Amateur radio is not for public use like public park. It is like a public golf course, where have to pay for membership and can only use it for certain things.
Also, amateur radio does not have that much spectrum for the bandwidths we expect for internet. That is what has kept the spectrum from being taken away. Much of the high frequenecy spectrum does have is shared with ISM bands.
You don't have to pay ongoing fees: the initial outlay in the USA is $35 for the license (you have to pass the exam) plus the cost for your equipment (~$70 for the cheaper HAM radios on Amazon), but after that there are no ongoing charges.
I did get my novice license (or whatever the lowest license is called) but never got an old borrowed radio to actually transmit. Then life kind of got in the way.
I keep meaning to get back into it, the sstv and various data networks are really cool. I really dig the analog tech.
In most other EU countries it's once off but the Dutch government wants money for everything.
If you want a "good" HT as an introduction to the hobby, then the Yaesu FT-65R or older FT-60R are both good.
A "do everything" (analog) radio might be the Yaesu VX-6R, which I previously owned. It excels on reception, and is a "tri-band" radio, but the extra band was not useful in my experience.
Just to clarify for people who might be interested-- this is not a perfect analogy in that you don't have to pay to participate in amateur radio. You have to pay a fee to take the license exams but it's a token amount, and you don't have to pay regularly to use any ham services that I know of. Apart from buying a radio, of course.
Not in every country or even always in the US. In Canada there is no government fees for ham radio, if the test giver wants to charge a fee, they can, but most do not.
In the US there are clubs that pay for new hams fees out of a fund for that purpose.
That said, everything you do in amateur radio is in the open. So if you want to talk to your European friend, only the Sun can prevent you, but anyone can listen.
Ham radio is a great hobby. But like all hobbies, you get out of it what you put into it. "Old dudes being boring" for sure are a staple of the ham radio community, but if you come into it with prejudice, you probably won't have the experience you want or make many friends.
What are grumpy old men famous for? That's right, loudly complaining about things other people do and say. So when I see an HN or Reddit thread about ham radio complaining about all the old farts on the air, my mind melts from the overload of irony.
That aside, I don't think I would count on ham radio for subverting censorship but I guess it depends on what you mean. Laws vary by country but in the US and in most countries, you cannot broadcast to the general public, play music, encrypt your transmissions, or use ham radio frequencies for any business purpose.
A ham radio license is permission from your country's government to get on the air for the sake of playing with radio waves and communicating with other hams locally or around the globe without any further agenda. Bouncing signals off the moon is still a fair technical challenge but it has and can be done. But we also bounce signals off the Earth's ionosphere (in the HF bands) and through satellite repeaters, both of which are far easier.
I recommend looking into it and seeing where it takes you. There are plenty of resources online that will help you get started.
Ha, one of the great modern (and unsung) ironies of Amateur Radio can only be seen from today's perspective.
When I first got my amateur license decades ago long before the internet, amateurs would find themselves on the end of disparaging or pejorative jibes from those who weren't radio amateurs (but who—more often than not—were also family members) that went something to the effect 'heaven only knows how they manage to gabber and yabber on about such inconsequential garbage for so long' and other like comments.
Now Amateurs can revenge that wrong with a vengeance beyond comparison. All they have to do is to point to the almost infinite tons of inconsequential garbage on Social Media that far exceedes the sum total of all utterances ever made by Radio Amateurs by many orders of magnitude.
I've often wondered why Amateurs don't rub this fact home to the Great Unwashed with much glee
They probably have, but using a communications medium that only they ever use, so no one else knows or cares.
I've joined ARES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Emergency_Servic... - which coordinates to provide HAM support for emergency communications. If a big earthquake temporarily disables a chunk of communications infrastructure I can hopefully be useful!
About 30 years ago, the people I met who were into ARES seemed a bit weird — sorta a radio version of “preppers”. Maybe I was just in an area not prone to earthquakes…
Hams aren't "motley." They're well-organized. That's why they appear to you as "preppers."
I don't care about being "important". I'm more into the hobby for the technical side.
Ham magazines like QST and 73 published schematics and other how-to articles which amounted to an excellent education in practical electrical engineering. 73 magazine in particular was very technical -- it assumed you had good working knowledge of many common RF and audio circuits. Also, to get a ham license you needed to take a test demonstrating a good level of proficiency. For the lowest rung "novice" license you just had to demonstrate knowledge of Morse code at a slow but reasonable pace. For higher rungs of the achievement ladder like "advanced" or "extra" you needed to pass an exam about electronics as well as receive and send Morse code at a fast clip. The license presented a barrier to entry which didn't exist in CB radio -- which some hams looked down upon as a cesspool of unwashed, technically illiterate bozos.
My exposure to ham radio really started in the 1970s since my dad had been a ham playing with homebuilt radios since he was a kid in the 1930s. In the '70s the hobby was trifurcating. On one hand were the hard-core guys who built their own rigs, sometimes for the challenging high-frequency bands. Some also participated in designing and launching a ham-radio satellite via the ARRL. Early forms of digital encoding over radio were also big. Those guys were the real engineering types, and I admired them. On the other hand, commercial outfits were selling ready-to-use radios ... no engineering skills needed. In the middle were guys assembling and using stuff from Heathkit -- a great way to learn about electronics.
The ham hobby has been fading away for many years. I think the thrill of building a radio and then talking to somebody on a different continent with it has diminished in the face of cheap international calling, cell phones, Skype, etc. The only thing left for hams to do these days involves disaster relief -- and the remaining ham mag QST plays up that theme (or at least did the last time I looked). Meanwhile, the young nerds who used to take up ham radio now occupy themselves with various open-source software projects. I suppose that's natural.
> For higher rungs of the achievement ladder like "advanced" or "extra" you needed to pass an exam about electronics as well as receive and send Morse code at a fast clip.
The General license (which I got) required 13 wpm. I think I read somewhere that they still broadcast Morse code practice every night.
The Extra was 20 wpm. I don't remember "Advanced."
There is apparently still a thriving CW community, and some of them use auto-keying now, so you don't need the manual dexterity any more.
The point is that the ham radio hobby is very intertwined with the electrical engineering profession. It's very technical ... not just a bunch of guys talking to each other over the radio (although it's that too).
The Novice test was something else. 20 questions. 5 WPM code. I was thrilled when it came in the mail. 40 Meter CW, look out.
Depends on the band, for VHF, UHF and higher bands a country may make different decisions on what is not permitted. Canada has allowed encryption with published keys to be used for repeater access control in the past.
Huh, perhaps where you are but I've never heard any of note. AR is pretty clean in that respect, self-policing works very well.
PS: Sorry about that damn typo, I must kill autocorrect.
It's a great hobby if you are in it for the actual tech itself. Check out e.g. https://pysdr.org/ for a nice introduction. There is https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ to get you started and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio for more advanced stuff.
You don't need a license to listen!
Also, people are doing some crazy stuff: https://pietern.github.io/goestools/guides/minimal_receiver....
I disagree, it's much more that, far too much to discuss here. A starting point would be to check the ARRL and RSGB handbooks which provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of AR. (Google each for more info.)
There are many more specialist books if you want even more in-depth information.
[1] ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications 100th Edition Six-Volume Set:
https://home.arrl.org/action/Store/Product-Details/productId...
Old guys? Tube radios? You got my attention.
Almost everything is now well beyond economic repair. It's all about emotions and nostalgia for almost all of the gear.
I no longer jump when something smokes or pops, and I know it's usually a good sign, as it helps you figure out where the trouble is. ;-)
I've learned to hate Silver Mica capacitors, and came up with a technique to help track down the noisy ones. (Take out all of the tubes, leave B+ on... measure the voltage across all the resistors, most of them will read 0 volts, if you do get a voltage, check the schematic and see if it's reasonable, if not... there's current flowing to a bad silver-mica cap through it. It really cut down on the time to find issues)
Collins 30S1 amplifiers.... those will always command fear and extreme caution. 3000 volts at a solid Amp will easily burn off limbs, and it will hurt like hell as you watch it happen to you. Or... it'll just kill you, and burn your corpse.
That's the best type of faultfinding, much faster and less tedious than tracking down subtle faults. Locating the source of burning smells and touching resistors to detect excessive heat work well too.
Never had much problem with silver micas, paper and electrolytics are usually much more troublesome.
Re the Collins, I'm very glad I started with high voltage stuff, if it had been the other way around and I'd started with semiconductors I'd likely have electrocuted myself, getting used to low voltage first wouldn't have been a good idea. As it was I was bitten several times, once so badly that I was essentially paralyzed for quite some minutes. That was 850V.
Don't get me wrong, I am fascinated by tube computers. Yet that has more to do with being interested in modern computers and having a desire to learn about how we got to where we are today. Without that interest in the contemporary, the historic would have little relevance to me.
It's somewhat unfortunate (but understandable) that the rep ham radio gets is based on a few old dudes talking on HF. Whereas the reality is that the most popular mode in ham radio by far is digital, not voice (namely FT8).
Now, do you want a hobby that lets you explore the physics of antennas, how our atmosphere actually works, build your own experimental low power QRP rig just to see how far you can throw a CW(Morse) signal with a tiny bit of juice, or maybe help set up comms for local events or emergencies? Yes, ham radio is that hobby.
Callsigns are generally spelled using the nato Alphabet though.
However people do have local chats and ragchews in the local language. It's more the contests that are English only (but that doesn't go any further than "59 good copy. Next."). Which is why I hate contesting, I find It so boring that nobody has time to speak. I have no drive to be a "winner" so I never care about the number of contacts.
In fact most people in the ham demographic here would speak very limited English anyway due to not learning it at school in their days.
Doesn’t help that the HAM community will more than happily snitch on you if you goof around too much, and licences mean your full dox are publicly searchable (at least in America).
Also, a valid address for your license can be a PO Box if you care about your personal details being online.
Is Ham that hobby? I am genuinely asking. A few days ago a thread here had lots of people agreeing it was mostly old dudes being boring. But I like the idea that maybe I (in Europe) can talk to my friend (in the US) by bouncing radio waves off the moon, or some such, and not relying on intermediaries.