There's another way to do this. 30+ years ago I added an MX record for my callsign to the ampr.org DNS. Back then Brian Kantor was the admin out of UCSD. He passed several years ago and I'm not sure who's running it now. The DNS is intended to resolve ampr.org domains to IPs on AMPRNET (not Internet), but they are bridged so it doesn't matter.
I'm strongly inclined not to trust this without more info on who is behind it and how well secured their infrastructure is.
As the center of online identity, email is incredibly vulnerable -- even more so than access to a person's phone number. Don't use email by anyone you can't trust to respect your privacy and especially to keep it safe from malicious, capable third party threat agents.
Also, when you provide your callsign to them, they have access to your home address because of it being an FCC requirement. So you have to be willing to give up your privacy whenever you mention your callsign.
So if you use your callsign as your email address, anyone who receives an email from you will know your name and home address.
You don't have to give the FCC your home address. You only have to give them an address that you can receive mail at. This can be a P.O. box, a relatives house, your local ham club, etc
It still connects your online identity with a physical address associated with you in some way. That's a lot more info than an email address alone ought to supply.
When using ham radio, you must transmit your callsign and therefore show your identity. Also all ham communication must be unencrypted. There's really no way to conceal your identity and operate legally. If this isn't for you, then don't participate. Having an email tied to your callsign is just for ease of communication. Someone can send an email to my callsign@winlink.org and it will be relayed to me over a ham radio mesh network to my receiver. Totally open but I just wouldn't use it for anything I wouldn't want someone else to see.
Just like with social media networks, one may have multiple accounts with different rings of contacts. One ring might be people they know in real life and another might only be online "friends" they don't really trust with knowing their real identity.
If you use your own domain you'd also have that same kind of connection in the whois records. You can of course bypass that by using other information in there but it will be the equivalent of using a PO box.
Understood, but you have to think of this before you register your callsign because they publish the history of addresses that have been used. So it's too late for someone like me, who has already used his home address. The PO box would be the most private, at whatever cost that is. I would definitely not want to use my work address (which is what many people recommend), because anyone receiving an email from me would know my name and employer.
> I'm strongly inclined not to trust this without more info on who is behind it and how well secured their infrastructure is.
A teenager, it seems:
> DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT. QSL cards and using it for basic contact is fine, however, using this in place of say a hotmail address is not ill-advised, seeing as this service is ran by a high-schooler and I cannot guarantee an SLA.
I can and will assume whoever is behind this is most definitely not a ham operator nor someone in that community on account of the website not looking like something from 1995.
If there's anything I found to be common of all the ham operators I've met or heard of, it's that they're all electrical engineers at heart with not a single fuck in the world available for form or aesthetics. Jank and old-fashioned are their pride and passion.
Source: Father is ham operator, has the time of his life janking it up with his ham friends who likewise jank it up.
Hello! I am the person that made this service. I am a relatively new ham and I thought the domain was cool so I picked it up. I'm a high-school student, lol
I'm happy to be pleasantly proven otherwise, wishing you best of luck.
Kudos on POP3 support. I never liked IMAP as I've always preferred to keep my emails between the server and client stored independently. Call me old fashioned, albeit in a different vector from hams.
I’m a licensed operator and I’m not an electrical engineer, I got my license in order to operate a radio telescope when I was a physicist. Websites I build are more modern than this, and I do have one for ham radio resources. There’s your counterexample.
I am unfamiliar with how radio telescopes work, do you transmit as well as receive on them? If you transmit, I assume you send your callsign as well every 10 minutes? Do you run into issues staying below 1500W/200W PEP?
I was sending not very high powered pulse signals at the time and observing response signals. The signals were automated with gnuradio. Callsign was part of my automated sequence, sent periodically.
Now, most of the work done with radio telescopes are passive, but they are really just large dishes capable of receiving any radio signal, including ham stuff.
There is so much truth to this statement -- all ham websites, even my own are straight HTML or at least 10-15 years behind modern web standards... and we like it that way.
Well, not a ham operator myself, but one of my friends (a Swede, living parttime in Denmark, married to a Dutch woman) is one, and has an IT business in which he (also) delivers websites. So I guess, anecdotally, not all ham operators are 10-15 years behind. (Actually, he even operates from e.g. his car, operating either his Sweden or his Denmark radio through his ‘microphone connected to it’ using a ‘very long cable running through the internet’. Not really old school there.)
Oooh, check out Mr. Five-digit-user-id over here (for the kids: an old /. reference).
The user name is their radio callsign, which you can look up in the FCC database. I don't know how much more attachment to a "real-world identity" you're looking for.
Ad-hominem much? It sure matters who the person in question making the statement is, but what's particularly relevant here, and to my comment, is that it's not easily discernible who they are.
I love this kind of thing and massively encourage the (seemingly very young!) operator to keep their desire to provide useful and interesting stuff for their community. People who do that carry on their crafts and interests to a new generation and are to be applauded.
One thing I'd add that's slightly less positive is.. well, running email infrastructure is a huge PITA when it goes wrong. Be careful!
Neat, but I wish there were more information. I'm an active ham but curious about how much space I get, are my emails encrypted or readable on the server, etc.
Storage is 1GB by default (you can ask for more when you reach that limit), and emails are sorta encrypted. I find it weird that emails are ‘encrypted’ with a key pair that are on the same email server. I’m going to attempt to find a way to make emails encrypted with your own key/pass combination.
Nice idea! However, I can't seem to access the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which are required to be agreed to in order to sign up. (Yes, I am one of the ~12 people in the world who actually read those.) Are these available anywhere?
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I haven’t planned to keep it in /root. It ran as a separate user, but in that directory. Plus that thing only contains the homepage and the form, not emails, accounts, attachments, etc. That’s also ran as a separate user (as mailcow is dockerised)
I recently setup a new domain with a wildcard forwarder (e.g. *@newdomain -> my real email). I hand out specific names to companies that want emails, and if they bug me I just blackhole that address.
It has worked well so far, though it might break down eventually if the domain gets spammed? Not sure.
Anyways, the domain I used has a 5-character TLD, and some sites have rejected it for that reason. Just a word of warning that >3 char TLDs might not be universally useful.
Those sites probably store passwords in plaintext too.
In my experience trying to send email from any address with something other than .com, .net, .org, and most 2-character country TLDs automatically counts against it by spam blockers to the point where users have to whitelist the address to see any emails (and even then they sometimes don't get them). Even newer three-character TLDs like .xyz are practically useless for sending emails.
I did this as well and have liked it for the most part, but would also recommend using an older, established TLD.
I went with `.email` because... it just seemed fitting at the time and it's been depressing how many sites won't allow it because it's "not a valid domain". Or worse, I've been able to register an account successfully only to be blocked by the login form which uses a different validation configuration (looking at you, REI).
I don't want to discourage your enthusiasm but please think carefully about this.
It might be a fun project now but let me say a few things.
What's going to happen in a year or two when you lose interest or get too busy with other things? I'm sure you give no guarantees so you have no real obligation but nobody likes to disappoint people.
What's going to happen when something stops working while you're away for a long weekend and someone foolish enough to use this as their primary email address is waiting for something important?
I've done vaguely similar things on a small scale for friends but I will never host mailboxes again. They are a PITA. They tend to grow. Some IMAP implementations can be heavy on resources. Migration can be a pain if you want to move to another server.
I'll happily to do email forwarding for friends at a hobby level but not be responsible for storing mail. It's just not worth the trouble.
Free is not sustainable if it gets popular.
With that out the way, welcome to ham radio. I've been a ham since I was 14 and that was over 50 years ago :) My interest and activity level have fluctuated over the years but I still do some digital modes on HF and like to listen around with an SDR.
You’re totally right. Maintaining this service will be a toll and in a few years, I may not be interested in this.
My current plan is if I ever do have to shut down email.radio, I’ll have the servers up for at least an extra year, then allow people to fetch their data for a couple of extra years.
Currently, I’m trying to get email.radio into a ‘low-maintenance’ stage. Meaning, I won’t need to login to the host server practically ever, only to update the mailcow instance.
I have plans to keep this sustained for quite a while, as I would like someone to place on my resume, lol.
For email.radio, I tend to just match the IP location to the address listed on the license. I also thought about using the navigator.geolocation location API to automatically verify users, but that could easily be spoofed.
I do know that some use postcards and make you upload your official license. EchoLink has an option to charge your card $1 to match your billing address to your callsign address automatically.
The database of licenses is public through the the ULS [0], and ae7q [1] has a bunch of archives and information about how to use that and provides tools itself that I used when finding a vanity.
Verifying lisences is a messy process. Most processes I have experenced ask for an uploaded (official copy) pdf from the FCC ULS. LOTW sends a postcard to the registered address. LOTW certs can be used to “prove” your identity but it’s more complicated than most will endure.
I'm not a ham operator, though I debated it a few years ago, I just don't even know where to start, and have zero equipment. I wonder if a better email would be to match your call sign, I assume you have to announce it when communicating with new people? Or am I making a bad assumption, even so, that would maybe make it much easier for someone to figure out how to get to you via email.
Is there a primer somewhere that tells us someone, who is interested but knows pretty much nothing about all this yet, what all this means?
As in what are the equipments one must have (as bare minimum), or should have, what are the daily uses (other than things like helping out during disaster etc)? What are the fun aspects of it - for someone who is setting into and not from an “old timer’s” pov?
I am mostly curious about what it would be mean to use it actually. Will one need to have huge antennas and consoles etc? Or something handheld works and if it’s handheld then how short the range is?
Whenever I try to read about it, almost everywhere it immediately becomes pedantic and jargon filled.
Ham Radio is incredibly diverse, and different people get different things out of it.
Many people get a basic license and use a handheld radio to talk to people in their area through a "repeater" (basically a big range extender) on VHF/UHF frequencies (~140MHz or ~440MHz) - that'll give you several miles of range to chat with locals.
You can go further and get a mobile or home base station with a fancy antenna to get more range, while still essentially doing the same thing.
A lot of people have fun with "DXing" (distance communications). There are a few different approaches to DXing. Most people set up a home or mobile base station with a big (but can be very cheap, just a wire) antenna for use on lower frequency bands ("HF"; from a couple MHz to a couple dozen), which can have much higher range than VHF/UHF. There are some people that use atmospheric conditions to get higher range on VHF/UHF though.
Some others connect their radio (handheld or base station) to their computer to set up long range computer networks.
There are endless other uses, but a common thread is that they're quite technical and it's very personality driven. If you're a computer enthusiast, you might enjoy mesh networks, AX.25 (networking protocol), or FT-8 (extremely durable protocol for low power long range DXing). If you like building things, building your own radios and antennae can be fun. And if you just like talking to similarly nerdy people, you can grab a handheld and get chatting.
I personally am looking to get into DXing with FT-8 soon - I want to put together a mobile setup that runs completely offline. FT-8 requires a synchronized clock (within 1s accuracy) so I want to get a laptop set up with GPS time. Then, I've gotta find a radio I can rig up to the laptop, probably at a hamfest flea market. The ultimate result of that is that I'll be able to communicate directly with other hams on the other side of the globe (ideally!) from a laptop in my car.
In the Internet age, ham radio isn't really all that practical. It's fun to tinker with though!
I've setup quite a light mobile FT-8 setup in case you are interested.
I'm using the FT8CN Android app and a truSDX radio. USB cable from the radio into my phone powers the radio as well as sends/receives the audio.
For antenna I'm just using a hamstick on the roof.
This only puts out about half a watt but I was getting out about 2500-3000km away. You could then have an alternative power source like a battery to get around 5 watts.
I hadn't heard of the truSDX - I'll probably pick one up! Seems like the cheapest new HF radio with computer control out there, sounds perfect for getting started. I would assume I can connect it to a 12V socket in my car for full power.
I'd be happy to exchange emails or even hop on a zoom with you to talk about ham radio! Let me know. I've given presentations to various groups to demystify it a bit.
Not a ham myself, but my father is. With that context, as far as I understand:
* Minimum equipment necessary is as simple as a walkie talkie, though if you want to have an actual "radio station" per se you need an antenna and a transceiver and the wiring to hook it all up. Note that a ham license concerns transmitting radio signals, if all you want to do is just receive ham radio signals you don't need a license.
* Ham radio exists for anything that falls under communications. Communications during an emergency is an oft cited use case, but if you just want to talk shit with your ham friend across the continent or even the world one random Tuesday evening that's perfectly fine too.
* The fun aspects of ham radio lie in the electrical engineering aspect and the communication aspect. You need to have proper understanding of all things electricity to fully understand and appreciate what goes into transmitting radio waves, and that might be something you find fun. If you find the idea of talking to someone just because you can fun, that's also something ham radio can satisfy.
Amateur radio is a series of narrow regulatory carve-outs of the radio spectrum for the public good, somewhat like a national park. It has existed since the discovery of radio itself. RF is now a mature formal engineering discipline, but the underlying knowledge and practice has also been passed down through amateur channels for generations in an almost guild-like fashion. It is now one of the very few sanctioned ways in which a person interested in radio may put their own electrical components together and see how it works on a workbench.
In the US there are two major distinctions between licenses. The basic Technician class license mainly lets you access VHF and up - these radio waves propagate based on line of sight. The general focus in this area of the spectrum comes from the sheer utility of radio.
Then, the General and Extra class licenses let you operate more fully on shortwave. These are lower frequencies that interact with the ionosphere, giving them the curious property of reaching around the planet. (Extra opens up a little more spectrum, and is recognized by some international treaties allowing you to operate while abroad).
The basic starter equipment for a technician is a handheld or mobile radio. The line-of-sight limitation on VHF is overcome by the use of repeaters. A no-stakes way to sample the activity in your vicinity is to get an RTL-SDR dongle and tune in to the 2 meter and 70 cm amateur bands.
The classic starter kit for a general is an HF radio and homemade dipole. The radio will realistically cost a couple hundred dollars, but the antenna can be just scrap wire and modest coax cable. The size of the antenna is determined by the wavelength at which it operates. The two most common beginner bands are 20M and 40M. A dipole for those wavelengths is about 33' and 66' of wire respectively, but the wire does not have to run in a straight line. You can use a WebSDR to peek in on the activity for free.
My personal interest in all of this is SOTA -- Summits On The Air. It is a radio sport that involves taking portable shortwave transmitters up to mountain peaks. It is equal parts exploration, since many of the peaks in my region lack even trail access; and invention, as the physical realities of mountain climbing necessitate radios and antennas made for the purpose. The actual radio exchange from the peak is simple - who is calling, how well they can hear you, and where they are located, and maybe a pleasantry or two. There is a great deal of camaraderie from the other operators, and you never know whether your next contact will come from San Francisco or coastal France.
It's such a broad hobby that there isn't really a least common denominator. The easiest way to get into it is probably voice chat on VHF — a cheap Baofeng brand handheld radio and a license will get you on the air and you can decide if you want to spend a few hundred USD on a better radio.
But these days, a lot of stuff can be done using cellular+internet that used to be the domain of hams. Voice comms can be fun (the local repeater nets kept me sane during pandemic isolation) but they're not exotic any more. The other corners of the hobby are kind of esoteric. It's hard to say what might interest you.
For me (relatively young, definitely in the ham radio circles) I like two activities: Summits on the Air and Parks on the Air.
Summits on the Air - take your gear to a mountain summit and attempt to make at least 4 contacts.
Parks on the Air - take your gear to a state/federal/provincial/national park and attempt to make at least 10 contacts.
Check out Ham Radio Crash Course on YouTube. He has a bunch of great stuff for people interested. From there hopefully one of the areas will pique your interest and you can go down the rabbit hole from there.
If you want to bike, the bare minimum is "any bike". It's too small? Someone else bought a BMX to have a small bike. You find one in the scrap that's rusty? Someone else enjoys cleaning the rust off and tidying up old bikes. You find one with a single working gear? Someone else busy is turning their bike into a single-gear fixie to save weight. Someone recommends you a heavy but solid mountain bike, someone else recommends you a light road bike - they are at odds, how do you choose? You ask what are the daily uses of a bike and people will tell you commuting and grocery shopping and transport, but those aren't the hobby of biking - nobody commutes as a hobby. Hobbies are "playing with the thing" and play is personal. You ask what the point of riding 50 miles in a day is, people might tell you it's for exercise but exercise isn't a hobby - or rather, people whose hobby is exercise are the people who are pedantic and jargon filled about exercise things like VO2max and HIIT schedules and etc. The point of hobbies is that you spend your time doing thing-you-like-doing and if you have a geeky personality that generally means taking an interest in the pedantic intricate details of thing-you-like-doing.
"In ancient Etruscan they actually had a word ending for differentiating between a <grammar jargon> and <a grammar jargon> but it was only used on Holy days in one province and..."
"ok but who cares? where's the fun in that?"
"That is the fun in that!"
"What daily use is it?"
"..."
The job of programming is to build what your employer pays you for, but the hobby of programming is "can I build a trie in my favourite weirdo language so I can understand how tries work?" and "can I get this Arduino to run my code if I'm only willing to power it with this small spare solar panel?" and "can I get JavaScript and WebGL to draw the Julia Fractal with GPU acceleration just to see if I can do it?" and "can I make a playable game in a pure functional language and how will I manage game state to do that?" and there's no daily use for these things, they are wildly different. Yes you can use (language, data structure, algorithm, technology) in your day job, but that's not really the point. In that case it's job training not hobby. The point of them as a hobby isn't to achieve things it's to spend your time doing thing you find interesting. (Yes, some people like achieving things as a hobby and work on OSS tools as if it were their job).
Looking for a daily use of a hobby is looking for the wrong thing, and looking for other people's fun to copy is also looking for the wrong thing. You can't ape other people's fun, because you aren't other people.
My dad volunteers for amateur radio as a method of comms at rural events, but they all bring cellphones because they are better for comms. The radio is an excuse to get out to the event, and the event is an excuse to play with radio. He also takes part in a friendly competition to take portable radio gear up hills and make contact from the top. The radio is a reason to get outside and climb a hill, the competition is a reason to take some radio gear and play with radio. And it's run from the internet and smart phones because they're better for organizing and reliable fast comms.
> "I am mostly curious about what it would be mean to use it actually."
Some people buy a radio and sit in a shed and talk, some people limit themselves to Morse code and try to communicate over noisy channels, some people try to connect to people as far away as possible using limited radio power, some people track the atmosphere conditions and try to bounce radio waves off the upper atmosphere to make long range communications, some people pack portable equipment and climb hills and make radio contact from the top to get points in friendly competitions, some people find old equipment from junk sales and challenge themselves to make it work and connect it up to whatever else they have, some people like to argue about which manufacturer is better and which technology is needed.
The hobby originally (a century ago) was "wtf is radio??" and the bare minimum isn't any specific product or technology, it's an interest in wireless electricity and a thread that interests you to pull on.
There are a number of intros to ham radio, ARRL has https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio but searching for "intro to ham radio" will give you plenty of hits. Also YouTube channels such as hamradiomadesimple, TheSmokinApe, HamRadioCrashCourse, etc. also may be of interest.
As far as activities, the sky isn't even the limit! Sort of a joke there as there are all sorts of radio astronomy / space-related RF, a few are: bouncing signals off meteor trails and aurora, communicating w/ satellites and the ISS, pulling weather imagery straight from NOAA satellites, conducting EME ("earth-moon-earth") communications, the list goes on.
You really don't need huge antennas or anything like that unless you start getting into something very specific and/or high power. Even using the lower frequency band (still called "HF" high frequency), you can use a very small diameter wire that you can temporarily toss up in a tree and talk to people around the world. The length of that wire grows the lower in frequency you are operating but it's still a small light wire you can wind up and toss in a pack.
You can buy a Baofeng UV5R handheld ("HT") for under $20 USD and start listening to people on local repeaters and listen in on weekly "nets" conducted on those repeaters straight away. A repeater is just a powerful station that is ideally somewhere high that rebroadcasts your communication to a wider area than a handheld could do. You'll see some criticism of that radio and other budget radios by some of the more grumpier types but they are a great way to get started for not a lot of money. You can also listen to NOAA radio weather reports with one, which is particularly useful if you are in an emergency situation, power outage, etc. If you get licensed (hamstudy.org is a great resource for this) then you can talk on those repeaters and direct ("simplex") to other local hams.
That Baofeng handheld operates on VHF and UHF bands, specifically the 2 meter band and 70 cm bands (you'll typically see bands listed in meters and millimeters, this is roughly how long the radio wave [wavelength] is for that band - e.g. 2 meter band is 144 MHz to 148 MHz, and a 148 MHz radio wave is 2.053373 meters long) These bands aren't really great for long distance communication. You can make/buy an antenna and make a contact with the astronauts on the ISS though!
Depending on your interests, it's a lot of fun building radios from kits or completely doing it yourself. There's a whole subset of "QRP" (reduced power) communications where people use tiny low power radios and still make contacts around the world. There's an activity called POTA (Parks On The Air) and SOTA (Summits On The Air) where people will set up in a park or on a mountaintop and try and make as many contacts as they can in a period. You'll often see them using small QRP low-power radios.
You can send images and video (SSTV - Slow Scan TV and ATV - Amateur Fast Scan TV) over the air, there are lots of digital modes / packet radio where you can send emails, messages, and a plethora of other activities.
SDR (Software Defined Radio) is fun as well, they are basically USB sticks you can hook up to a computer and receive a wide range of signals. I run one that monitors for ADS-B beacons on nearby aircraft and I feed that to some of the flight tracking sites. You can listen to shortwave broadcasts from other countries and pretty much everything mentioned above (and more!) You can check out some online at http://websdr.org/
If you're coming at RF/radio stuff from more of the programming side, SDRs might be a more interesting option. I got my license in college and I was the only one at the test under 50, and I never really found ham radio to be very interesting.
This video series by Michael Ossmann is fantastic:
Idk what happened with all the FPV tech and drone pilots everywhere eg. DJI goggles. When I was doing this stuff in 2012 you were suppose to have an amateur license if your video transmitter power was over 25 mW.
If you happen to attend DEFCON the Ham Radio Village is awesome. They run exams you can take and will help you to understand any questions you missed. https://hamvillage.org/
For ham operators, there's Winlink, which is an email system that uses ham frequencies to exchange messages. And yep, there are rules where you need to say your call sign periodically, and Winlink does that on your behalf.
Regardless of where you are located in the world try and find a local ham radio club. Lots of them have classes, my local club even has a 22 and under chairman with special events for younger hams.
If not investigate your country's national organization. In America its arrl.org and in Great Britain its RSGB.org. I was in Munich this summer and the local club has been given an entire room in the science museum and they've set up an entire station there.
Find your local clubs and go to some meetings or see what kinds of things they are doing. I did a lot of infrastructure work - bringing my existing skills and going to remote mountain tops to climb towers and hang antennas and long distance (25+ mile) data links.
Other people like to see how many distant contacts they can make, others are into mesh networking and others doing communications for events like marathons.
Yeah, I'm a little surprised if ARRL doesn't have a way to get forwarding setup for <callsign>@arrl.org or something. Every call sign has an associated (postal) mailing address that's public information anyway.
Study for both the Technician and General licenses. I think it's universal that if you pass the Tech, you can take the General at the same time for free.
The tests are 35(IIRC) multiple choice questions out of a pool of several hundred.
Perhaps an overview of FCC amateur radio licensing in the U.S. is in order:
The (entry level) Technician license gives ALL amateur privileges above 30 MHz - that's the bottom of the VHF region and up. So that's all VHF, UHF, and microwave bands and modes (FM, sideband, AM, digital...) allocated to U.S. hams, at maximum power levels permitted to hams. Small allocations in a few HF bands below 30 MHz with limited power levels and modes are also included to offer Technician class licensees a taste of shortwave operations.
The General license adds access to much (or all) of each HF (shortwave) amateur radio band (frequencies lower than 30 MHz), including all the modes permitted there, and full power. Having access to all the ham HF bands means you can choose the band that is working best for you at any given time.
The Amateur Extra license adds access to the remaining parts of HF bands that are not fully allocated to General licensees. In other words, there's some "Extra only" sections of several popular HF bands. There's a handful of other minor privileges as well, not directly related to frequencies, power, or modes.
The Technician license requirements must be completed before taking the General exam, just as General is required for Amateur Extra. However, all three tests may be taken at one exam session as long as each respective test gets a passing score (70% or better).
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/11/24/0051236/brian-kanto...
Anyway, my mail server still gets mail to (anything)@(my call).ampr.org. Of course it's mostly spam.
https://www.ardc.net