Hey /out/,anyone here into ham radio? looking to get into the hobby. share your experiences, tips and tricks.
>>2835265/diy/ has regular ham threads>>>/diy/2931635
>>2835265experiences>be me>work as a RF development engineer>develop and maintain parts of critical infrastructure also consult projects>never had anything to do with HAM people>boss is very verbal about his distain for HAM people, neves lets an opportunity to ridicule them pass(the guy has several valid points)>glad I have no affiliation>also equally uninterested as ever
>>2835265I wanted some radios for outdoor use, ended up getting some GMRS radios. As it is they can reach about a mile and a half through thick trees, but I've been meaning to get some longer antennas. There is a lot that goes into HAM, including equipment, learning curve, and licensing. As well as interacting with the retarded boomers who use it as facebook to "contact" people, and talk to others. If your into that then HAM is your best bet, but if you are just looking for outdoor comms with your group GMRS is much simpler. And if you choose to actually get a license, GMRS licenses are only 35 for your whole family. But that creates a codename that you have to use on air that is in a public database and can be used to look up your full name and address with ease, and the same is true with HAM licenses. But as far as I know the FCC doesn't care as long as you are not being a nuisance on proper channels, and not using non armature channels. There are no recorded cases of them actually prosecuting anyone for anything like that. The only ones who care are the boomers who will loose their minds if they find you aren't using your codename on air.>>2835267Of all the real world hobbies, you hear the worst things about HAM, by a decent margin. It seems to have the largest concentration of boomers in any hobby.
>>2835266ah, thanks, did not know!i am looking to get a ham license, already started learning the basics in my country.
>>2835279>boomersidkI think what my boss was on about most of the time was cargo cultists. Those guys would follow some guide online to construct all sorts of RF hardware while lacking fundamental understanding. I guess the disdain then starts when those guys are too stupid to understand what they are doing, just immitating what someone else presented and ending up constructing something that leaks alot of power in the spectrum that people have a lot of demand for and thus is very finely divided and licensed by lawmakers. And then you have some fuckwit who has zero brain but thanks to modern society enough money for components so that he can build effectively a broadband jammer and be 'YOOOLOOO' across the spectrum.Meanwhile that guy employ a team of engineers to be in the lab for months on end verifying his products output power, spectrally, looks like a bar graph. - 150dBm to the sides, square corner, 40 dBm on flat top, square corner down to - 150 again.I think that was the core of the animosity. Also they are hopeless nerds aren't they? I mean how does a normal person who doesn't even worm in RF go that route and develop that interest out of all things? Neyt thing they even have a sort of culture and rules and they love to follow those and fit in there like absolutely deluded NPCs.Idk man.
>>2835267>>2835399Canadian or European?
>>2835265you need a licence and training, this isn't whatsapp
>>2835265Used to be into it a few years ago and had an HF rig, ended up selling it because I needed the money, basically broke even, HF stuff is very expensive. It was fun listening to see what's out there, it's a like a hidden world.
>>2835399>I mean how does a normal person who doesn't even worm in RFAt least in the US there is a significant amount of preppers and gun owners that have already or are starting to get into radios. Most of those guys don't want to get any type of licensing, and want to use aes256 encryption on all transmissions. Not wanting to be on a federal list and the prolific use of encryption seems to cause a lot of contention between the two groups. That's where most of the disdain for HAMs I heard comes from. I hadn't heard of the cargo cult aspect.
>>2835265Parks on the Air (POTA) is pretty cool. Made up points scheme for setting up and 'activating' a state park or similar. You can practice setting up in other than optimal conditions, potentially combined with backpacking if you want. Also, you don't necessarily have to have a deep conversation with people, just a short exchange of callsign and park number, in case you're worried about another rousing tale about gout on the airwaves. I have a tx500 for more rugged lightweight 10W HF and a yaesu Ft-891 in an armoloq case for 100W. I have configured and tested encryption on my anytone 878 and 578 but don't use it much. Really looking forward to trying to do more POTA this fall when the weather is nicer and in the future when my boys get a little older. There are very few summits high enough near me, otherwise Summits on the air (SOTA) would be fun too.
>>2835279>Of all the real world hobbies, you hear the worst things about HAM, by a decent margin. It seems to have the largest concentration of boomers in any hobby.>mfw my boomer dad tells me its time to move his DIY 30 meter antenna up and down again once all sunday every 2 weeks.I wanna die.
>>2835265have fun talking to old people about the weather
>>2835265A FRS radio is actually fine for reaching people outside of yelling distance, JUST SO LONG AS, you research and buy a FRS radio that actually puts out the FULL 2 WATTS as allowed by the FCC.Radio nerds will talk shit about FRS radios because of them being weak and low quality and "hurr hurr I paid the gubberment for a GMRS permission slip so I can use 5 watts instead of two watts" but for talking to people around you but outside of shouting distance, a 2 watt FRS radio is fine.The only actual issue is that there are shitloads of crap FRS radios you can buy that only output 0.2 watts but then have a 'high power mode' which is just 0.5 watts. And the box doesn't mention it at all. Plus the antenna is made of shit metal that can't receive good either.I regularly carry a Motorola Talk about 478 on every mountain hike and island hike and river trip. I've been able to talk to other groups or friends at base camp or friends up river just fine. Whatever metal the antenna is made out of is FANTASTIC because it can receive far off signals that it really should not be able to. If I put it in my window on scan mode I can hear GMRS guys on repeaters talking all the time, and I frequently hear a large daycare and construction workers talking all around me. It also has a FM radio and NOAA radio so it's nearly perfect. In Maine during snowstorms and floods and power outages, it's been normal since 1998 for people people in neighborhoods to all just hop on channel 3 to start checking on each other. People driving around on sleds would also use FRS radios on channel 3.Everybody loves to shit on FRS but if you're looking to talk to people around you then it's really just fine. But ONLY if you buy a FRS radio that outputs the full 2 watts of power. If you buy a shitty one then yes you will have a shitty experience. I think my Motorola Talkabout 478 is great but the best FRS on the market is the Rocky Talky Mountain Radio.
>>2835265'ou ga'a 'oisense fer tha'?
>>2836067>I hadn't heard of the cargo cult aspect.Curiously I dont see how anything you described would inspire distain. At the same time I must say, the odd random encounter with traces of amateur radios operates on the internet I had clearly showed where the cargo cultism stems from:Usually someone has shown a design for something that is bad to begin with and that is the followed by several guys immitating without understanding what and why they are doing. Unsurprisingly many then end up with something worse. At the same time they manage to delude themselves into believing they had related education by parroting 'big word'. Often it is quite comical.My job as a development engineer often had the team wittness such things because at some level, technicians, distributors etc. HAM and jobs were peripheral enough to attract basically this interest group. And for the sake of selling stuff you just had to put on a smile and nod while internally screaming when the guy explained to you how things are.
>>2836104Earlier this year on twitter, a boomer HAM operator was lamenting about how he wanted to kick in peoples doors with a rifle for not having a license and for using encryption. HAMs also participate in fox hunts to try and find unlicensed operators so they can be reported to the FCC, which wont do anything about it anyways. The boomer HAMS seem to get pissy because no one wants to follow the licensing and encryption rules. >while internally screamingkek. Unless the feds go after people who make those shitty radios for essentially creating jammers, it seems like the issue is at an impasse, and unless the diy culture changes and people have the desire to get more knowledge, I guess they will likely stay the same. I keep hearing about a CB guy on the west coast that jams channel 19 with significant spillover into other channels for several states with his constant babble, and as far as I heard nothing was ever done about it.
>>2836128>A HAM has disdain for other HAMs for crrtsin reasons.That is not the same as professional developers and users having an issue that is more related to an idea of academia, education and the scientific method than anything else. Also I should point out users of the bands I and the team were working with are absolutely safe from interference. That's partly due to the air interface protocol being highly interference resistant, you could recknstruct the datastream from almost fuckall and this is also from how I was told authorities would handle any unlicensed Tx on the band. We as licensed developer and manufaturer always had to jump through alot of hoops and red tape if we wanted to test anything outside a shield. Heard many stories back then how it's not a joke getting a visit of that kind.>impasseI am. just relaying the sentiment of others. I couldnt care less altho I must admit it is a sorry state for a human bejng to obviously have a passion about something (I to this day hate RF dev) to be contempt with that little understanding and simultaneously experience feelings of grandure and success.Yeah it will remain that way.>jams commercial radio broadcastGo jam TETRA or TETRAPOL in europe, P25 and that equivalent DMR thing... forgot the name, over there and see what happens.They will not discount the possibility that youre trying something but will probably be also inclined to. make you an example.Funny btw: The outside observer can tell by the behaviour of TETRA if there is activity. Not only can you tell a traffic channel from others without much effort but power saving features usually make bas stations sleeping obvious. Go figure what to do with that.
Idunno i met some ham radio dudes out on public land i work on and they all were very nice. They were participating in some contest for the number of contacts over the day or something. They were all kinda weird boomers but thats most of the people where i live anyway. One of them offered me some of his wife's homemade cookies.
Getting a HAM license is always a back and forth for me, I think the idea of it is great per se but I'm not very interested in DXing or spending a huge ton of money on equipment. But I definitely want to get a little portable world receiver sooner or later for hiking/travelling and at home, just out of curiosity what I could hear with it. Hope there are enough shortwave stations left to hear something at all or if I'll even be able to hear far away ones with the basic antenna that they have.
>>2838041You don't need a license for a receiver, even when I had a license I did more listening than talking anyway, and an HF rig costs a fortune.
>>2835265You can transmit on HAM frequencies without a license and you wont get in trouble but you may get some old boomers to drive by your house and try and intimidate you if you're annoying and do it a lot.If you try to jam any frequencies at all or transmit on law enforcement/emergency/business etc channels you will absolutely get in trouble.Get a cable and download chirp to program your radio, search youtube for baofeng and enjoy the 50 trillion videos that will walk you step by step through literally anything you could ever want to do.
