Anyone on here know anything about H.A.M. radios, or radio broadcasting in general...

Anyone on here know anything about H.A.M. radios, or radio broadcasting in general? Been interested in getting into it as a hobby, but don't exactly know to much on where to start.

Other urls found in this thread:

rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
itead.cc/airspy.html?acc=cfcd208495d565ef66e7dff9f98764da
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

No idea, but have a bump because I'm a bit curious myself too.

>where to start
arrl.org

I have a ham radio. It actually pretty boring. Ham radio is populated by grouchy old guys and a couple weirdos who are convinced it will make them some sort of god if the world ends because they will be the only ones who will be able to communicate over long distances.

Also they are crazy strict about the rules and lingo which makes it annoying to use and unless you're going to buy your own repeater and find a way to mount it high in the air you will be stuck using someone else's repeater, usually owned by a club, so there will be a bunch of other people listening and talking. Unless you use a simplex operation which will vastly limit your range of communication you will be listening to other people and they will be listening to you. Also some of the guys have enough equipment to triangulate your broadcast location so ya, that's creepy.

Is that the type of radio that let's you talk to pilots. I'm not OP, but I have zero knowledge as well.

I have an online friend in Wales and he always talks to pilots coming in and out of the UK on some sort of radio.

So in a sense theres not much to do without my own repeater is what youre saying?

you can start by doing some research and getting your operators license.

Been doing it for years, but not on the amateur bands - 27MHz, and other "pirate" bands around the shortwave spectrum. Started out of CB radio and went on from there.

look for radios that allow you listen to cop etc
it very expensive hobby

buy a baofeng 5v for $24 and fuck shit up lol

Find anything interesting over the years?

no, thats VHF and using 118-137 will get you V&
you need to have a ROC-A license for those

Haven't got anything set up at the moment, at my old place I had a 60' vertical which I could tune up anywhere on shortwave but I'm in an apartment at the moment so I've just got my receiver on a mag loop. Need to get a car so I can go mobile. I prefer 27MHz SSB, worked all round the world from England with 200 watts and various radios.

I use CB band rather than HAM, alot less rules and relaxed as a good start point.

Shame as its few and far between where i am

I fix these fucking things for a living.
Yeah I fucked up in life.

Also the people using them are nothing but grouchy old men. It's a pointless endeavour, don't waste your time. You have the internet.

My dad always has a CB in his cars because he is a truck driver. I would always get on there as a kid and fuck with some people.

But there was this retarded older guy that would use one from his home. He was really cool and he knew my dad. So we would talk to him a lot in a non-troll fashion. I felt bad because he was disabled mentally and physically, so he sat at home on his CB all day. This was pre-internet days.

Europoor sporting US license and vanity callsign reporting in!

sadly hamworld is literally full of dudes that think hamradio is not about creating and experimenting, but about buying stuff

No, HAM radio is a public area of radio bandwidth. You need a license to operate on it but it's relatively easy to get. You have to take a test to show you know the laws that govern the HAM bandwidth. Because it's public it is forbidden to use for business purposes. I don't know what those pilots are using but it's not HAM.

There's not much to do in general. The best way I can deceive it is this. I live near Detroit. The tallest building in Detroit is the renaissance center. A local club has paid to instal a repeater on top of the building making it the highest repeater in metro Detroit, probably all of Michigan. Now remember that radios work by line of sight so the higher the repeater is the farther away a person can be and have a line of sight to the tower. So long as your radio is sufficiently powerful enough people can hit that repeater from up to 30+miles away. this repeater is therefor the most popular one around. The repeaters job is to capture your incoming signal and then broadcast it back out to everyone else. Don't expect to have privacy without your own repeater and even if you do have your own repeater there is no way to stop someone else who's in range from listening in.

I think the best way to describe it is to compare a popular ham radio repeater to a chat room. People can come and go as they please and talk about whatever they feel like so long as it's within the bounds of the law and the repeater owners rules. Also if the owners want to take control to have a meeting of the club or whatever, they get precedence and you will have to refrain from speaking.

Some are even moved over to fully digital solutions these days.

It won't broadcast very far with any sort of real quality signal but you can listen in to repeaters just fine with them. I have several I use for road trips and boating.

This is one of my radios, KW202 receiver. Needs a thorough overhaul, haven't used it in years.

I got into ham radio because of a fucking internet shortage that literally blocked everything "smart" in my house for hours. I love the idea of transmitting data without some external infrastructure to rely on.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel (I agree it's way more sane buying a radio/modem/whatever than trying to build one from scratch).

Thus I think the true spirit of hamradio is either experimenting (how much performance we can get with cheap garage tools and cables and spare parts) or computer science (how much data we can push into the cheap radio/antenna setup we have).

rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
itead.cc/airspy.html?acc=cfcd208495d565ef66e7dff9f98764da
damn, it cheap now.
but all "interesting" frequencies scrambled

What is left to experiment on? We've had ham radios figured out for at least 50 years.

Also interested

Been a ham since I was twelve. Go to the ARRL website, find a local club and talk to some of the club members. They will be more than happy to share their experiences and show you their radio gear. You will meet mix of neckbeards, preppers, wanna-be paramedics and some actual normies that just love radio and electronics. These will be the guys that will probably the most useful in helping you figure out if this is something that you want to get into.

What can you do in ham radio? All kinds of shit...chit-chat, communicate around the world, make shit, talk through satellites...all kinds of stuff. There are commercial and consumer services that cover most anything that ham radio can do, so just keep in mind that this is "radio for radio's sake" - you're not going to replace your cell phone with ham radio.

This can be super-cheap to get into; there's a lot of free information, licensing tests are free from many sources and VHF/UHF transceivers start at $40. You can make an antenna out of wire and then buy a "broadcast band" radio for $400, allowing you a lot of old-school but cool shit globally. You can spend a near-infinite amount of money in this hobby, but this is for exotic shit or contesting and isn't required to enjoy the hobby.

Finally, the computer software aspect of this hobby is growing rapidly and there's a lot of stuff that programmers can do in this hobby. You can download a lot of stuff that allows you to do a lot of things - communicate in digital modes, for example, or you can create your own.

Hope this help. Good luck...

Certainly as far as HF goes, if you live in an urban environment you're probably going to be constrained in what sort of antenna you can put up. Making good in that sort of situation with wires and an ATU is a valid and challenging form of experimentation.

did this and was always frustrated, because:

- never found any decent introduction book (I'm not American)

- local hams always talk big about cryptic electrical concepts, then suddenly switch to which radio they're going to buy/sell

- local hams buy radios only to have some small talk. They use whatsapp and cellphone texts to say "hey, tune 144.5, I'm there"

This.
You can consider hamradio only if you have a high and safe place to put your antennas.

There has to be a way to send images and video through radios

Is there?

I used to be huge in to cb's in the 90's since the take over of cell phones CB's and hamming is just about dead.

actually hamradio only makes sense to preppers

Fuck Ham I have a galaxy 9000 and a base boost FTW

Not necessarily. People can work all round Europe on 80m and 40m CW with indoor antennas.

This isn't entirely accurate. I made a "loop" antenna using $100 worth of materials and have "worked" (had a verified two-way contact) with over 120 countries using a ten-watt radio. The antenna sits on a discarded IV bag hanger with a tripod bottom and had been used on my patio, a couple of balconies and the back of a boat.

Yes, multiple ways. Google "amateur radio image modes".

My father-in-law was into HAM radio for years. Back then, since there was no internet, the next best thing was to be able to connect to someone in a different state or, if conditions were just right, even another country.

Once a year his group would go to a local hill and practice emergency broadcasting with the state police. You'd think that would be obsolete these days with cell phones, but think of Puerto Rico right now. No cell towers standing. HAM communications is pretty much it down there.

...

>need a license to operate

Gotta love the government, can’t do fuck all without paying them for permission.

>implying NEED

This is the radio that really got me into DX. Ran it into a 200w amp and a 5/8 wave vertical on top of my house. Worked all over the world. Haven't fired it up in about 20 years, burned out the RF choke on the DC input and never got round to fixing it. When I get a car I'll fix it and stick it in that.

D'oh forgot the pic!

How do you burn out an inductor?

OP confirmed bald

I had a CB in my truck for a few years. Upgraded to a cobra 29LE with dual 102" and 6" pot bellys. Adventually had my radio tuned up. That truck died and I bought a new one and don't want to drill tons of holes.

Pic related old truck. You can kinda see my antennaes

Holy shit! I had one of these when I was a kid. Actually, I worked in a commercial radio store as a technician when I was in high-school and had several President radios. Presidents and several other brands were manufactured by Uniden and were among the best CBs of the time.

If I remember rightly, it was an RF feedback problem when I had a fault at the antenna end of the feeder and I was running a couple of hundred watts on FM.

They were good, yes. I used to know which chassis was which - the Cobra 148 was the other radio you used to come across a lot on 27MHz SSB, Hygain V, and so on. Gradually everyone started buying ham radios with the "out of band" protection removed and the older CB gear died away.

>You can consider hamradio only if you have a high and safe place to put your antennas.
I don't think that's what he said. My antenna is a vertical at ground level an is about 20 ft. high. I routinely reach from Midwest US to Europe and often Russia using data modes on SSB.

>implying

No I’m saying (not implying) that you NEED to get a licence to operate it...which you do. Go ahead and do it without a licence, enjoy getting V& and fined (heavily)

If I get around to building one, I'll try to remember to include a fuse to guard against things like that.

Triangulation is a thing. If you want to pirate broadcast, you'd better be in a safe jurisdiction or mobile.

Why are you telling me triangulation is a thing? Thank you captain obvious..

I’m the guy that says you need a license, I don’t have to worry about “triangulation” maybe this will help for any edgelords who think they don’t NEED a license, pic related

The FCC are hot on it, but in Europe generally nobody gives a fuck as long as you aren't causing interference to other services.

Voltage and current are two different things in this case. There is nothing complex about the RF choke in this case, the thing costs no more than a postage stamp. I wouldn't make a habit of having RF in the shack (coax feeders, after all) so there is no great panic.

> some of the guys have enough equipment to triangulate your broadcast location so ya, that's creepy.
I can just see it now. Op treats ham radio like Sup Forums then calls some crazy hermit a short dick faggot and then gets murdered.

That post alone makes me not want to talk to anyone over ham.

>took the test, and past it
yeah, a real Einstein.

ham radio is nothing but a bunch of old farts complaining that their dicks can't get hard anymore. ham radio is dead.

So what happens if you break a rule? A bunch of faggots yell at you? Are they somehow going to ban your radio?

you buy a Pofung Baofeng for less than a pizza and you can label yourself as ham amateur hamradio hamham hoperator

FEMA is begging for licensed hams to help out with the Puerto Rico thing.

It's rare, but it still does have a purpose now and then.

If you break it bad enough and often enough bored hams will use RF finders and locate you, FCC tends to fine big and often when people get caught.

Odds are still low, but FCC doesn't fuck around when they do finally catch someone.

If you really follow all the laws, which most people don't, the Baofeng is illegal to transmit inside the US.

Your mom is a ham radio. No actually. Sorry. A ham station.

nope.

she's a hamplanet

>H.A.M. radio
> the type of radio that let's you talk to pilots
>Wales... talks to pilots
>I don't know what those pilots are using

Ham radio guy here. KMG365.
Been in the hobby for years, started as a colonel, worked my way up to general and now I'm an ultra.
Pilots use AM modification. That stands for Aircraft Mode.
Wales use USB, that stands for Under Sea Band.
They can't talk to each other on H.A.M.
'76!

HAM was originally an insult used by morse code operators to describe someone who sucked at Morse, "ham fisted".

It stuck, and came to mean someone who operated as an "amateur".

>Wales use USB, that stands for Under Sea Band.

There used to be a myth on CB back in the day that you'd "get out" better on USB than LSB, because obviously the upper sideband was better at going over hills and shit.

then USB 2.0 came out

>My reaction when i found this

mastergadget.doomstuff.com

Can someone send me a good barnes and noble link or something to a book where I could learn the basics?

Also I don't understand how can they use RF finders to find someone

Would that be a Hamateur?

I’ve seen her, ham galaxy

>be me, teen, living in a large city in late 1980's
>local hamradio club full of dudes, not even a single female
>suddenly news spread about a local female hamradio operator, online at random times
>literally everyone is trying to identify her, triangulate her, doxx her, flirt with her on FM USB LSB AM
>months late one of the most faggot members of the club eventually spots her antenna on a 3 storey apartment building
>he awaits her for hours, lucky noone called the police about this guy sitting in his car
>he tells her he wants to see her face, "plz plz come out on the balcony!"
>dozens of other hams literally twisting their stomachs out of envy and jealousy
>the fattie eventually comes out on the balcony
>"owwww she's a true goddess" shouts the stalker in the mic before turning on the engine and run away with the force of a thousand suns
>she turned down many dudes, had ham orbiters floating around her even 15 years later when she eventually married a non-ham dude
>epic times

tldr, vintage attentionwhoring

that's awesome

google rtl dongle and sdr sharp its very cheap to listen

>Raspberry pi FM.
>Broadcast nuclear alert on popular radio frequency.
>???
>Profit?

step up the game

>Broadcast "Traps are gay" alert on popular radio frequency.

>Broadcast Notorius KKK

Splice soundbites of dubbya and make him admit to 9/11