So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency? Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying for it.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license. But it’s easier to use when you’ve had the practice and aren’t fumbling around learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better, when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the building management team, which politely informed every corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they would be participating.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but
the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather have a cheap Baofeng.
This is the correct answer. I have my license and help with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool, but the ham radio community has been around for a century, is far better organized and entrenched with various services, etc. There is far more trust and reliability there.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Homeland Security tries to get local first responders to join the SHARES emergency radio network.[1] This is 5 HF channels at 5 MHz, and some more around 15 MHz. They test on Wednesdays around noon. Transmission is voice or PACTOR. It's ham-type technology for
government emergency response.
Although many local first responders are not on this net, the USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from a large disaster area.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map to find out where they are.
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development. ... What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days?
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency? Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying for it.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license. But it’s easier to use when you’ve had the practice and aren’t fumbling around learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better, when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the building management team, which politely informed every corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they would be participating.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
There's a galactic difference between just reading about it and actually experiencing it even just once.
Essentially the difference between being book smart vs. street wise.
Meshtastic has actual issues with bandwidth running out on the LoRa when there are too many people using it in a small area.
It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather have a cheap Baofeng.
This is the correct answer. I have my license and help with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool, but the ham radio community has been around for a century, is far better organized and entrenched with various services, etc. There is far more trust and reliability there.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Homeland Security tries to get local first responders to join the SHARES emergency radio network.[1] This is 5 HF channels at 5 MHz, and some more around 15 MHz. They test on Wednesdays around noon. Transmission is voice or PACTOR. It's ham-type technology for government emergency response.
Although many local first responders are not on this net, the USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from a large disaster area.
[1] https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/programs/shared-resourc...
[2] https://ema.arrl.org/wp-content/uploads/files/SHARES_Spectru...
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map to find out where they are.
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
N3RTW
I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
It’s the only time I’ve used my General class privileges.
Check out https://github.com/drowe67/radae. David Rowe has been working on a really neat new digital mode for audio transmission over HF channels, using a pretrained autoencoder. It's currently getting integrated into the freeDV gui in this branch https://github.com/drowe67/freedv-gui/tree/ms-rade-integ
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development. ... What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days?
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
APRS is cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...
https://aprs.fi/ is a site that displays a bunch of devices online.
Some people have APRS radios in their cars so they can see exactly where it is for example.
You can find a selection of things you can do with ham radio in this blog post: https://dk1mi.radio/a-declaration-of-love-to-amateur-radio/
With packet radio you can transmit digitally, and basically have IRC via radio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
Heh, I just finished an AuxComm training and two IMS (Ontario’s version of ICS) courses last week. Great timing.
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