Does anyone still use ham radio

Do you ever get on 40m and start an interesting conversation or do you just drivel about listening to others? This article puts the hammer on the nail for what us Hams do. When Hams get together for a meeting we all speak the same language to all of us can understand. We are a community of various backgrounds that have one thing in common. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.

Learn how your comment data is processed. An operator at the Plimoth Plantation special station event on November 30, The power supply is on the ground, not pictured, a refurbished piece that he bought used from another ham. Exchanging and selling refurbished or used equipment allows people to enter the hobby at different price points. Operators at the plimoth plantation special station made contacts from a.

Field Day is one way for hams to practice for that possibility. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn. Facial recognition tech plays a key role in law enforcement, but many fear the lack of regulations. Massachusetts senators consider wind farms for climate bill, expect pushback from Trump administration. You may also like. Very nice article Lily. You captured the spirit of ham radio perfectly. Alive and thriving!??? And to encourage newcomers, the FCC no longer requires that hams know Morse code.

There's also a new smartphone app called EchoLink that patches hams into transmission repeaters, devices that receive weak signals and retransmit them with more juice.

With my radio busted, I downloaded EchoLink and found a repeater near my Brooklyn neighborhood. I will, with my new radio. It's good to know I can reach a friendly voice. Hopefully just to chat, but also just in case. Type keyword s to search. Sterling Mann N0SSC is advocating that ham radio shift away from a focus on person-to-person contacts. Photo: Sterling Mann. It's a clickbait title, Mann admits: His blog post focuses on the challenge of balancing support for the dominant, graying ham population while pulling in younger people too.

To capture the interest of young people, he urges that ham radio give up its century-long focus on person-to-person contacts in favor of activities where human to machine, or machine to machine, communication is the focus. These differing interests are manifesting in something of an analog-to-digital technological divide. As Spectrum reported in July , one of the key debates in ham radio is its main function in the future: Is it a social hobby? A utility to deliver data traffic? And who gets to decide?

Those questions have no definitive or immediate answers, but they cut to the core of the future of ham radio. But Grandpa's ham radio set isn't that big a deal compared to today's technology. That doesn't have to be sad. That's normal. Gramps' radios are certainly still around, however. It's a social group, and they won't even talk to you unless you're in the group.

Martin F. Jue K5FLU , founder of well-known radio accessories maker MFJ, is developing new products to accommodate the shift towards digital radio communications in the amateur bands. Photo: Richard Stubbs. But Jue, 76, notes the ham radio space has fragmented significantly beyond rag-chewing and DXing making very long-distance contacts , and he credits the shift to digital. That's where MFJ has moved with its antenna-heavy catalog of products. To that end, last year MFJ unveiled the RigPi Station Server: a control system made up of a Raspberry Pi paired with open-source software that allows operators to control radios remotely from their iPhones or Web browser.

This collective of national amateur radio associations around the globe represents hams' interests to the International Telecommunication Union ITU , a specialized United Nations agency that allocates and manages spectrum. In fact, in China, Indonesia, and Thailand, amateur radio is positively booming, Sumner says. Indonesia is subject to natural disasters as an island nation, spurring interest in emergency communication, and its president is a licensed operator. Trends in Thailand are less clear, Sumner says, but he believes here, too, that a desire to build community response teams is driving curiosity about ham radio.

China is also changing the game in other ways, putting cheap radios on the market. HF radios are changing, too, with the rise of software-defined radio. Nooelec often hears from customers about how they're leveraging the company's products. For example, about members from the group Space Australia to collect data from the Milky Way as a community project.

They are using an SDR and a low-noise amplifier from Nooelec with a homemade horn antenna to detect the radio signal from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas. When you can pull in totally unique perspectives, you get unique applications. We certainly haven't thought of it all yet. The ham universe is affected by the world around it—by culture, by technology, by climate change, by the emergence of a new generation.

And amateur radio enthusiasts are a varied and vibrant community of millions of operators, new and experienced and old and young, into robotics or chatting or contesting or emergency communications, excited or nervous or pessimistic or upbeat about what ham radio will look like decades from now. What we've learned over the hundred-plus years is that there will always be these battles—AM modulation versus single-sideband modulation, whatever it may be.

The technology evolves. And the marketplace will follow where the interests lie. Julianne Pepitone is a freelance technology, science, and business journalist and a frequent contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Julianne Pepitone is a freelance journalist who reports via text, video, and television.

Now a freelancer, she works with an eclectic roster of clients. I agree with many of the comments below. Spectrum, while always in the crosshairs of commercialism, is relatively safe, largely because of global agreements. One rapidly growing area of the hobby not mentioned much in the article is competition, or as hams are now calling it: RadioSport.

This is an area attracting more younger participants. Also, there is extensive global competition to "activate" and "work" special sites, such as summits Summits on the Air , parks Parks on the Air , islands Islands on the Air , and even lighthouses Lighthouse on the Air. There are extensive online database sites that track these contacts. The new technology integrating computers, the internet, and space does make this hobby exciting for an admittedly limited, but significant, audience.

One the digital signal leaves your station it is in the very same electromagnetic form that challenged Tessla and Marconi. This is still a very fun hobby. Plenty of women in Ham Radio. To continue operating during pandemic-related shutdowns, organizations around the world underwent digital transformations.

Examples include using remote technology to collaborate with employees and customers and employing automation to improve customer experiences. This will always be a thread in our hobby, but this thread is merging more and more with digital functions, including the Internet. Digital Mobile Radio has exploded in growth in the past decade. Many amateur radio operators use Internet-connected hotspots to operate from their shack without tying up local repeaters. These Internet-connected repeaters hold value, the biggest is the ability to have two different time slots carrying voice traffic simultaneously on one repeater, whether they have an Internet connection or not.

Ham radio will always be a hobby where those engaged are practicing to help if the need ever arises, whether they participate in public service events with local clubs or not. These often dismissive and vile opinions are not great for the future of amateur radio.

Who cares how we get it done? We must get children interested in the hobby. How do we get young people interested in the digital age where they can communicate anywhere in the world with a tap of a button?

The United States is embarking on the next generation of space exploration. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are making space and engineering cool again, and ham radio could easily ride that wave. Using space exploration as a drive for getting a ham license would be a fantastic entry point for space geeks everywhere.

For young ham radio operators who already have their license, look no further than Remote Ham Radio as a shining example of how to get kids interested in upgrading their license. They offer a program where kids can win free time using world-class remote DX contest stations.

The young hams have to meet the following criteria:. You can exercise while playing ham radio all at the same time.