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Do You Still Find Amateur Radio Interesting?
Marcos Eliziario asks: "Soon, I'll be taking the exams for a Brazilian, Class-D, Ham Radio license (Equivalent to an American Technician License) and, as I was reading about the subject, I wondered what today's geek thinks about amateur radio. In the past, Ham Radio was very popular among nerds, however with the Internet boom it seems that interest on radio, among the younger generations, is becoming dimmer each day. A lot of cool things can be done with radio, like building your own equipment, digital modes (btw, few people know that Packet Radio was born on the amateur's rank), and long distance contacts. The gear is cool, there's a lot of things to be learned about propagation, and today's Hams even use satellites to talk. Do you think that we could see a renaissance of Ham Radio among 21st century techies?"
How else will we communicate after civilisation collapses back to the level of 1905?
There are far more geeky things to do. Wny bother talikning to someone on the other side of the world via ham when I can just use my cellphone? Is it the random encounters with people you don't know?
It's more fun to frag someone in Quake then drop some smack in context.
My uncle had all his ham licenses when I was a kid. I was 9 and didn't see why it was fun then either. Looking back, it kind of seems like lame social networking for geeks.
I wish i had the bankroll to get into HAM. I live in the woods and another way to communicate would be nice. Plus I predict that after the US government is done raping and pillaging the internet, IP over HAM might take off among those who know how, and want to keep a free internet.
That being said, I'm a licensed (Tech +) ham, and I havn't touched anything ham related in a few years. Yes, HF is cool, talking to people around the world, morse code, using 5W to talk to Russia... but the fact of the matter is those things take a) time b) money and c) space. It used to be kids who got interested in things like that and then grew up involved with it at the local level. Except, now, kids have ohther things to do and community things are non existant.
Ham raido is dying for a number of reasons. Weaker feelings of community. Quicker easier alternate forms of communication. Less and less people can mount antennas on their homes/condos/apartments, etc...
Nah, like any good hobby, it's about the people you meet.
If it weren't for Amateur Radio, I would have never met Bdale Garbee, prior to his becoming the Debian Project Leader, or any of the other great folks who are Hams.
+++OK ATH
My friends and I use ham radio because our cell phones drop all the time.
Yep, I ragchew all the time to/from work. I have a 45 minute commute. The time on the road (and time in traffic jams) generally breezes by. The topics vary, but it's always interesting conversation.
For those who say: "I can do the same thing on my cell phone", let me ask you this? How much does your 1800 minute per month plan cost? Mine costs $0. Plus, I'm usually chatting (rountable style) with more than three people. I never heard of Four or Five Way Calling on a cell phone plan.
73 and I'm QRT
The way I see it, there are five classes of individuals who have historically been interested in ham radio. These four classes are not mutually exclusive, and I am in all five of them.
First, there are folks who want to meet people and chat. These folks now have the internet, and have gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Second, there are folks who want to be able to make phone calls away from a landline. Traditionally, this has been done via a phone patch. Cell phones are now dirt cheap, so these folks have gradually withdrawn from ham radio. As a result, there are also fewer phone patches than there used to be.
Third, there are folks who want some form of intra-family communications. These folks would get their entire household licenced historically. Now these folks either get cell phones, or FRS or GMRS radios, or in some rare cases, MURS or CB radios, and so these folks have (need I say it?) gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Fourth, there are folks who generally love radio. These folks will never leave ham radio because playing with radios is fun (which is the real answer to your question).
Fifth and finally, there are the ever-prepared crowd. These folks will do whatever they feel they need to in order to make themselves stable and useful in the event that social order breaks down for some reason or other.
www.wavefront-av.com
An excellent point. Here are the rhetorical questions I use to try to explain the appeal of amateur radio to non-hams:
"Why does anyone spend huge amounts of money on a fishing boats and fishing equipment, when they can just buy a fish at the grocery store?"
"Why do people go horseback riding, when a car would get them where they want to go, faster and more comfortably?"
Amateur radio is a hobby. Like most hobbies, it's not meant to be practical (though it can sometimes come in handy during emergencies).
We are surrounded, indeed, inundated with technology, but for the vast majority of people, their only interest is to consume it. They don't care how it works. Hams care how things work.
You can do some incredibly cool things with ham radio, and my ham background (VE7LDH) has served me well in my work (telecommunications). But as an active ham? I haven't attended a ham club meeting in years. The same old grey haired people (almost all men), the same old cliques, the same old conversations (many of which were more about computers than ham radio anyway). Too many throwbacks stuck in the Good Old Days of the 1950s. Transistors? DSP? What's that?
AMSAT has enormous geek potential, but in my entire involvement with ham radio (since 1993) the party line has been "give us more money and maybe some day we'll launch the super-duper satellite of your dreams". They launched one, all-but-bankrupted the organization doing it, it worked for a while, then it partially stopped working, then it packed up completely. Now they're back in Give Us Money mode.
I want ham radio to be interesting. I think it's a great incubator for techies. Real in-depth geeks, not techie-as-fashion-statement. But at the moment, I'm not finding it as interesting as I'd like to. I think that's a shame. I wonder what happened.
...laura
Since you can do both of those using a commercial cell-phone and SMS, why would you want to take away amateur radio bandwith to duplicate what you can already do using a cell-phone?