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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

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What service do high frequency traders provide?

Hams are weird, but at least they're hurting anyone. Theres a good argument to be made that HF trading should be banned.

Oh please, ham radio is not nearly in the same category as making bombs or committing arson. You could make your argument about pretty much any hobby (what service does growing your own vegetables provide to society? We should ban it to let commercial farming get ahead). And for what it's worth, ham radio has probably got plenty of hackers into fields like electrical engineering, so if you value what those engineers provide...

> What service does ham radio actually provide to society?

Ham radio allows the public to use slices of the radio spectrum.

If someone wanted to "hack" on RF projects, what should this person do if the entire spectrum was given to companies and governments + militaries instead?

If you are arguing against ham radio you are basically arguing against hacking, tinkering and experimenting.

You're proposing a false dilemma because there's a third option: make some of it ISM. Today, way more hacking, tinkering and experimenting happens on ISM bands than on HAM bands. I've written about this before so won't spam the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714225

The ISM bands are much, much more limited in other countries(eg duty cycle). I agree that really interesting stuff is happening in ISM space however reallocating ham allocations doesn't seem like the right path forward.

FWIW I think repealing the symbol rate restrictions and opening up bands a bit more would go a long way towards the spirit that ham was started with. The hobby seems pretty ossified these days and it would be great to see more advancements in digital modes and stuff closer to the state of the art.

Oh yeah, I'd be happy with saner HAM rules. The problem is that the community is sufficiently ossified that it actively resists such changes under the umbrella of "defending" HAM, so reallocation seems like a more practical method of change.

Or we could just leave it alone and not worry about the demands of 0.000001% who want to accumulate yet more wealth at 0 benefit to society, unlike ham operators who can help during emergencies and natural disastors when all other means are down.

The point I'm trying to make is that hobbyists vs. .0001%ers is a false framing because less restrictive rules would benefit a much wider set of users than just HFTs. If you compare the degree of open-source project activity between ISM and HAM bands the difference is night and day. Stuffing all that vibrancy into a few narrow bands while HAM activity above HF is practically dead is the opposite of a public good.

Re disaster support: complete and utter LARP to an embarrassing degree. I've been familiar with a variety of clubs all my life through participating family members and this simply doesn't happen in a way that has any practical benefit to anyone. Again, opening it up would improve disaster comms quality by incentivizing development of better protocols and by getting access to those methods out of the hands of the unqualified gatekeepers of clubs.

Yeah, I agree. We should also ban cooking your own food, painting your own walls, repairing your own car, hemming your own clothes, growing your own food, and reading to learn outside of an accredited context. The people who do these things are sick weirdos and it would be good for the economy.

> Outside of the fun aspect, the only actual use for ham radios I can think of is providing emergency communications, particularly during extreme weather events that affect the functioning of cell towers and such

Aside from the useful thing they provide, what useful thing do they provide?

We are only nine meals from anarchy. More modernly, we are only 4 technologies away from the Internet. Wired, wifi, cellular, satellite. If those get overwhelmed, which they easily do when stressed, we need to have fallbacks in place for communication. You're right that things are evolving add technology improves, but the hobby has also evolved. Morse code is no longer a requirement, for example.

HFT provides nothing useful and some would say they make the stock market even less fair unless you're in the 0.0001% who can afford to be colocated and set up near-super computers to do trading. They provide no additional service to society and tend to try and accumulate even more wealth to the already extremely lopsided wealth of the 0.1%

A true hard to censor communication channel. Not that many people use it, but I think it is reasonable trade for what would be mostly unused resource.

It’s not a huge part of the spectrum. It’s certainly the only part which any adult can access for the small cost of an exam, license, and shack. The top level amateur licenses go up to 10W!

Open radio spectrum is a natural resource like any other. It is indeed about as commercially useful as a field, a tree, or a patch of blue sky.

Ham radio license (in the US) allows up to 1500W on most bands.

Like any hobby, the point is to have fun learning something that might lead to benefits. There is a reason recreation feels good.

For example surfing is “pointless” and leads to a lot of plastic waste but… it leads to health benefits, better swimming skills and a chance to socialise.

Am I tripping or are you comparing ham radio to watching child porn on HN?

Not everything has to serve wall street or the 1%. As environmental disasters start becoming much more common we will likely need the shortwave radio operators and the government should probably be encouraging it more as the average age is increasing rather than decreasing or holding steady for ham operators. I'm not sure why people hate those things allocated to the public like ham radio, we certainly don't need to give it up for HFT. They can get by with near light speed over wire, I don't feel any sympathy for them.

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