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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

The title of this piece is "HF Ham Radio on a Budget: QRP Labs, QRPGuys, CW Academy" and probably should at least just be the first part. The article doesn't really talk about being it a golden age for amateurs except for the existence of SOTA.

It's actually a pretty bad time for HF right now because of low solar activity; in fact, it's probably one of the worst times in recent memory to try doing HF beyond SOTA.

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> pretty bad time for HF right now

Not true, the lower HF bands (80m through 20m) are excellent and there is worldwide communication happening all the time.

It's only bad if you recall periods of high sunspot activity with superb 10m and 15m conditions. Certainly something to look forward to in the next few years but not a show stopper in the least.

Also, there is now significantly more weak signal activity than in previous sunspot cycles thanks to FT8 (linked below) and MSK144.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18255849

And, FWIW, this HN post is titled in a way that makes it more useful/relevant to the general audience. The original title is aimed at existing enthusiasts.

Definitely. 17000km QSO the other day with CW on 6 watts out.

FT8 bores the crap out of me unfortunately.

I like both. FT8 is great when you want to multitask while getting on the air.

True. I do FT8 when I'm depressed from having no CW contacts. It's amazing the distance you can cover with it.

While i wouldn't call it a golden age, its definitely not a bad time if you want to do things like digital or satellite work.

New modes like FT8 really allow hams to work in at this crappy solar level. Pricing on HTs has gone down a lot due to the now illegal Chinese knockoffs, so Satellite work and local stuff is more accessible.

Personally I've only done FT8 for the last year and its great. I've been able to make contacts 8000mi+.

Got any links for getting started with SATCOM other than the SDR to weather satellite stuff you typically see?

getting started is cheap and easy:

http://www.work-sat.com/Home_files/WorkSat-08-2018a.pdf

http://www.algissalys.com/amateur-radio/aprs-over-satellites

We're certainly seeing a resurgence of audio content with podcasting. Mostly due to proliferation of mobile and ad spending rotation.

But WebSDR is pretty amazing technology. The ability for concurrent users to operate radio via internet could find broad adoption. I'm just not sure what drives it. It might be nice, in an autonomous vehicle future, for example. For idle passengers in neighboring cars to communicate with each other via voice.

University of Twente (Netherlands) Wide-band WebSDR

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

http://sdr.hu as well for even more locations

I have been using that to figure out what's on while I get my new (1982) HF rig up and running. :-)

Why is low solar activity bad for amateur radio?

HF signals need to bounce off the ionosphere to travel any distance. The more ionized the ionosphere is, the more effectively hf radio waves refract off it. High solar activity leads to higher ionization.

In ham terms, this is know as “band openings”, eg when ionospheric conditions allow hf at a given frequency to refract off the ionosphere.

Beyond the horizon transmission (radio propagation) is by bouncing signal off (refracting) the Ionosphere, which is more effective when Solar activity is at its maximum. At Solar minimum, about fifteen to 30 megahertz is screwed.

Low solar activity means that there is less EUV (extreme ultraviolet) radiation hitting the ionosphere. This leads to weaker plasma formation, as well as shifting geometries of the plasma layer. In general the lower and weaker plasma tends to restrict the range of HF transmissions attempting long distance communications via refraction through ionospheric plasma.

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