of water bottles at site GR2")
- medium priority traffic between hospitals when other communications systems fail (coordinating transfers, etc)
- handling all the low priority traffic from large festivals and events to keep primary communications systems clear (so a town's EMS dispatch doesn't need to talk about boo-boos, and so that event organizers don't need to try and talk through police dispatch)
- additional eyes and ears for police and fire
- locating anyone (inadvertently or deliberately) disrupting emergency communications
Would stuff be OK without the above? Sure. But it works a bit better with all that.
I would pull out satellite messenger to text people that I'm okay.
I have thought about getting Starlink for internet but it is too expensive for just disasters. I'm hoping they come out with smaller, cheaper dish. But Starlink would be perfect for command posts. Or for city to setup communication centers for the public.
i'm doing my part!
"Those boomers are ruining ham radio for us!"
It's the ciiiiiircle of life...
This makes absolutely no sense. There's a whole base of physics, experince, antenna design, &c that are shared between analog and digital modes. Truthfully much more is shared than is different -- after all, in the end, digital modes are just another analog mode transmission.
The best way to influence the content of that exam? Join one of the more progressive VECs (Volunteer Exam Coordinators) as a volunteer examiner. Minimum license level for this is General, but really, Amateur Extra, so you can give all three exams.
Which VECs are progressive? Start with the ones that host online exam sessions, and seem enthusiastic about it. The money is trivial ($15 per exam given, and they have to have three examiners watching one test taker), so they’re in it for the love (and possibly community clout).
VECs, in turn, help the FCC set the question pools for the exams, and those are updated a little bit every four years. They’ve started adding a few questions about digital modes. I personally think they should have more content about safety and regulations, because that’s what really matters for playing nicely with others on the little bit of spectrum we have.
I think the problem comes down to the HAM rules having been formulated pre-Internet, where the distinction between amateur and commercial activity was a lot more obvious: noncommercial ~= useless, commercial ~= useful. The advent of the Internet demonstrated the existence of a whole new category: noncommercial ~= useful.
Today we've got all kinds of noncommercial but highly useful RF applications, e.g. Meshtastic, that are stuck in the relatively limited ISM bands (yes, I'm aware of HAM mode, but recall usefulness → encryption). Just using the Internet isn't a replacement for these projects, as they're intended to be useful offgrid or during times of centralized Internet disruption. IMO it's a crying shame that stuff like this, the bleeding edge of non-commercial usefulness in RF, is lower priority than ragchewing. Besides, it's not as if all the technical aspects go away under looser rules: propagation behavior etc etc are just as important, if not moreso, than they ever were.
This doesn't mean just hand it over to the corps; there's a third way. Some chunks of current HAM spectrum should be converted to ISM. That doesn't mean a total free-for-all; duty cycle and EIRP limits apply and can be scaled appropriately to the frequency's propagation characteristics. The degree of freedom in usage in ISM bands drives innovation in protocol design to make better use of available bandwidth, as has happened with 802.11, so congestion/commercial use is actually a good thing.
Small amounts of digital have been allowed in FRS for a while. But only one second, every 30 seconds. Creating a mesh within that constraint would be genius.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/95.587
But sending GPS coords and short data bursts standalone or with phone app is a thing. e.g. https://baofengtech.com/new-release-btech-gmrs-pro/
Here's a link to the VHF band plan we use here in the UK - obviously I can't speak for other countries: [https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/19/ ]. It's _littered_ with SSTV, beacon and digital mode allocations (and for clarity, that's a good thing). The digital mode allocations are full of people chatting in text using FT-8 or JS8Call (more in HF than VHF, those, but the principle holds). On the next page, there's an entire 1MHz allocation dedicated to wideband digital data modes.
If you're a licensee, there's plenty of innovation and digital experimentation space available. Sure, a chunk of the traditionalist ham community aren't excited about it, but there's plenty of us who are. And, as ever, you don't need a license to receive...
Kinds sucks being the birthplace of telecoms...
The curmudgeons are a minority, but a very vocal one.
I'm pretty sure that those few who might get into really do get pushed away by the people who still do it...
It is very sad. I have a feeling a new wave of hackers would flood radio if the community pushed for some spectrum to be community dedicated to digital comms.
Outreach would be much easier.
I've actually seen hams go on a >20 minute rant about how digital is ruining ham radio.