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?"

Comments

Out of the loop

[AndroidCat]

and up until recently there was even some overlap between the two groups.

I didn't get the memo. When did the split occur?

Re:Out of the loop

[n8ur]

Yeah, that struck me as ill-informed.

There are more than a few well-respected hackers (in the good sense of the word) are hams, and there's a lot of software development going on in ham radio.

In particular, ham operators are doing lots of work with new digital modes made possible by using the sound card + PC as a powerful DSP platform. There's a lot of good stuff going on there.

Blatant plug -- I'm president of TAPR, which is a group that's promoting computer-related R&D in the ham radio community. Along with the ARRL (the US national ham group), we sponsor an annual Digital Communications Conference where papers are presented on all sorts of new uses of technology in ham radio.

PS -- for the hams here who may not be familiar, TAPR is not significantly focused on packet radio these days; we're doing lots of other stuff related to digital communications.

Re:Out of the loop

[BlueStraggler]

Given that ham radio predates computer hacking by half a century, I'd say the split has always existed. Commonalities in the two cultures have drawn it together in some ways, but they never merged.

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.

NPR's coverage of ham radio

[The I Shing]

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?

until recently?

[hutman]

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.

Tasty

[secretvampire]

[Homer]

Mmmmmmmmmm.....Ham radio.....glaaaaaaaaaarrgh...

[/Homer]

Exploited?

[AAAWalrus]

Hrm... how about that both technologies started as chic geek projects and are now exploited by corporate interests?

Bless them!

[Otter]

Whenever I'm configuring a new Linux kernel on Saturday night, evading my wife's attempts to drag me out the door or into bed -- I always get to the "Amateur Radio" section and think "Hah! What kind of dweeb do they think I am?"

Hopes

[LordMyren]

the one desperate hope i bear is that software will not go the way of ham radio. ham radio pioneered radio, but ultimately it was the corporations that had to advance the art. they were the only ones who could sink the required technology and capital into the field. (generall) ham radio has been relegated back to a enthusiast hobby as die hard development has faded off.

i'm not sure why i stick to this hope so badly, but i hope there's another way for software. fundamentally, software is all about building blocks, using the existing to build more. for this reason, its crucial that there be open-ness of software.

software at least stands a chance. it doesnt require adv. fabrication, expensive test equipment and doesnt cause anything other than your own computer to break.

and to all the hardcore ham people still out there, keep kickin baby! or something.

Myren

Re:Hopes

[lostchicken]

Amateur Radio isn't at all relegated back to a hobby without development.

Go pick up a copy of QST (the ARRL's magazine). Flip through it. You'll see all kinds of articles on people developing more and more transmission and encoding techniques. Pretty much all of the development focuses on digital (packet) radio systems, and since power outputs are limited, (sometimes by law, but usually just because it's fun to be challenged) amateur radio operators have developed pretty much the best ways of dealing with interference and robustness in transmission of data.

Today's ham tech is 2007 commercial tech.

Re:Hopes

[j1m 5n0w]

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:

• No crypto (most people regard digital signatures as ok). No ssh. No ssl. If you check your email over ham radio, everyone else can read it.
• No music. Not even if you made it up yourself.
• No swearing.
• No business-related traffic.

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)

Perhaps a little off the mark

[spyrochaete]

Ham is to pirate radio stations as hacker is to hacktivism (e.g. defaced web sites)

Hacking a "closed" repeater

[MsWillow]

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

Past Tense

[amacleod98]

Why is that whole article written in the past tense?

They are the same community

[GhengisCohen]

When the first BBS's went up in NYC, and the first personal computers came out, like the Radio shack Model 1, all those early programmers/BBSers were Ham nuts. Hacking in NYC and personal computers user grew directly out of HAM. They are not parallel, but instead the hacking field all grew from Ham. Everyone in FreakShow 100 from NYC learned their stuff from a guy name Art. Art got into computers from his Ham hobby. Other pioneers of the NYC hacking scene were the likes of Billy Arnel (Ham first, ran an early BBS called People Links) and a lady named Susan I seem to remember (ham as well)

Packet radio

[LodCrappo]

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?

The sad side of the split

[gnat_x]

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.

Still lots of overlap

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the gnu-radio project
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
Th e TAPR group (not just packet radio anymore all sorts of digital communications topics)
Eric and Matt from the gnu-radio project were at the TAPR digital communication conference again this year.
http://www.tapr.org
Here's some more linux ham software listed:
http://radio.linux.org.au
Also check out The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT):
http://www.amsat.org
The next major sat project named Eagle will use as much open source software and open hardware as possible.
There are also many notable hams who are also linux hackers, just to name one Bdale Garbee, former Debian Project head and CTO for linux solutions at HP, whom I met at the TAPR DCC this year, he is very active with both TAPR and hardware design on AMSAT satellites.
Also check out the June and September issue of Linuxjournal for gnu-radio and a psk article (Sept).

73, w0uhf

Even more similarities

[OzPeter]

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.

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 .. he was my father.

(Yes I am bitter about that .. but yes I am dealing with it)

BTW I also remember when people built their own computers .. from scratch .. and coded up their own systems by the bootstraps.

MSOD (Morse String Of Death)

[BoulderDad]

This happened to me just a few weeks ago. I was monitoring payload comms for a high-altitude research payload that we had built, and all the data comms went through a Linux box that was routing traffic to the payload.

Everything was going smooth as silk in mission control and then... lost connection to the payload from the mission controller station... I go to the linux router, and its LOCKED UP... nothing... screen is frozen with my windows up, no mouse movement...

CAPS and SCROLL led's are blinking in unison... some kind of code... maybe a number? I start trying to write down dots and dashes, but my autonomic response is to try to copy is as morse code... I get characters... then I scrawl out...

F A T A L E X C E P T I O N

!!! Linux was sending me morse code via the keyboard LEDs! That's a new one on me. It didn't send any kind of diagnostic code, not that it would've helped me. But knowing that it was a fatal exception was actually the right information, because I knew it was appropriate to immediately restart the machine.

So instead of the Windows blue screen of death, it's the linux "Morse String of Death" (MSOD?) !

-K0DUG

dit dit

the biggest thing that helped...

[Lumpy]

Is not what these people did, how much they researched, learned, designed,etc..

It's the simple fact that they SHARED what they knew with the world.

that is how things like Packet Radio, APRS, antenna designs, etc become more refined and wide spread use.

Most of what is in Ham Radio and software WOULD NOT EXIST if people were selfsih and kept their discoveries and designs to themselves.

Forgot to mention...

[MsWillow]

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 :)

Potential for Software to Fade Away

[Teancum]

There are some problems right now in the computer industry, and unfortunately they aren't being addressed right now. I think you need to compare software engineering to nuclear engineering, and see how that now the current crop of high school students who want to get into computer science and software engineering are encountering some incredible barriers to being able to truly understand and work with computers from a hobbyiest viewpoint.

The growth of Linux certainly is counteracting that influence, but there are some things to worry about besides closed API's. It concerns me when CPUs are so incredibly complex that you get a crop of even seasoned software developers who are simply incapable of hand-assembling a piece of software. I'm not talking about doing this for the latest copy of DOOM III, but if you don't know how to hand assemble a simple "for" loop that does a quick bubble sort, you really don't understand the hardware that you are working on.

Also, while abstraction is useful, it is also important to have at least _SOMEBODY_ on a medium sized development team that can go all the way down to the gate level and understand just what is going on in the CPU, and to understand that while computer are fairly consistant, there are still time delays and quantum fluctuations that can affect a piece of software, sometimes even at the wrong time. If you look through the SETI@Home website, they mention that they have to on a daily basis reject some work-units simply because an add operation missed a bit in the carry network or some other similar random fault of the CPU occured. At some point software does have to directly interact with the physical level, and sometimes that happens just in RAM and the CPU itself.

While the above points might show some bias toward how I learned to program computers: On early mainframe computers and early 8-bit micros (where hand assembly was really the only way to do thing unless you had a few $$$ or took the time to write your own assembler), I would have to add that since the collapse of the internet bubble, I would also strongly discourage young people to even get into the industry right now. With significant numbers of software developers still out of work, incredibly intense competition to gettting what few jobs are around, and the outsourcing problems that are plaguing the industry shrinking the current number of jobs down even more, it is getting tougher to really break in. Essentially what I'm saying is that the computer industry right now is burning intelletual capital rather than trying to invest into its future.

If you are smart and want to get into a hot new industry that feels like the computer industry did 20 years ago, I would strongly suggest going into aeronautical engineering and try to join up with Bigelow Aerospace, Scaled Composites, or Armidillo Aerospace. Them and a dozen other companies right now are getting ready to boom, and that is going to further take away the creative types that earlier fueled the computer industry.

This is perhaps the #1 analogy that I can use with ham radio, which is struggling right now trying to attract the young smart minds that have the talent and the slightly off-axis humor to be able to build things like radio frequency jammers, blue and black boxes, or even computer virii. From doing those irreverent and potentially illegal in some context applications, many young people formed the skill sets that makes many of the advanced technology applications that we see today. I fear that the computer industry is losing that group in particular, and now all that is left are folks who can follow a recipie (script kiddies), but are incapable of coming up with anything like that on their own. Some of that is still left, but many school and university administrators are now beating out any creative urge in most schools in regards to computers.

I'm speaking now to the creative 1% of humanity who really makes things happen. They aren't missed right away when they are gone, but you eventually

XASTIR

[n1ywb]

Best. ham. radio. software. ever. I wish every application was so great.

http://www.xastir.org/

Fun Stuff

[leighklotz]

I've been a ham since I was 7, but was inactive from the college years until recently. There's a tremendous number of things to do, from building your own low-power and medium-power equipment to computer-connected stuff, to Microwave (10 GHz is popular, and the 3.5 GHz band is getting more interesting these days too) and VLF (how about a signal on 176 KHz?).

Personally, I've ejoyed the following lately:

• PSK-31 -- a cheap soundcard-based text-to-text mode that uses only 31Hz of bandwidth and goes around the world on 5 watts
• XML for Ham Radio -- I've started a consortium to develop XML standards for ham radio, starting with an extensible logging format, and working with everyone from QRZ and eQSL.cc on the server side to xlog for Linux and Ham Radio Deluxe for Windows and others.
• RPSK -- a TCP/IP based protocol for remote operation of a PSK station with a Java applet client and a hiptop client. (The antenna is not hooked up right now so don't expect the applet to work.)
• HFPack -- portable and picnic table operation with HF radio; I talked to Estonia with an Elecraft KX1 and about 4.5 Watts
• An RSS feed for APRS -- working with APRSWorld I developed an APRS to RSS converter to help HFPackers let people know where and when they are operating, so people can listen for them.
• Kit building -- I have built an Elecraft K2, one of the most sensitive ham transceivers in the world, their KX1 (one of the smallest and most featureful), a Small Wonder Labs PSK-20 specific to PSK on 14.070 MHz, and a variety of American QRP Club and Four-State QRP Club kits. For more power, I built an 50 Watt HF Amplifier in a group project and am working on a 100W one.
• CW -- I learned Morse Code at 5 so it was easy to pick back up after a couple (ok, a few) decades of disuse, and it's been a blast as well.

Check it out and take a look at my Ham Web Log for more stuff.