I got my amateur radio class mostly for college...

yea its cool because you can study the way people communicate and then you can work up your ham radio rep by knowing the call signs and morse code.
plus you can talk to people from undisclosed locations, suppose if you were going on a 2 week trip, you could pop out your backpack and message in a care package, kind of like the military

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I got licenced to play with wire, and to be let into the sekret clubs for playing with wire. (Actually, those sekret clubs are rather cool.. One of them has a warehouse-sized swapmeet once a month.)

Almost zero motivation to do the QSO thing-- but I expect I'll give it a go when I've built something. (The Novice-level licence I'm on doesn't allow transmitting with my own homebrew.) At the moment it's getting hardware together for the Receive side of things-- RTL-SDR, etc.

I do own a rig, a FT7900 for 2m/70cm. I would've loved a uBITX... but they suffered from "The Raspberry Pi Result" in being all bought up in seconds by Rich White People, when they were supposed to be a lower-income intro radio.

We're over at /hamradio/

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Q code is Finnish-tier hard for me

My country's Advanced Licence is 2x 50 question multiple-choice exams. A pass needs 100% correct in the regulations paper, but just 70% correct for the other. I'm hoping there aren't 15 or more Q-code questions...

It's too bad it doesn't teach you how to write properly.

Software radio is genuinely interesting. HAM radio is more about emergency preparedness and old farts talking about gear. If you want to transmit, you'll need a license.

The technicians license is super easy. The General license isn't much more difficult. The Amateur Extra has many more questions from a much larger pool. The General and Amateur Extra will get you a few more frequencies that you can use.

There's a free program on Linux called hamexam that you can use to study. If you're in the US, you can look up where to take the test on the ARRL website. You're not required to know Morse Code for any of the tests. There are some general ohm's law and electrical component questions you might need to brush up on.

Do you get a special badge if you get a high enough ham radio rep?

You get a badge for turning on the radio. :^)

The hobby is what you make of it. Like another user said it's a hobby made up of tons of different sub-hobbies. The wackers playing rescue ranger thinking they will be the hero when the nukes go off and a few radio cop wannabe's are just a highly visible minority. The OO's and such are all dead and gone.
The FCC doesn't give a shit about amateur radio anymore and the bands mostly self moderate. If you are not QRMing anyone or being a dick people are nice. Just getting your callsign is really the only rule that actually matters.

I have a decent HF setup but don't really get on and ragchew much. Lots of older buzzards like to hang out on SSB down in 160/80. 40m is like the /b/ or CB radio sometimes.
Lots of younger people are in to the digital modes because of the mix of computers and radio. I mostly mess around with the weak signal stuff like WSPR
wsprnet.org/drupal/

AMSAT can also be fun
amsat.org/

SSTV is pure autism and easy to get in to now. All you need is a radio and a PC with a sound card.

Around me 2m/440 FM is dead except for a few old burnouts who refuse to get with the times. DMR has taken over in a big way.
If you think you can get by with a fm only Bofang HT you are going get board mighty fast.

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THIS. If you aren't into radio itself and RF engineering as a hobby don't waste your time. If you aren't already into SWL or satcom or something similar, you should probably try those out first. You don't need a license to receive.

shit codec

It does sound like shit. But it won because its an open standard. ICOM, yaesu, and Kenwood where greedy kikes and each tried to own digital with their own incomparable proprietary codec's. A few people actually fell for the D-Star meme.

It also helps that there is a ton of MotoTRBO gear out there and now the chinks are making DMR radios for 70bux.
Here is the netwatch on one of the bigger DMR networks. During the day it's jamming wile the FM repeater networks are ghost towns.
trbo.org/cBridge/netwatch.html

The simplex data and "texting" capabilities is one part of DMR that is not completely shit. The TDMA part is completely not shit. Being able to run 2 separate voice conversations or voice and data at the same time on a single freq is neat.

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*incompatible

You've done the Australian Foundation Licence, I see.

Something neat I go up and going last night-- all the click-and-drool... I mean.. cool kids.. are flooding the air with the FT8 mode atm. There's nothing anything really new about it-- except giving a One-Click-Install download for Windows users. (There's a QRSS guy crying because his area of the hobby required a little bit of /effort/ to start with.)

Anyway, I'd been ignoring FT8 because of its Normie Fad appeal, but I did have a go at trying to compile the source for WSJT-X, and actually got it to build. (Which was unexpected, given that Hams always use some fucking shit Windows IDE/environment. Something I looked at a few days ago was written in 2017, in goddamn Borland Turbo C++)

Okay, I am slightly impressed now that WSJT-X could get Russian and Spanish stations with just a cheap handheld SW radio using its telescope antenna.

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Kenwood hopped on the dstar meme now too actually.

..for college? I'd like to know what that's about. (Admission credit?)

This, its one of the tightest circlejerks in existence. They'll hunt you down by triangulating your location, kick down your door and basically SWAT you for intruding on their sekrit boomer club

mount a radio transmitter on a quadcopter and use it to troll hamplanets

I joined for the fun of it, the appeal of ham radio is that it's an independent source for communication when all else fails. also, radios can sometimes operate in cell-phone dead-zones.

If you really want to get transmit distance out of your setup, that's the part where it gets expensive. VHF/UHF bands have most of their activity through repeaters, those bands don't have much simplex activity aside from the ARRL band-plan freqs. simplex gets most of it's activity through the HF and lower bands, and the entry-level base stations are easily $1100+ USD. if you just want to listen to HF or lower, make a long-wire antenna and hook it up to a shortwave radio with something simple.

if you really wanna shitpost or listen to shitposts on the airwaves, 7.2mhz 14.313mhz and 3.699mhz will be your best bets. some hams are autistic about the law, but really the FCC comes after you only if you transmit without a callsign, spam the airwaves, or operate with power levels so high that your neighbors' TV speakers start outputting your broadcasts.

VE7KFM, is that you? probably not, but I would be amused if he actually uses 8ch

Well I guess we will see how far that goes. They also make DMR radios.

1st gen Mototrbo (dmr) repeaters are starting to hit the 2nd hand market bigly and that seems to be a driving factor pushing the armatures to DMR over anything else.
Also the chinks actually pulled off a decent little dmr portable with the TYT Tytera MD-380. 90bux and it comes with the programming cable.
Repeaterfags are cheap. DMR is popular not because its open but because it's the most affordable.

They are down to 1 enforcement officer for all of new england. They dont even bust radio pirates on the broadcast bands now unless there is a serious interference issue.
FCC is to busy sucking cellular carrier cock to worry about that happens on the ham bands.

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Do you believe that people should have the right to pollute shared resources? Ham radio is a shared resource that everyone ought to use with responsibility. Don't shit up our water supply and don't shit up our radio space.

We're all shitting up the internet right now, aren't we?

I normally don't consider shitposting on a website to affect the rest of the Internet. Doing things like the DOS of fundamental DNS servers or the automated exploition of public vulnerabilities to be a different matter.

What's stopping a group of people just continuously broadcasting an annoying tone? I'd guess th expense of the equipment is the barrier to entry?

Shitposting on a website is more akin to bantering in a bar.
Shitposting on the airwaves would be more like blocking the highway/road

< blocking the highway/road
Oh no, how long before BlackLivesMatter 's Jewish backers find out about radio?

personally, I haven't met an elitist ham. Now, I know that they exist but the majority of hams aren't like that. The hams that I have met have been really helpful. But most hams tend to view ham radio as a privilege; they want you to get your license and callsign and play things by the book, so that FCC (or whatever) doesn't add new restrictions for hams. And secondly, most hams want you to get a license and callsign because when (if) you get a license, it means you know the basics how to operate a transceiver and the customs of ham radio. Thirdly, hams despise those brainlets who give CB radio its bad name and they want to keep those out.

the costs aren't necessarily that high. You can get a cheap walkie-talkie (a wouxun or similar) for abt

Yes.
On HF its cost, effort, and knowledge. Pick any 2.

On VHF and UHF any idiot can set up a mobile radio or HT and get on the air. But your range would be very limited and it would be easy to triangulate.

And you just don't get that much feedback. You can't hear when your TXing and people will just move to another freq. Its not like shitpostong on a chan or social media where you can get feedback reading all the reactions.

the /b/ of repeaters

broadcastify.com/listen/feed/14747
your435.com/

Fuck you, ham should be deregulated by the FCC. If people want their precious sekrit clubs let them encrypt it.

If you don’t have your technician ticket at least you’re a total pleb and belong on cuck /g/. There is just no excuse.

Encryption does nothing if a faggot is keying 24/7 with 500kW on any given frequency

The bantz.

Yes because that works so well on law enforcement.

This would make sense if the rules were just about air wave traffic, but there are rules about content as well. IE I can't sing a song telling you to go fuck yourself over the radio, and that is just wrong.

Do you understand words or are you just a meme loving fuck?

Protip: the FCC turns a blind eye to encryption if it's being used for "remote admin" purposes

bump