Ham Radio / Off-grid communication

888Flux said:
Nope, not retarded. Sometimes depending on your audio and rig setup this will happen. I just need to find a proper way to implement handling this.
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OK thanks, I was worried that I broke something while playing with the settings.

HairyBadger said:
What is HAM/Amateur , frequencies, basic equipment etc?
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OP is a very good place to start. Don't hesitate if you have any specific questions, don't hesitate. I'll try:

Portions of the electromagnetic spectrum ("bands") are reserved to certain users and purposes. For instance, aircraft (https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Aircraft), commercial FM broadcast, military...

Some of these portions are reserved for amateur/ham radio. Full list here

Amateur radio is a technical hobby focused on non-commercial experimentation on these portions, which means you can contact other hams all around the world using voice, morse, data, images... all this without using internet or cellular network.

To transmit on these frequencies, you must take an exam on basics of radio transmissions such as antennas, electronics, ... the goal is to give you the theory to be able to understand and experiment effectively.

The license specifics will depend a lot of your country of residence.

It's an extremely diverse hobby. Some hams join civil protection programs for emergency communications, other are chasing DX (distant entities) or rare countries and some others focus on theory or electronics and rarely pick up a microphone.

As for the equipment, the most basic setup is a transceiver (transmitter + receiver) + antenna. You can have a 2m+70cm (2 ham radio bands) HT (handheld transceiver) on the cheap (such as the Quansheng UV-K5 for like 20$)

I'd suggest you to start for free, just by listening through a Web-SDR (open receiver via Internet), such as the excellent one at the University of Twente.

You can listen to Russian number stations or ham communications in the bands mentionned above.
 
Null said:
So do you just scan through it out of boredom every so often or what? Do you meet local boomers on it?
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Yes, of course.

You meet a lot of annoying autists, but also lots of retired engineers who actually know what the fuck is going on and you can learn good shit from them.
 
Null said:
So do you just scan through it out of boredom every so often or what? Do you meet local boomers on it?
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There's a lot more to Ham radio than people give it credit for.

While talking to boomers certainly is one aspect, Ham radio is a hobby driven by tinkering and innovation. I think when you really get into it it's the closest thing to IRL magic.

You can build an antenna out of nothing more than copper speaker wire to carry your voice across a charged layer of particles in the ionosphere and get heard all the way across the world when there are right band conditions

There are projects that range from trying to fit audible human voice in under 300 bits using machine learning to building DIY radios that use Arduino microcontrollers

You can bounce signals off the moon or send pictures using SSTV or even go and invent and design your own data mode and run a packet radio BBS.

There are thousands of different antenna designs and setups. A common thing in the hobby is to do Parks on the Air where you go portable and try to see how many QSOs (contacts with other Hams) you can get deploying from a park or even something like the top of a mountain

It's a great way to get practice or learn the fundamentals of electronics too.
 
BIG BILL HELL'S said:
What I continue to find astonishing is that I'll turn on 7200 around 8 P.M. Central Time and it will be completely quiet. I guess the nursing homes are enforcing curfew or something.
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I think FCC put out lots of letters recently because I haven't had much fun listening 7200 for a while. Just that CW and camera SSTV guy that drives me nuts.
 
Null said:
So do you just scan through it out of boredom every so often or what? Do you meet local boomers on it?
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Voice on HF is the traditional ham hangout but I prefer digital modes on there, things like FT8 you can bounce a text message across continents.
The various local “mesh network” projects are interesting to play with as well.

It’s all practically irrelevant while we have ubiquitous internet and cell phones, so most people using it caught the bug before those things took over, but there is a new generation of nerds and preppers doing cool stuff.
 
I'm going to be re-working the OP with a lot more info, and some of the links I noticed I had were dead. If anyone has anything they would like to see added please lmk!
 
888Flux said:
I'm going to be re-working the OP with a lot more info, and some of the links I noticed I had were dead. If anyone has anything they would like to see added please lmk!
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I was reading the OP just a few hours ago and was thinking about that. Any resources and guides on a mobile innawoods setup would be cool. Max larp potential.
 
I still used Patrick Tomlinson's retarded profile pic as me SSTV test image.

To expand on day to day utility, I use the APRS system to collect weather station data so I can stay ten minutes ahead if radar apps and forecast. Helps me collect more industrial runoff for work before the runoff is too clean to be a meaningful sample.

APRS stand for Automatic Package Reporting System, so radios automatically send out data packages that get relayed between other radios also broadcasting data packages. The boomers figured out a way to automate talking about the weather and where they're driving to, but there's utility at least

You can also check your email with things like Winlink. As a bonus, if you do parks on the air, you get to erect scary looking metal spires with wires radiating out from them in your local park so you can talk to boomers and brag about being outside and ambulatory.
 
WanderingFarmer said:
I still used Patrick Tomlinson's retarded profile pic as me SSTV test image.

To expand on day to day utility, I use the APRS system to collect weather station data so I can stay ten minutes ahead if radar apps and forecast. Helps me collect more industrial runoff for work before the runoff is too clean to be a meaningful sample.

APRS stand for Automatic Package Reporting System, so radios automatically send out data packages that get relayed between other radios also broadcasting data packages. The boomers figured out a way to automate talking about the weather and where they're driving to, but there's utility at least

You can also check your email with things like Winlink. As a bonus, if you do parks on the air, you get to erect scary looking metal spires with wires radiating out from them in your local park so you can talk to boomers and brag about being outside and ambulatory.
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No stalker, you didn't.

Also, don't know if meshtastic is thread relevant, put I've noticed a lot more units going live in the large city I live in. I can send/receive messages from the other side of the city, though the connections between residential clusters still seem a little thin, imo.

I think we're getting very close to the point where people will be able to communicate anyplace and anytime within a large metropolitan, and large scale adoption by normies will become a lot more realistic. Some of them seem vaguely aware of it already, specifically because of bitchat and the fact it's been used in protests. I never enjoy my hobbies going mainstream, but I also despise censorship regimes, and I feel like this will complicate government efforts immensely.
 
What’s the deal with Bitchat anyway? I’ve checked it the last few times I’ve been through major cities and airports, there’s never anyone “nearby”, and only once have I seen a geo message.
Has anyone seen it in use?
 
Oxyjen said:
What’s the deal with Bitchat anyway? I’ve checked it the last few times I’ve been through major cities and airports, there’s never anyone “nearby”, and only once have I seen a geo message.
Has anyone seen it in use?
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I’ve never had a ping and I live in a city with a really big Meshtastic network, so there’s plenty of autists about.
 
Oxyjen said:
What’s the deal with Bitchat anyway? I’ve checked it the last few times I’ve been through major cities and airports, there’s never anyone “nearby”, and only once have I seen a geo message.
Has anyone seen it in use?
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Vibe-coded clout project from Jack Dorsey. Nothing wrong with a little bit of slopcoding but for something that is security critical you can't fly blind like that. On day one it had critical security vulnerabilities.

It's nothing new either. Briar can do everything Bitchat can do and has been around much longer (BLE peer to peer messaging). For LoRa, Meshtastic and Reticulum are what you are looking for.

Reticulum now has an Android client called Columba with built in BLE interface support. You could theoretically have a network topology that looks like:
BLE devices -> LoRa -> Ham radio -> BLE devices
 
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