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Ham and Software - Communities of Creativity?
lgreco asks: "I've been thinking about the similarities between the community of early ham radio operators and software developers. Both communities produced a lot of useful technologies that found applications beyond the scope of a 'just a hobby'.
Ham radio operators built their own equipment and experimented with modulation and propagation techniques. The results of their efforts today are used in a variety of radio communication applications, from cell phones to marine radios.
Similarly, hackers developed concepts of computing that are now universally accepted tools of productivity. Both communities share an enthusiasm for technical creativity and up until recently there was even some overlap between the two groups. Are there any interesting stories about the creativity of either groups (that relate to the other group perhaps) that should be recorded and documented?"
There's an NPR episode of Talk of the Nation entitled "Letters and Ham Radio Lessons". From the website: "...ham radio teacher Rick Stern joins Neal Conan with tips on teaching your kids about ham radio."
There is also this episode of TOTN that covers the topic, featuring the authors of the book Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio.
And in February of this year, All Things Considered ran a piece on the pending approval of a Morse code "at" symbol so that operators could tell others their email addresses. How's that for radio and the internet meeting in the middle?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
There is still a ton of overlap - most hams I know are interested in both 'hobbies'. I like the comparison though - I think there will always be a group of people who love technology for it's own sake and will be very innovative simply because they're not out just to make a buck.
Back in the McHenry, Ill, area, there's a closed repeater that, to unlock, you need to send a series of tones at the start of each transmission. It's run by a club whose "dues" go mainly into one guy's pocket, effectively making this system not legal (but hey, who really cares about legal, as long as he gets rich?).
:)
Anyways, one local ham used to be part of that clique, until he managed to cheese off the repeater owner. He wanted to be able to use the system again.
I built a gadget that used one of the cool digital recorder chips you can get from Radio Shack. We digitally recorded the signal on the input frequency of the repeater, then sent these tones when the mic was keyed up.
Worked amazingly well, until the guy dropped the mic and the wire broke loose. Wheee, what fun his sudden re-appearance on the system caused!
OK, so it's not really software hacking, more of a hardware hack with some social engineering thrown in too, but hey, doing it was quite a blast. MUCH more amusing than Field Day.
de N9JZW
Lemon curry?
My father has been a HAM for nearly forty years. Growing up I always enjoyed going to hamfest and other events with him. Even in the short time I experienced the ham culture (aprox 1980-1990), I noticed a trend towards PCs becoming frequent topics of discussion and PC gear being swapped at swapfests as much as radio equipment. Probably the best integration of the two worlds that I experienced was packet radio. I'm sure there are many who know more about the system than I do. I remember being fascinated that you could log in to a packet radio bulletin board and exchange messages with people from all over the world. In those days a local dialup PC based BBS would typically only have members from the surrounding area. Maybe someone can post more info on Packet radio?
-Lod
Growing up I had this neighbor who was a stereo nut, and had been building his own speakers since the 60's. I learned about going to radio shack and soldering things together. I learned a little about fixing stereos. I learned lots about transmission of sound through the air.
Unfortunately, as a youg internet generation geek (I'm 21), I look around at geekly peers my age, and see very few people who know how to solder.
I fear that the age of computer geeks going and buying the parts from Radio Shack and building stuff might be passing. Radio Shack has noticed this too, and stores with a good parts selection are getting harder to find.
I knew a person back several years ago who was heavily into Ham Radio. He built some of his own equipment and hoarded heaps of "useful" parts that were never used, but were considered "handy" to have "just in case". He spent all of his free time either chatting to people all over the world from inside his darkened radio shack or planning how he was going to do it. And when away from home (on the road to the local shops or on vacation around the world) he took portable equipment so that he would always be connected, which was to the annoyance of those around him.
.. he was my father.
.. but yes I am dealing with it)
.. from scratch .. and coded up their own systems by the bootstraps.
As a result he of this obsession he never communicated well with his family, instead choosing to share freely with his on-air mates. Resulting in a well of negative energy in his own home.
Yep I knew him
(Yes I am bitter about that
BTW I also remember when people built their own computers
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Back in university ('81), hanging around VE2CUA was the best place to catch the overlap between the hams and hackers--especially packet radio since a number of the pioneers (VE2PY) hung out there from time to time. What I learned about data packets came in quite useful later. (And watching "live" Slow Scan TV Voyager pictures from Saturn via JPL was pretty cool pre-Internet.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Actually no. Federal/International law has a VERY strict regulation on spamming on HAM radio. Generally any type of radio transmission (a general agreement between nations) requires that the radio operators to state his/her callsign at a time interval (forgot if it was every 15 minutes or 30 minutes). So if someone spams, you can either track him down easy using his callsign. Or if he's not using one or fake another callsign, he could get into a shitload of trouble with the FCC. And tracking down someone abusing radio is easy once you got two or more people.
The reason that the government crack down on this is because HAM radio is considered as an emergency communication channel. A very good example is that on 9/11, all communications from NYC (internet, cellphone, phone, and etc) failed because of over-congestion or physical destruction to the infrastructure, except for HAM radio, which helped coordinate the rescue effort and aides from other states.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Still waking up here, sorry. Anyhow, I forgot to mention that each dues-paying member of the repeater cabal had their own series of tones that identified them. The "social engineering" came from recording several different tone IDs, culminating with the repeater owner himself. Twas great fun as the owner tried to figure out a way that he and his clique could keep their private toy free of the riffraff *WEG*
:)
Ahh, the joys of using in-band signaling
Lemon curry?
And getting your feet wet with radio/computers doesn't even require a licence. A scanner, sound card and some software will let you play with neat digital stuff like ACARS Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, which lets you do stuff like a real-time map display of airplanes near you. other link. (Perhaps not as spiff as this one.) There's other telemetery besides position and speed, so it could make a cool wall display--with no bandwidth suck.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
One of the reasons for Elecraft's success is its approach to development: It's strikingly similiar to Open Source Software development. Users of Elecraft are more than just customers, they are part of a community whose input is valued and taken into consideration for the improvement of future gear.
The resulting transceiver is a superb piece of equipment, surprisingly devoid of useless bells and whistles, shiny knobs and impractical handling that have become to characteristic of all the modern Japanese transceivers.
A modern FT1000MP is like Windows XP, including the lack of proper documentation and source code, whereas the K2 is just like Linux: transparent, performant and it comes with the source code.
As a morse code buff I will definitely get a K2 should my old TS930 decide to quit one day.
DF5JT
...because it's an analog technology, kinda like DSL on steroids...
Because it's hooked to high voltage power lines which attract lightning (not really, but they sure seem to).
Because it's expensive and dangerous to keep running.
Because it's owned by a company whose main business is not communications.
Because, if it radiates, it's susceptible to interference, too.
Given a choice, consumers won't take it unless it's better and cheaper than other alternatives, and it's already being dropped in Canada, UK and Europe, because it didn't live up to the promises.
And yes, I, too, feel that it was a sweetheart deal at the FCC, just like our loss of 220.
And it can't happen too soon.
(DSL is going away in my town. Verizon's running fiber to the premises. Let's hope BPL goes the same way as DSL)
My grandfather was "radio hacking" in the 1920s. He told a funny story where he "accidentally" took out a commercial transmission while playing with some homemade hardware as a teen. Sounds a little like website defacing to me, but 80 years before the computer kids were doing it. His hobby grew to the point where he was hired as the communications engineer for a huge mining and resources company that had to manage communication lines right into the Arctic. By 1937 he had developed a portable voice radio that could be carried and used in bush camps by operators who didn't know morse code - arguably the first walkie-talkie. Sounds a little like the early PCs to me, but 40 years before the computer kids were doing it. His employer donated his services to the war effort in 1939, and he modified the walkie talkie into a military tool that filtered out battle noises and had signal scrambling to prevent eavesdropping. Sounds like error correcting, encrypted communications to me, but 50 years before the computer kids were doing it.
So yeah, there are similarities, but the hams were there way before we were. Most of the hams who pioneered the field are now dead and gone, whereas most of the computer pioneers are alive and well, and still debating who gets credit for what. The links between the fields that are obvious now only came about after many decades of convergence.
As for your list of combinations, none of these is new -- all of these things have been done for at least 10 years. (I guess it depends on how you define `only recently' ...)
Different band? I guess if you're trying to obfuscate things, you could use multiple bands, but the law doesn't let you really do that either. And anything obscene is not permitted, as you knowAD5RH
I think the problem with HAM radio is that it's technology for its own sake. If I write good software, it can make a difference in the world. People who aren't programmers will use it, and it will make the world a better place. If I come up with new HAM radio technology, no one but HAM operators can make immediate use of it.
The practical uses of HAM radio are very limited (emergency communication is the most significant exception). Rules have been placed on the HAM bands such that they can't be used for anything remotely useful. Many ham operators consider this a feature, since it keeps away all the people who don't care about the technology and just want to use it to surf the web and check their email from remote locations. Their objections may be justified - frequency is scarce (especially on the lower frequency bands), and commercial traffic, if allowed, might make the bands unuseable.
Unfortunately, this also means that it can't have any real effect on people's lives. The Internet is a tool of social change. Ham radio is not.
The rules I'm refering to are these:
These rules all ensure that HAM radio is a polite medium used by nice people who aren't going to step on each other's toes. It also means, however, that you can't use HAM radio to carry Internet traffic for non-ham radio people, due to the difficulty of policing their traffic, making sure they aren't sending or receiving prohibited data.
My opinion is that they should open up some small subset of the UHF and VHF bands to general purpose traffic. It would still require a license to use the equipment, but with content rules similar to the ISM band (whatever kind of traffic you want, as long as it's not interfering with someone else). This would allow people to use HAM radio as part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
-jim (KE7BGU)