Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?

Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.

From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. With the advent of Amazon and cheap electronics anybody can now get into it without tinkering at all. Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.

Just renewed my license for the first time. That means I've had it 10 years. Problems for me:

It's either really hard or really expensive to do basic stuff. Want to get on a repeater and chat? Great, a $20 baofeng radio can do it, but you have to get on the Internet to find the repeater frequency, offset, and tones, and then figure out how to program those into the radio. That either involves tedious button pushing on the radio, or getting a special cable, getting Chirp figured out and working with your laptop and radio and cable, and then figuring out the weird Chirp UI. You finally do all that, and then realize (as others have pointed out) that the conversations on the repeaters are lame.

And then the radio is portable, but you can't charge it with a USB cable like everything else, or put in regular AA batteries. You take it camping and it dies after a day.

Again, this is the most basic ham radio thing to do, lowest level of license required. It's not fun hacking, it's just annoying and discouraging.

The alternative radios to baofeng are literally 10 times the price or more, and it's not clear to me that they make any of that any easier. Gear for HF (longer range) is a hundred times the price or more. I haven't even wanted to go there.

Why isn't there a handheld radio that runs android and has a USB C data/charging port? Connecting to nearby repeaters based on GPS location could be automatic! You'd have all the young hams talking on the repeaters and things would start happening. That would be a radio that would actually be worth a license and a few hundred dollars

Playing with radios teaches you so much: no hobby has been more helpful for my career than ham radio.

And it's such a broad hobby: you can make contacts just like your granddad on MF/HF CW today, and then on monster microwave arrays doing Earth-Moon-Earth with modern digital encodings tomorrow. You only need the one license.

I'm glad to see that he mentions GNU Radio in his slides. It's amazing what you can do with it. I built a VOR receiver a few years ago.

I'll migrate it to the new QT based display sometime this fall.

I do agree. amateur radio, can be so useful for hacking on custom protocols, and transferring data. It does not all have to be talking on the radio if that doe snot interest you. I also feel like a new generation is blooming.

I actually have a little ambition but maybe one day if I have energy I'll pursue an amateur radio art installation of sorts. The space seems ripe for this sort of energy.

What always surprises me on the ham world is the huge number of possibilities. Beside having voice QSO in HF or VHF, there are many other options: QRP and SOTA/POTA, digital modes, DYI antennas and radios, SDR, EME, identifying unknown and misterious signal, etc.

What I don't like about the communities is that is mostly composed by grey hairs guy that are not really opened to change.

I've barely done any contesting or public safety or really any rag chewing, but I got my Extra for digital RF synthesis experiments and digital modes just in case I want to do something in those extra bits of the bands.

Lowfer people don't need licensed under a certain power and QRSS grabbers are an astoundingly neat thing for everyone licensed or not.

Meanwhile the RSGB won’t even let you take the foundation license test on linux, because they want to spy on potential members.

I haven't seen much innovation in the HAM spectrum, but I do some fun stuff done with Lora, and mesh networks by flashing routers with custom version of OpenWRT.

Honestly I think the problem with the HAM spectrum is that it doesn't allow for (much) encryption and so much digital transmissions are hampered.

I read that licenses were some kind of security measure to prevent foreign spies from communicating using the radio back in world war 2.

What's the point of even having licenses in the modern day? If you have to go through red tape to get started, it's little wonder usage is declining.

Yes! RF is fun for hackers. Go get licensed. 73 de KQ4RLZ.

Of course hackers need to know how radio works. They need to know how to break into WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular comms, take over drones, break into RF-controlled industrial networks, spoof GPS, read RFID devices from a distance...

None of that is in the ham bands. Few hams have enough RF knowledge to do any of that. Hams are mostly still at CQ DX, CQ DX...