Anyone else interested in or licensed for amateur/ham radio? Here's a post for open discussion about amateur radio activities, licensing, tech and/or questions.
I have a tech license but don't do much transmitting. The process of getting licensed and learning about the associated gear and activities did give me exposure to a lot of interesting aspects of radio, many of which have various practical applications. For example, a lot of the knowledge and hardware I collected was useful in monitoring and interpreting scanner activity during protests. There's something to be said for amateur radio tech as a supplement to things such as emergency planning, tactical communication, monitoring/intelligence and to extend other tech such as drones. It's also an interesting playground to work with RF, electrical engineering, programming, small scale manufacturing and other disciplines.
The wider community of hams has a lot of knowledgeable people but a culture that I find often infuriating. There's a fair amount of open racism/sexism, gate-keeping and condescension to newbies, chuddy prepper types as well as just general clubbiness and lack of diversity. At the moment, theres not many avowed leftists within that hobby/community, but plenty of interesting tech! So hoping we can have some discussion here among hams or those interested in radio.
Please keep in mind that posting your own callsign is self-doxing so I suggest you do not do that here.
I definitely agree that mesh networks are likely more capable and useful than older packet technology. Packet is more of an interesting curiosity to me, a what-could-have-been of the early internet.
IMO the nature of amateur radio regulations (mostly the no-encryption thing) severely limits the usefulness of mesh projects operating strictly within ham frequency allocations. I understand the reasoning behind no encryption and it's ultimately probably a good thing. However, its always going to be a stumbing block in combining the modern 'net with amateur radio. Mesh-wise, I'm much more interested in stuff like NYCMesh that isn't really involved with ham stuff at all. Although to be fair I haven't looked too deeply into Hamnet and AREDN. Last time I was investigating that stuff I saw that some of the ham mesh projects had split due to typical ham drama and I was simply not interested in spending time to figure out which splinter project was more viable. I don't know if that's relevant at all to the state of those projects in 2020.
Also, how insane is it that we still have symbol rate limits on data transmissions for some portions of the ham allocation? Doesn't affect the 2.4GHz mesh stuff, but imagine all the cool digital modes we could play with on VHF or HF without that outdated limitation.
At the end of the day, the network effect still gets us, and these ham networks will remain dead as long as there's nothing interesting on them - and I totally agree that being able to use encryption and connect to the broader internet is basically a necessity in this day and age. I totally forgot about NYCMesh, but projects like this are much more useful from a practical perspective. Though I think there is a lot to be learned from the experimentation going on in the more ham-centric projects, I'm personally more interested in setting up a pirate internet than building infrastructure to help the cops when their own shit breaks lol.