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Anybody here interested in ham/amateur radio?
I was wondering if there's anybody here who's interested in ham/amateur radio. I'm somewhat interested in it myself, and am planning on getting a BaoFeng BF-F8HP soon as my first radio, as well as a Tech (or maybe even General) license.
My interest in ham radio is mainly with AMPRNet. Getting a publicly routable server on 44.0.0.0/8 is on my bucket list.
Yeah, that would be pretty neat.
I am very interested in ham, yes. My interest in amateur radio on the other hand is primarily based on my constant amazement at the level of legal control there is on radio bandwidths globally, how strict the governing bodies tend to be against infractions, and how little general knowledge there is on that - leading to people doing things like making homemade jammers for their school or office and facing prison time.
Making signal jammers isn't all that trivial and you must understand the idea of radio waves and interference, at least on a basic level. I'd have a hard time believing people didn't know what they were getting into if they were actually building them.
GPS jammers, though (aka the little magic box you can buy on the internet to stop tracking systems installed in vehicles, usually by employers), don't require much in the way of understanding and can have pretty bad consequences such as interfering with aircraft, which is a big no-no. Those people absolutely deserve the fines and/or jail time they get.
How do they interfere with aircraft unless they're taken on the aircraft?
GPS jammers, like any radio jammer work by emitting radio waves at the same frequency as they are trying to block. Because GPS satellites are very far away (they orbit at approximately 12,500mi/20,000km high), the signal strength when they reach earth is very, very low. So, even a relatively low powered transmitter like a jammer can interfere with signals quite effectively. The difference in the height of a flying aircraft (up to maybe 6mi/10km or so) is almost irrelevant when compared to the distance the GPS satellite signals come from.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes much more sense and makes them seem a lot more dangerous than I first thought they'd be.
I can't imagine this guy's "jammer" to block his employer's tracking device interfered with aircraft.
http://bgr.com/2017/11/30/gps-block-chip-bag-australia/
Maybe @Tardigrade was thinking of that.
Ham and amateur radio are the same thing, I thought? You seem to be speaking of them as if they are two different subjects.
Amateur radio is not nearly as tasty :-)
I got my license 15+ years ago, and I've kept it renewed, but I haven't really done much with it. I'll occasionally pop into a local repeater meet, but that's about it anymore.
Been a licensed amateur for about fifteen years, though I don't make use of it much anymore. Just a Technician license. The 2M repeaters are full of crazy old dudes who've all known each other for decades and can ragchew for hours about nothing.
Be warned a lot of the older hams really hate on the Chinese HTs. If you do get one, get a lapel speaker/mic; the audio quality when you transmit is substantially better than with most of the built-in mics. Also, the battery packs are pretty short-lived, both in terms of power-on time and just... lifespan. I've had a Baofend and a FDC, and both seem to have Ni-Cad packs (!) that don't hold a charge after ten to twelve months. :/
What's the deal about a Ni-Cad pack? And a lapel speaker/mic is the sort you plug into it and hold that is both a speaker and mic, right?
Yeah, it's a little box on a cord, with a speaker and a microphone and a button on the side. Like what most law enforcement in the US use. There are two or three common standards for the connectors, the usual one being "Yaesu-style" or "Yaesu compatible".
Nickel-cadmium batteries are cheap, old technology. They don't hold a charge very long compared to more modern battery types, and they have a pretty short lifespan in terms of the number of times they can be recharged. It's not a huge deal, but expect to have to replace the battery quite regularly. To be fair, they're only like $10-15, usually. You get what you pay for.
Alright. The one I was looking at has a Li-ion battery, which I know is somewhat standard for rechargables (not just in ham).
Never done anything with it but I'd love to try it out as a hobby someday!
Same here. I'm very intrigued by it, but probably not enough to find time for it.
For me it's the sort of thing I'll put on a list to check out for when I'm retired.
Yes! I'm still pretty new to the hobby and life has gotten in the way of it lately but I've had my tech for a little more than a year now. It's a really fun hobby with a really cool community around it. I had a Baofeng as my first radio, it does the job pretty well, especially for the price.
On the one hand I find the technology fascinating and would love to dive into the specifics, but on the other I'm pretty anti-social and don't think I'd really enjoy talking to other people for any significant amount of time.
How is the user base? I've always kind of wanted to get into it, but every time I look at gear I remember back about five years ago when I drove a truck and had a CB. It was nothing but men with almost comically overblown southern accents vomiting irrational Obama hate at the clouds. Does amateur radio attract the same type, or is CB generally just more cancerous because of its low barrier to entry and rare consequences?
It depends on where you are, and what bands/modes you're on. The overall demographic skews very heavily old white guys, though the politics probably vary regionally, and by band. A lot of the digital modes on VHF/UHF tend to attract (comparatively) younger people of a technical inclination, whereas it seems like the deeper into the HF bands you go, the older and weirder everyone gets. The stuff in between can be a crapshoot, especially the higher bands that open up with a General license. Like, where I am, there's not much local activity on 20M... except a local militia who all studied together, got licensed, and have a daily "net" to check in with one another. Elsewhere I know local chapters of groups like Zombie Squad have done similar things, and are perhaps slightly less cringeworthy.
CB is cancerous because of the low barrier to entry and the mobile, anonymous user base. Some bubba said something uncouth about your mother? He'll be out of range in five minutes and you'll probably never hear from him again.
I have no idea, because I've actually not got a radio myself yet.