Why Modern Makers Are Bringing Back Ham Radio

As to YT over ham radio: there's ATV (amateur television) and you can/could? (check your regional regulations for audio broadcasts) send radio streams on some bands. As long as it stays true to the ham-spirit, you should be ok.

(I can't speak for what the ARRL allows on what bands and so on, i have an old yearbook stashed away somewhere, but i'm not american, so...)

vy 73

It seems that most (or at least very many) hams just do contesting, where there is no innovation or even just learning something new at all and doing well is just a matter of good antenna placement, high power (except for QRP), training and perseverance in repeating the same letters for hours on end. For decades!

Antenna and transmitter characteristics (the equipment is off-the-shelve anyway) and propagation conditions (in contests, all signals are 59 anyway) are really well-researched by now, so why are we wasting time and bands on contests?

Unfortunately most hams don't take the suggestion to stop contesting too well.

802.11b has a bandwidth of 22 MHz. The entire 2m VHF allocation for amateur radio is 4 MHz. The entire 70cm UHF allocation is 30 MHz, and there's another 26 MHz at 33cm.

Now, with a license you can use much higher output power (up to 1.5 KW depending on the band), including on 2.4 GHz. A high-gain antenna and some power can go quite far. And there's also fast-scan Amateur Television (ATV) and slow-scan television modes that can be used as well.

But if you're using it to watch YouTube you're kind of missing the point of amateur radio - it's about communication, not watching Youtube videos. Things like embedded meshes and other experimental work are fine, but YouTube is really more of a cellphone thing.

There has not been any movement in this area and I hope that there never is.

People trying to do what, exactly? And how would existing ham users benefit by having the bands taken over by those commercial activities that the FCC regulates under other parts?

There are multiple roadblocks:

FCC part 97.113(A) prohibited transmissions contains:

"(5) Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services."

So... if all you're trying to do is replicate a wirelessISP or satellite internet service, but do it for free on the ham bands, well, that's illegal in and of itself aside from encryption. This part of the law has occasionally caused controversy for the RC airplane people on the 6M band, the "text email service for sailboats" people on HF, couple others.

And if you live near the border of a country or have impressive range there's part 97.117.

And there are interesting regulations for 3rd party traffic across international boundaries.

And there are pecuniary interest regulations, so no doing work or getting paid for it or having money change hands except under relatively weird and limited forms.

Its not as simple as crossing out a couple words in 97.113(A)(4) that prevent "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning". That alone will not magically let wireless ISPs offer service pretending to be ham radio.

In that sense, encryption might be viewed at the very least as being selfish by some; and at the worst, some jurisdictions would start having to think differently about threats on ham radio bands.

As such, privacy is not a goal of amateur radio at all. If you desire private communications, the FCC offers different (more costly) licenses for that. There's also the internet.

The extent of my calibration of a cheap SDR dongle is just adjusting the PPM to correct any offset.

Something I've noticed about maker movement is to maintain the cultural pool cohesion or whatever they don't socialize with existing clubs, teams, groups in other hobbies, leading to, at best, reinventing the wheel, at worst, safety situations. Starting with zero person-years in a makerspace is probably unwise if the local ham radio club meets across the street on a different day and has person-millennias of combined RF experience. Not to mention online groups, podcasts like the soldersmoke guys...

Its hard to come up with something strictly ham radio that isn't more widely applicable to electronics in general. But possible...

Generally the hams are extremely talented at metalworking and trad carpentry for cabinets and RF component structures. I'm sure that could be 3-d printed and laser cut plywood and who knows what else. Imagine printing out a new custom plastic case for a field radio. Could you print out a power distribution panel, its just an array of rectangular holes, perhaps designed specifically for powerpoles to snap into. Could you print out low/medium power coil winding forms? For high power use you could remove the PLA if the copper wire is thick enough to self support. I've been fooling around with printed temporary antenna components. Fooling around with, as in "breaking" but eventually I'll print something that works. I (very briefly) talked to a guy who sewed a vest thing for his goat and his goat carries radio gear to the top of a mountain where he operates just for fun. I'm sure thinking outside the box someone could laser cut a wood backpack antenna support for backpack mobile people. Microwave waveguide work has been traditional metalworking and brazing, but maybe 3-d printing fixtures and things? There's some waveguide stuff on thingiverse but I'd be happy starting out with just WR-42 standard flange dust caps to snap on the unused end. (WR-42 size waveguide is for 24 GHz ham band, others are also useful). Alignment jigs and things? 3d Printed mounting brackets to attach standard microwave horn antennas to tripods? Basically anywhere you'd see a ham using 2x4 wood cutoffs and duct tape, a printer and lasercutter could do better.

Most of the above is "in my infinite spare time I plan to..." who knows how many ideas you'd get from a large club.

The ham radio construction / homebrew group is "probably" larger than the group of makers specifically into electronics. The hobby is big enough that it should be easy to find an existing spot to extend.

Its useful for non-hams to know this is a very old and unkillable meme.

There are other long lived memes in ham radio such as its impossible to build equipment at home anymore, its impossible to install/solder whatever connector everyone is using at this time (anderson powerpole for DC, PL-259 RF connectors, hardline connectors, etc), its impossible to do surface mount at home, my antenna system is great but anyone who spent less than me has a "compromise antenna" because they didn't spend as much as me, all frequency bands above which I operate are line of sight only (no matter if that's 80 meter phone band or 47 GHz the ops say it the same way). There's been trolling on the voice band segments of 80 and 20 meters since at least the 50s. Another popular meme is ham radio might be an infinitely large map to explore for a lifetime but my favorite activity is "real ham radio" with a side dish of the map may be infinitely large but how far I've gotten, no matter how small, is as large as the whole thing is. Hams do have amateur physicists who understand radio propagation vs the ionosphere as well as any professional, but there's probably two guys disseminating pure bro-science for every reality based amateur physicist, I donno if broscience counts as a meme, I guess so. There are a lot of weird memes about age and ham radio because to some extent money and time result in a longer ranged station, therefore most of the guys you'll talk to have the longest ranged most expensive stations therefore you'll get the peculiar idea that all hams are 70, whereas what it really means is if you spend a lifetime building up your station you tend to end up with a really impressive station just before you die.

I refer to the 50s alot above not because it started then, but as a third generation ham, my ancestors had a lot of old magazines and books to read when I was growing up. The hobby mostly being male and often transmitted from father to son is highly susceptible to the overall cultural trends WRT single parenthood and boys growing up without male role models.

http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/just-starting-read-this.html

"Mesh nodes can easily have a range of 10 miles or more using stock power and gain antennas if you have true line of sight"

"Mesh nodes on channels 1-6 use FCC part 97 rules instead of part 15. This allows big antennas, more power, other changes"

In lots of commercial WiFi appliances, power is software-defined. And norms have their own power index. Values can be tweaked using free software solutions/a bit of magic.

In addition with networking technologys, power amplification,...

It's totally legit, quite accurate, and underestimating the reality.

Up to 1500 watts in the US.

Various specific frequency ranges have lower limits either across the board or in specific geographical areas (e.g., there are some restrictions near the Canadian border, and near White Sands Missile Range), but I don't see any that apply to the amateur bands that overlap with wifi bands.