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Re:Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio? by clbrmbr on Thursday July 18, 2024 @04:03PM (#40999184)
Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives.

That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend:

2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz) VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters) HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters

That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air.

Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).

Re:Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio? by adrianpike on Thursday July 18, 2024 @04:36PM (#40999493)
Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?
Re:Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio? by asciimike on Friday July 19, 2024 @10:57AM (#41007183)
I went deep into this earlier in the year, here are a few resources I found helpful:

- https://www.ariss.org/uploads/1/9/6/8/19681527/k9jkm_2012_sy... has a good overview of how to hit the ISS (and other sats)

- https://www.va3hdl.com/projects/gpredict-and-hamlib is the software stack you probably want to play with