[HN Gopher] How ham radio endures
___________________________________________________________________
How ham radio endures
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-10-14 17:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| mindcrime wrote:
| So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role
| with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the
| aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where
| local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline
| and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch
| fire/ems resources.
|
| The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive
| hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend
| just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a
| Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local
| repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn
| the lingo, etc.
|
| I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local
| AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm
| not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to
| competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work
| things out to where I can get more active.
| mullen wrote:
| > But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work
| the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get
| started, learn the lingo, etc.
|
| Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with
| repeaters. If you live in a place where there are
| hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one
| charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license
| is easy.
| eternityforest wrote:
| How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency?
| Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you
| don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying
| for it.
|
| I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of
| anything practical about emergency communications.
| amingilani wrote:
| In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a
| radio without an amateur radio license. But it's easier to
| use when you've had the practice and aren't fumbling around
| learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better,
| when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
|
| Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn't
| compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune
| into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check
| in with my partner when I'm hiking.
| donw wrote:
| Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a
| disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the
| building management team, which politely informed every
| corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they
| would be participating.
|
| Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could
| adjust our schedules, but the actual alarms did sound,
| and the entire building evacuated, which included
| climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with
| your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-
| hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a
| pretend fire after you got outside.
|
| Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and
| you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to
| pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full
| pressure.
|
| Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your
| first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher
| happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having
| to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-
| of-hand and burns down the house.
|
| Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the
| provided jack, and so on.
|
| Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having
| the right tools for the job".
| Dalewyn wrote:
| There's a galactic difference between just reading about
| it and actually experiencing it even just once.
|
| Essentially the difference between being book smart vs.
| street wise.
| scottyah wrote:
| "We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall
| to the level of our training." Reading about it generates
| expectations, and they can be deadly.
| teraflop wrote:
| > In an emergency you can make use of anything, including
| a radio without an amateur radio license.
|
| Just to clarify: the law in the US (47 CFR SS 97.403)
| says that you can use amateur radio frequencies without a
| license, or unlicensed frequencies, for: "essential
| communication needs in connection with the immediate
| safety of human life and immediate protection of property
| when normal communication systems are not available".
| That's much narrower than just "in an emergency".
|
| And if you try to use ham radio equipment without knowing
| what you're doing, there's a risk that you'll interfere
| with other amateur or non-amateur users who are
| coordinating their own emergency response.
| amingilani wrote:
| Thank you for the clarification. I wanted my explanation
| to be generic enough to apply to any jurisdiction. For
| example, I'm in Canada where the regulations are
| differently worded but have a similar effect.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham
| radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and
| reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to
| say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather
| have a cheap Baofeng.
| 0xEF wrote:
| This is the correct answer. I have my license and help
| with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with
| meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool,
| but the ham radio community has been around for a
| century, is far better organized and entrenched with
| various services, etc. There is far more trust and
| reliability there.
|
| I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham
| radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Meshtastic is also still very much "beta" quality. Unless
| you spend a bit of time working with it, messing with
| different radios and antennas, you can end up with a
| setup that can't get much range at all, negating one of
| the main features of the mesh.
|
| Though just buying a Baofeng can lead to similar results,
| as it's not that amazing at reception. In my testing I've
| only been able to get a good signal within a few hundred
| meters, which might not be enough to hit an area repeater
| except in ideal conditions.
|
| Either way, having the knowledge and practice going into
| an emergency is much more helpful than just the
| equipment!
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Meshtastic has actual issues with bandwidth running out on
| the LoRa when there are too many people using it in a small
| area.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| https://bayme.sh is IIRC actively experimenting with
| moving from LongFast to MediumSlow specifically to try to
| address this.
| wepple wrote:
| > But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work
| the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get
| started, learn the lingo, etc.
|
| I'm not sure where you live, but I've never lived in a house or
| apartment where I could hit a local 2m repeater without driving
| or getting up on a roof.
|
| I also have an 80 watt 2m radio in my truck, and will turn it
| on when I'm doing long trips. Very rare to encounter anyone
| else (simplex), let alone be able to chat for more than a very
| short period of time.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I haven't done a like, systematic survey or anything but when
| I used to travel for work I'd take my little quansheng and
| mess around. Basically every american city with at least one
| "tall" building has a repeater up there that covers the whole
| metro area. There's one on the sears tower that you can hear
| in michigan. But even dubuque had one I could contact from a
| hotel room across town.
|
| So yeah most of the _area_ is rural and there 's probably not
| much out there without big gear. But most of the population
| lives within 30 miles of a 12-storey building.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Experiences do definitely vary in this regard. I live in a CA
| Bay Area suburb. Geographically, this is a valley, and there
| are a fair number of more-or-less active repeaters mounted up
| along various mountain ridges, and I can generally hit a
| couple of them from my tiny backyard w/ a 5W HT (and a decent
| antenna!).
|
| OTOH, while I never got in to it, there _is_ spectrum
| available to Technician licensees (assuming you 're in the
| US) on 6m and 10m. You're not likely to get NVIS propagation
| there and hit more local folk that you couldn't hit w/ LOS,
| but that might get contacts where nothing's available on
| 2m/70cm, for not too much more initial equipment cost (again,
| assuming US _and_ an HN user, where moving from $40 to say,
| $400 isn 't completely out of the question).
| mindcrime wrote:
| Fair point. I live in Chapel Hill, NC, and we're fortunate
| enough to have multiple repeaters that can be worked with a
| hand-held from where I live. But yes, geography will
| definitely play a factor. I should probably have noted that
| originally. Good catch.
| melling wrote:
| Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet,
| computers, and software development.
|
| What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham
| these days? I've had a technical class license for a couple
| decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get
| a more advanced license.
| binome wrote:
| Check out https://github.com/drowe67/radae. David Rowe has been
| working on a really neat new digital mode for audio
| transmission over HF channels, using a pretrained autoencoder.
| It's currently getting integrated into the freeDV gui in this
| branch https://github.com/drowe67/freedv-gui/tree/ms-rade-integ
| chillingeffect wrote:
| That reminds me. I'd like ppl to get excited abt the "codec2"
| open source replacement for c4fm, p25, and dmr... unless sth
| newer is out there
|
| https://www.amateurradio.com/codec2-open-source-vocoder-
| proj...
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet,
| computers, and software development. ... What are the most
| interesting things people are doing with Ham these days?_
|
| It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the
| answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken
| literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of
| ways.
|
| That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from
| person to person. A lot of people are interested in the
| hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or
| repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or
| making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last
| amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly
| details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You
| could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" -
| trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number
| of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
|
| Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect
| being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available
| to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an
| FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other
| emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to
| help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
|
| And then you get people who want to experiment with new
| modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to
| evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce
| signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc.
| Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see
| if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country
| using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or
| whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems
| with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air
| using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF
| tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe
| into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a
| drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to
| collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
|
| So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole
| thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice
| people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people
| on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest
| is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service
| aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around
| with stuff in the ham space.
| blendo wrote:
| I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco
| to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.
|
| It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power,
| and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that
| each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
|
| It's the only time I've used my General class privileges.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Omg reading the wiki for wspr i thought i saw a typo "630m"
| but yup, ~430 kHz, wow. What antenna did you use, a quarter
| mile dipole? ;)
| wl wrote:
| Wikipedia is just being weird by using an MF band in its
| example. Most WSPR is in the shortwave bands, which can use
| large antennas, but not THAT large.
| swalberg wrote:
| Hams have privileges on 2200m, too! At those wavelengths
| people are using big loading coils. Saw a video last week
| of a guy in Alaska with a sizeable loop in the trees and
| was putting in about 1 KW to get 1W EIRP.
|
| WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making
| relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to
| see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on
| 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).
| bittwiddle wrote:
| With packet radio you can transmit digitally, and basically
| have IRC via radio.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
| theshrike79 wrote:
| APRS is cool:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...
|
| https://aprs.fi/ is a site that displays a bunch of devices
| online.
|
| Some people have APRS radios in their cars so they can see
| exactly where it is for example.
| exitnode wrote:
| You can find a selection of things you can do with ham radio in
| this blog post: https://dk1mi.radio/a-declaration-of-love-to-
| amateur-radio/
| swalberg wrote:
| DX'ing and contesting. I enjoy making quick contacts with
| people all over the globe, and sometimes having to go to a map
| to find out where they are.
|
| Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got
| into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work
| through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
|
| I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks
| and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for
| other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition
| rolled into one.
|
| N3RTW
| hdb2 wrote:
| > DX'ing and contesting
|
| apologies, I'm ignorant when it comes to HAM but have always
| been interested in it: what does DX'ing and contesting mean?
| I'm assuming DX = talking to other HAMs, but I can't figure
| out what contesting would be.
| swalberg wrote:
| Sorry... DX is short for a distance contact, so someone
| outside of your country. There are 340-odd "DX entities"
| defined, some of them incredibly rare (Bouvet Island, North
| Korea), and people spend their lives trying to get the ones
| they're missing. Other people will gather a group and raise
| funds to go to those places so that they get on the air.
|
| Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend
| with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People
| get on the air and try and get the most points by making
| contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people
| all over the world participating and top competitors are
| running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over
| 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests
| such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from
| every county on the air and people from across the country
| try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at
| the end of this month where people make up funny names and
| exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for
| fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the
| contests and gives you some idea of the variety.
|
| Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active
| during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests
| just to find a few more.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| For me it's:
|
| FT8 - a weak signal mode that lets you make contacts around the
| world with not much power. From Canada, I've made contacts with
| Japan and Romania on 10W of power.
|
| Satellites - the ISS has a repeater, so you can make VHF/UHF
| contacts with people in a huge footprint.
| amingilani wrote:
| Heh, I just finished an AuxComm training and two IMS (Ontario's
| version of ICS) courses last week. Great timing.
| Animats wrote:
| Homeland Security tries to get local first responders to join the
| SHARES emergency radio network.[1] This is 5 HF channels at 5
| MHz, and some more around 15 MHz. They test on Wednesdays around
| noon. Transmission is voice or PACTOR. It's ham-type technology
| for government emergency response.
|
| Although many local first responders are not on this net, the
| USCG, military, and Homeland Security monitor it. So it's a way
| to reach U.S. Government resources in emergencies. This isn't
| something you access with a handheld, since it requires at least
| a long-wire antenna. You can get hundreds or thousands of miles
| of range. The idea is to have something that can get through from
| a large disaster area.
|
| [1] https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/programs/shared-
| resourc...
|
| [2] https://ema.arrl.org/wp-
| content/uploads/files/SHARES_Spectru...
| kermatt wrote:
| Do you have a link that describes the equipment, for those of
| us who don't yet understand what a long wire antenna is?
|
| Having been in the WNC hurricane area, I have a newfound
| interest in this stuff.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| At 5MHz you have a wavelength of approximately 60m. So for a
| dipole antenna (the most basic) you'd need approximately 30m
| of wire.
|
| You'd have a length of coax cable going to the centre point
| of the antenna, so pair of 15m wires extending from each
| side.
|
| Getting your amateur radio license covers this in more
| detail.
|
| Dave Casler has a bunch of useful videos on things like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-6sJHk9hU
| cschneid wrote:
| A dipole is a very simple antenna, and pretty efficient.
| There are other shorter options that have worse performance
| too, but perhaps more suitable for an adhoc tree
| deployment. (random wire, EFHW)
|
| (I know you know this, but just adding in. Ham is fun! I
| like doing park & camping deployments)
| gabesk wrote:
| In the simplest analogy, it's just the TV rabbit ears with
| two wires in opposite directions, except much longer wires,
| because the frequencies are lower and therefore the
| wavelength is larger. Those classic rabbit ears are
| effectively a dipole antenna, which is basically: "stretch a
| wire out in a line so it's half the wavelength of the
| frequency you want to receive or transmit on, cut it in half,
| and send the signal from the middle, out both ends of the cut
| wire".
|
| https://www.aa5tb.com/dipole.html
|
| Picking that length of wire results in the lowest impedance
| (kind of analogous to friction) at the radio for pushing
| signal out to the antenna, but various lengths work with more
| or less efficiency, and you don't have to send the signal
| from the middle either if you have appropriate inductors and
| capacitors to adjust the impedance (it's just the simplest
| way).
|
| As with most things on the internet these days, it seems the
| best content is in the form of YouTube videos, so amusingly,
| this is the best written information I came across after some
| quick searching:
|
| https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0684938.pdf
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| You might want to check out this guy's stuff:
|
| https://qrper.com/2024/10/helene-aftermath-update-power-
| to-t...
| Animats wrote:
| The basic problem with using HF radio is that you need to
| know most of the things required for a ham license to operate
| one. Modern HF radios have displays, scanners, lots of
| features, and are moderately complicated to operate. Even
| hooking up an antenna requires some understanding of what
| antennas really do.
|
| Here's a typical modern portable ham radio.[1] (Not a
| recommendation, just an example) This one does both HF and
| VHF, so you can reach both SHARES and locals. Here are some
| simple wire antenna kits.[2] If you have both of those items,
| and some kind of power (a car battery), you can contact
| various US emergency services, radio hams, preppers, and
| whatnot, even if infrastructure is down for hundreds of miles
| around. A small solar panel to charge the thing would be a
| good idea. All this is probably about US$1500.
|
| Any isolated town should have something like that, and some
| people who know how to use it. Town halls, volunteer fire
| departments, sheriff's offices, etc. are good locations to
| keep it.
|
| Preppers seem to be more into VHF handhelds such as the
| Baofeng UV-5R. That's about US$80. Less range, can't reach
| SHARES, but can reach a few miles, depending on terrain.
| Useful if you're two miles from the main road.
|
| Here's a prepper view.[3] He uses a Slinky as an antenna.
|
| Once you have the ability to communicate at all, the problem
| is finding someone useful to talk to in an emergency. There's
| no addressing, just frequencies. On HF there's so much range
| that most of the people you can reach are not in a position
| to do much. The whole point of SHARES is that there are a few
| frequencies where someone is regularly listening. During a
| disaster, they're probably dealing with bigger problems than
| yours, so calling up Homeland Security HQ as an individual
| may not be helpful for anything not immediately life-
| threatening.
|
| If you're near a coast, you can usually reach the Coast Guard
| on a marine VHF channel. They're a first responder set up to
| take radio calls.[4] If the emergency requires a boat, call
| them. Marine Channel 16 VHF-FM (156.8 MHz). The Coast Guard
| gets involved with major floods, they maintain good
| communications with other emergency services, and they know
| almost everybody with a boat.
|
| [1] https://www.icomamerica.com/lineup/products/IC-705
|
| [2] https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/wire-
| antennas
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_sDHTTZYMg
|
| [4] https://navcen.uscg.gov/radio-information-for-boaters
| ubj wrote:
| I'm curious how satellite Internet like Starlink will enhance and
| complement ham radio. To be clear, I don't see it replacing ham
| radio--there are too many great reasons to get into the hobby for
| that. But Starlink has been playing a similar emergency
| communications role in recent hurricane-hit areas as ham radio
| has in the past. Will be interesting to see how the two are used
| going forward.
| user3939382 wrote:
| We had a freak earthquake in the northeast some months back.
| Guess what immediately went down when you needed it most? Cell
| towers. My guess is they're not designed for the capacity they'd
| need in an emergency where almost everyone is trying to call
| simultaneously. That's reason enough to have an alternate comm
| link.
| nlh wrote:
| One thing I will say, the Internet deeply and dramatically
| changed my perspective on the global community and connectivity
| in general.
|
| When I got my ham license (DE K2KD) at age ~11, the idea of
| picking up a microphone or tapping on a morse key or using a
| computer with RTTY to talk to someone _on the other side of the
| world_ was mind-blowing. "Mom, I'm talking to someone in
| Australia! I'm talking to someone in Nigeria!".
|
| Now we block entire IP ranges because they send too much spam or
| because we think the traffic from an entire country has a high
| fraud rate.
|
| Easy come easy go. Sigh.
| adamc wrote:
| The problem is that a huge fraction of people _are_ worth
| talking to, but a small fraction -- 5%? 10%? -- can poison that
| well so thoroughly that it is unusable. Being a ham operator
| takes some effort and is harder to exploit, so most people you
| talk to will just be normal humans -- enthusiasts. But the
| internet attracts every freak and scam operator in the world.
|
| I'm reminded of various "free" rock concerts of my youth, which
| were often disasters -- too many people, half of them stoned or
| otherwise out of control, etc. -- things I quickly learned I
| would pay to avoid. Things that are too easy attract people I
| don't want to interact with.
| somberi wrote:
| I was a 16-year-old kid in still-developing India, 1986. One had
| to wait seven years to get a landline connection.
|
| My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and
| evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was
| issued the handle OM118.
|
| The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single
| Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for
| 30-minute slots.
|
| Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with
| knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic
| voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least,
| please God.
|
| A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were
| too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras,
| we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and
| the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."
|
| 1. Madras is now called Chennai.
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamal_Haasan
| cadr wrote:
| That is a cool story!
| sudb wrote:
| This youtube video by No Boilerplate
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcF6tvepRlg) was a great summary
| and really got my interest up initially but I personally got
| bogged down quite quickly by the prospect of having to learn
| Morse Code
| abrahms wrote:
| You don't have to learn morse code to pass the initial HAM
| test.
| cschneid wrote:
| In the US, I don't believe morse is required for any tier of
| license anymore. For sure, I have my general and don't know
| it.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Or any ham test in the united states (note: learning Morse
| code is worth doing anyway)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Widespread access to space-based networks might finally kill
| hams. When disaster strikes, the guy with solar panels and a
| starlink terminal can facilitate more traffic than a hundred
| hams. Having cellphones that can get an SMS up to a sat might be
| more useful than handing out 4w radios.
| mikece wrote:
| Access to space-based network only works if it doesn't rely on
| a downlink connected to a fiber-optic network (eg: Starlink).
| There's nothing glamorous about amateur radio but being able to
| string up a wire and get a message hundreds or thousands of
| miles using only a 12V battery has its moments.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Starlink is better in this regard now. First, the ground
| station density in the US is really quite good and you're
| likely to be able to hit a single up/down path through most
| emergencies. And, second, over the last year they've turned
| on a lot of inter-satellite links (ISLs). The ISLs have a
| huge effect on reach -- you can now have a sat terminal in
| parts of eastern Africa and reach the ground station in
| Lagos, for example.
|
| (No affiliation with them; I'm working with a Ph.D. student
| studying this question.)
|
| I'd say that one advantage of ham is that you can operate it
| on much lower power equipment still - there's no such thing
| as a starlink HT yet, although we're starting to get close
| with cell phones with emergency satellite messaging. But
| starlink has a bandwidth advantage if you need to send photos
| or tunnel cell. Different capabilities - it's good to have
| both!
|
| AC3ME
| mikece wrote:
| "...there's no such thing as a starlink HT yet..."
|
| The FCC just gave emergency authorization for Starlink to
| enable direct-to-satellite service for T-Mobile customers
| in western North Carolina. It's my understanding that this
| is what Starlink was planning on releasing but they are
| doing a live beta right now.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/fcc-lets-
| starlin...
| floatrock wrote:
| Unless you're on the wrong side of a space-billionaire's
| political inclinations...
| cadr wrote:
| There is more to amateur radio than disaster communications.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Ham radio and blogs are at similar stages of cultural relevance.
| There may be something the blogging community can learn from the
| ham community, though hopefully blogging survives as something
| more than an emergency-response phenomenon.
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