As the internet gets more balkanized, censored, and controlled by a few giant companies, it makes me think that it's time for a different hobby. Something that can be used to subvert censorship (remember the whole "interprets it as damage and routes around it" conceit?) and is more hobbyists and less corporate sounds appealing.
Is Ham that hobby? I am genuinely asking. A few days ago a thread here had lots of people agreeing it was mostly old dudes being boring. But I like the idea that maybe I (in Europe) can talk to my friend (in the US) by bouncing radio waves off the moon, or some such, and not relying on intermediaries.
Amateur radio is not that hobby. There are significant restrictions on what it can be used for. And providing uncensored communication for others is not allowed.
Amateur radio is not for public use like public park. It is like a public golf course, where have to pay for membership and can only use it for certain things.
Also, amateur radio does not have that much spectrum for the bandwidths we expect for internet. That is what has kept the spectrum from being taken away.
Much of the high frequenecy spectrum does have is shared with ISM bands.
I agree that understanding the restrictions on HAM usage - including the ban on encryption, and strict rules on what kind of material can be broadcast (since anyone can hear it) - is really important.
You don't have to pay ongoing fees: the initial outlay in the USA is $35 for the license (you have to pass the exam) plus the cost for your equipment (~$70 for the cheaper HAM radios on Amazon), but after that there are no ongoing charges.
You don't have to take the test again. I believe you only have to take the test if your license expires at the end of the ten years AND you wait more than two years before renewing it again.
I did get my novice license (or whatever the lowest license is called) but never got an old borrowed radio to actually transmit. Then life kind of got in the way.
I keep meaning to get back into it, the sstv and various data networks are really cool. I really dig the analog tech.
I have heard good things about the Quansheng UV-K5/8/99. Primarily because there is a hack firmware available.
If you want a "good" HT as an introduction to the hobby, then the Yaesu FT-65R or older FT-60R are both good.
A "do everything" (analog) radio might be the Yaesu VX-6R, which I previously owned. It excels on reception, and is a "tri-band" radio, but the extra band was not useful in my experience.
> where have to pay for membership and can only use it for certain things
Just to clarify for people who might be interested-- this is not a perfect analogy in that you don't have to pay to participate in amateur radio. You have to pay a fee to take the license exams but it's a token amount, and you don't have to pay regularly to use any ham services that I know of. Apart from buying a radio, of course.
Not in every country or even always in the US. In Canada there is no government fees for ham radio, if the test giver wants to charge a fee, they can, but most do not.
In the US there are clubs that pay for new hams fees out of a fund for that purpose.
I got my HAM license in the USA a while ago. I'm in it mainly for the emergency communications side of things: I live in a coastal community in California with three roads in and out, all three of which can be affected by affected by storms, earthquakes etc.
I've joined ARES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Emergency_Servic... - which coordinates to provide HAM support for emergency communications. If a big earthquake temporarily disables a chunk of communications infrastructure I can hopefully be useful!
Jus curious, respectfully, is ARES still relevant? These days it seems like a few portable cell towers should outstrip what a motley group of HAMs can humanly do.
About 30 years ago, the people I met who were into ARES seemed a bit weird — sorta a radio version of “preppers”. Maybe I was just in an area not prone to earthquakes…
The ARES people think they're really relevant at least here in Europe. I don't join them because they take it all too seriously IMO. They have this thing where a minor flood happens and they all come out in tacticool gear and pretend to be important but keep running in the way of the real aid workers. That was at least my experience when there was a "deployment". Perhaps in other countries it's different.
I don't care about being "important". I'm more into the hobby for the technical side.
"If a big earthquake temporarily disables a chunk of communications infrastructure." OP is talking about the kind of thing that kicks in if that cell phone network, or 911 response, or what have you is compromised.
I do believe there have been instances where ham radio operators were able to deploy recently and get comms up in some areas faster than others would. These were disasters where they took down the towers, because it happens. And the local hams are faster than the cell phone company is to deploy something.
> It's mostly old guys erecting large antennas to connect their boat anchor tube radios to, from what I read online.
It's somewhat unfortunate (but understandable) that the rep ham radio gets is based on a few old dudes talking on HF. Whereas the reality is that the most popular mode in ham radio by far is digital, not voice (namely FT8).
I've got a friend who has been fixing those things since he was a kid in the 1950s... I've been helping him recently, it's an ersatz apprenticeship.
Almost everything is now well beyond economic repair. It's all about emotions and nostalgia for almost all of the gear.
I no longer jump when something smokes or pops, and I know it's usually a good sign, as it helps you figure out where the trouble is. ;-)
I've learned to hate Silver Mica capacitors, and came up with a technique to help track down the noisy ones. (Take out all of the tubes, leave B+ on... measure the voltage across all the resistors, most of them will read 0 volts, if you do get a voltage, check the schematic and see if it's reasonable, if not... there's current flowing to a bad silver-mica cap through it. It really cut down on the time to find issues)
Collins 30S1 amplifiers.... those will always command fear and extreme caution. 3000 volts at a solid Amp will easily burn off limbs, and it will hurt like hell as you watch it happen to you. Or... it'll just kill you, and burn your corpse.
That's the best type of faultfinding, much faster and less tedious than tracking down subtle faults. Locating the source of burning smells and touching resistors to detect excessive heat work well too.
Never had much problem with silver micas, paper and electrolytics are usually much more troublesome.
Re the Collins, I'm very glad I started with high voltage stuff, if it had been the other way around and I'd started with semiconductors I'd likely have electrocuted myself, getting used to low voltage first wouldn't have been a good idea. As it was I was bitten several times, once so badly that I was essentially paralyzed for quite some minutes. That was 850V.
"It's mostly old guys erecting large antennas to connect their boat anchor tube radios to, from what I read online"
I disagree, it's much more that, far too much to discuss here. A starting point would be to check the ARRL and RSGB handbooks which provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of AR. (Google each for more info.)
There are many more specialist books if you want even more in-depth information.
Old guys are amazing. They have a lot of knowledge and stories to share. I got into ham radio earlier this year, got my license too, and now learning CW (Morse). I've learned so much from these "old guys".
I think a lot of it depends upon how you are exposed to the stuff. When I started studying more my license, I was interested in the technical side of things and dreaded having to learn Morse. I got lucky in that the requirement was dropped before taking the exam, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth. It also doesn't help when you go to the local hamfest and sizable fraction of the gear on the tables is tube related. It gives the impression that the hobby is not only stuck in the past, it is stuck in the distant past.
Don't get me wrong, I am fascinated by tube computers. Yet that has more to do with being interested in modern computers and having a desire to learn about how we got to where we are today. Without that interest in the contemporary, the historic would have little relevance to me.
What I like about the hobby is that it can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. So the emcomm/prepper crowd is very interested in practicing communications for when existing networks go down.
That said, everything you do in amateur radio is in the open. So if you want to talk to your European friend, only the Sun can prevent you, but anyone can listen.
The thing which seems to be overlooked -- both in the linked article and in the HN comments -- is that at one time ham radio was a hobby for folks wanting to play around with state-of-the-art technology. It was more than just a bunch of guys chatting with each other over a radio. At one time most people had to build their own ham rig from piece parts. One had to have a serious amount of engineering ability to do so ... or at least be able to read a schematic published in a magazine and solder together a radio, not a small feat. As a hobby it was all about becoming proficient in electrical engineering, then enjoying your proficiency by chatting with -- and showing off to -- like-minded guys around the world.
Ham magazines like QST and 73 published schematics and other how-to articles which amounted to an excellent education in practical electrical engineering. 73 magazine in particular was very technical -- it assumed you had good working knowledge of many common RF and audio circuits. Also, to get a ham license you needed to take a test demonstrating a good level of proficiency. For the lowest rung "novice" license you just had to demonstrate knowledge of Morse code at a slow but reasonable pace. For higher rungs of the achievement ladder like "advanced" or "extra" you needed to pass an exam about electronics as well as receive and send Morse code at a fast clip. The license presented a barrier to entry which didn't exist in CB radio -- which some hams looked down upon as a cesspool of unwashed, technically illiterate bozos.
My exposure to ham radio really started in the 1970s since my dad had been a ham playing with homebuilt radios since he was a kid in the 1930s. In the '70s the hobby was trifurcating. On one hand were the hard-core guys who built their own rigs, sometimes for the challenging high-frequency bands. Some also participated in designing and launching a ham-radio satellite via the ARRL. Early forms of digital encoding over radio were also big. Those guys were the real engineering types, and I admired them. On the other hand, commercial outfits were selling ready-to-use radios ... no engineering skills needed. In the middle were guys assembling and using stuff from Heathkit -- a great way to learn about electronics.
The ham hobby has been fading away for many years. I think the thrill of building a radio and then talking to somebody on a different continent with it has diminished in the face of cheap international calling, cell phones, Skype, etc. The only thing left for hams to do these days involves disaster relief -- and the remaining ham mag QST plays up that theme (or at least did the last time I looked). Meanwhile, the young nerds who used to take up ham radio now occupy themselves with various open-source software projects. I suppose that's natural.
> For higher rungs of the achievement ladder like "advanced" or "extra" you needed to pass an exam about electronics as well as receive and send Morse code at a fast clip.
The General license (which I got) required 13 wpm. I think I read somewhere that they still broadcast Morse code practice every night.
The Extra was 20 wpm. I don't remember "Advanced."
By the time I got a HAM license that I only used for digital transmissions, several people taking the test with me were "old-timers" who were lamenting that you didn't need to know CW to get a license.
There is apparently still a thriving CW community, and some of them use auto-keying now, so you don't need the manual dexterity any more.
I'll add one more piece of ham lore to this thread. The gigantic electronic component distributor DigiKey got its start when the founder designed and marketed a Morse code key to the ham radio audience. DigiKey was originally a mail-order business selling to hams.
The point is that the ham radio hobby is very intertwined with the electrical engineering profession. It's very technical ... not just a bunch of guys talking to each other over the radio (although it's that too).
The advanced class had the same 13wpm code requirement as the general but added a difficult technical element to the exam suite. When I took it back at an FCC office I found it to be the hardest test of all.
Do you still have an Advanced class license?
I think that Advanced class is the only license that is currently around (and able to be renewed) that required a code test.
The Novice test was something else. 20 questions. 5 WPM code. I was thrilled when it came in the mail. 40 Meter CW, look out.
No I have an extra. I thought they did away with the advanced when the privileges were realigned couple or 10 years back. I haven't kept up with the class privileges.
This evolution seems to be the same in most technical hobbies. And as the evolution occurs and the technical requirements for adoption drop, you need more and more regulation to control the bad actors. See UAS regulations after quadcopters became off the shelf products.
Ham radio is not that hobby. For example, broadcasting is not allowed, one person-to-person comms. Subverting censorship? Not really. There's no cussing on the air, English only, make your contact to deliver info and move on. Maybe you get a rag chew on a local repeater, but that conversation will be about housework or health problems. Nobody is subverting anything in ham radio, though some of the tacticoolies might pretend they are.
Now, do you want a hobby that lets you explore the physics of antennas, how our atmosphere actually works, build your own experimental low power QRP rig just to see how far you can throw a CW(Morse) signal with a tiny bit of juice, or maybe help set up comms for local events or emergencies? Yes, ham radio is that hobby.
That's not in keeping with my experience, even ignoring the fact that I am in North America. I've made hundreds of contacts in the EU during contests and only English was used. Do they perhaps use their native languages on local repeaters? If that is the case, I would not hear it since contesting is done on HF.
Ah ok yes I'm never on HF. On HF it's more English only due to the many languages here in Europe. Especially during contests of course.
However people do have local chats and ragchews in the local language. It's more the contests that are English only (but that doesn't go any further than "59 good copy. Next."). Which is why I hate contesting, I find It so boring that nobody has time to speak. I have no drive to be a "winner" so I never care about the number of contacts.
In fact most people in the ham demographic here would speak very limited English anyway due to not learning it at school in their days.
I think you're getting unfairly downvoted so I'll try to answer your questions. I've had an interest in radio since I was a kid but have only had my license for about the past decade. The fact that you can have a box full of electronics send information to another box full of electronics _around the world_ without any wires in between still kinda blows my mind.
Ham radio is a great hobby. But like all hobbies, you get out of it what you put into it. "Old dudes being boring" for sure are a staple of the ham radio community, but if you come into it with prejudice, you probably won't have the experience you want or make many friends.
What are grumpy old men famous for? That's right, loudly complaining about things other people do and say. So when I see an HN or Reddit thread about ham radio complaining about all the old farts on the air, my mind melts from the overload of irony.
That aside, I don't think I would count on ham radio for subverting censorship but I guess it depends on what you mean. Laws vary by country but in the US and in most countries, you cannot broadcast to the general public, play music, encrypt your transmissions, or use ham radio frequencies for any business purpose.
A ham radio license is permission from your country's government to get on the air for the sake of playing with radio waves and communicating with other hams locally or around the globe without any further agenda. Bouncing signals off the moon is still a fair technical challenge but it has and can be done. But we also bounce signals off the Earth's ionosphere (in the HF bands) and through satellite repeaters, both of which are far easier.
I recommend looking into it and seeing where it takes you. There are plenty of resources online that will help you get started.
""Old dudes being boring" for sure are a staple of the ham radio community, but if you come into it with prejudice, you probably won't have the experience you want or make many friends."
Ha, one of the great modern (and unsung) ironies of Amateur Radio can only be seen from today's perspective.
When I first got my amateur license decades ago long before the internet, amateurs would find themselves on the end of disparaging or pejorative jibes from those who weren't radio amateurs (but who—more often than not—were also family members) that went something to the effect 'heaven only knows how they manage to gabber and yabber on about such inconsequential garbage for so long' and other like comments.
Now Amateurs can revenge that wrong with a vengeance beyond comparison. All they have to do is to point to the almost infinite tons of inconsequential garbage on Social Media that far exceedes the sum total of all utterances ever made by Radio Amateurs by many orders of magnitude.
I've often wondered why Amateurs don't rub this fact home to the Great Unwashed with much glee
Depends on the band, for VHF, UHF and higher bands a country may make different decisions on what is not permitted. Canada has allowed encryption with published keys to be used for repeater access control in the past.
HAM while playing by the rules is pretty much “not that”, due to ban on encryption and such.
Doesn’t help that the HAM community will more than happily snitch on you if you goof around too much, and licences mean your full dox are publicly searchable (at least in America).
It depends. I think the ham crowd skews older so there is a lot of misogynistic humor (which I enjoy) and a bunch of racist humor (which I don’t enjoy). Overall it’s definitely not boring, especially if you enjoy a slower paced, in depth discussion of topics.
Hum, OK. I'm in VK, seems it's quieter here. Thought they'd use VHF to keep it local, but I suppose 160m is the next best thing (it's not the best look, you ought to keep that traffic local if possible).
PS: Sorry about that damn typo, I must kill autocorrect.
Personal story: on my block growing up there was a blind guy who had an enormous antenna tower in his yard. He was SO nice to me, a teen-aged boy! His equipment all had braille labels on the controls.
I'm sure he's long gone now so I don't mind giving his name: Julian Gannon. His call was K9BCJ which he claimed stood for Better Call Julian.
Thanks, Mr. Gannon! I hope you're working the whole galaxy now.
(Actually, though, ham conversations were excruciatingly boring: how are you receiving me? You're coming through loud & clear here. What equipment are you using?)
My grandfather, Dick, was a Korea war veteran who founded a manufacturing company. He was a grizzly, old school guy with a bit of a drinking problem. As the legend goes HAM was the only thing that brought him joy. He had an entire room of the house with equipment that nobody was allowed in, until I was born (first grandchild privileges).
I always think of him when I see ham crop up online. The dish in their back yard was enormous. But yeah, in my head, ham is basically populated with guys like this, cranky old men who start ball slide part companies and smoke 2 packs a day
Technical hobbyists also have a genuine interest in technical work.
Contrast this with the flood of new college graduates who have minimal interest in engineering, yet want the high salaries that tech was famous for (until recently).
I really wish I was more passionate about tech, but I'm not. I open IDE in my private time about once per year. Computers just aren't that fun to me anymore, they became the symbol of the absurdity of modern society. I greatly prefer to have a walk outside.
This is sad and I'd love to have my hobby back, but I don't see a way I could change this.
Well, anal_reactor, it can be about more than tech for techs sake. My side projects help actual people in the real world, so working on them feels like more than twiddling bits.
In most countries, the advanced class (or equivalent) is a licence to design, construct, and operate your own radio transmitter for experimental purposes. (Just about anyone with a serious interest in electronics has thought about building their own transmitter, I imagine.)
While a lot of people will dismiss ham radio as just a bunch of old farts talking about their diabetes, a lot of the actual joy of being a ham op is from experimenting. Whether it's from building radios and antennas, to attempting to overcome difficult atmospheric conditions, or just trying to see how many (or far) contacts can be made on super low power.
This type of thing usually requires curious people. And the smartest tech people I know, are the ones that are the most curious.
Hams are the quintessential "know just enough to be dangerous" people.
Don't get me wrong, I've come across a lot of wonderful, truly smart hams; but I've also witnessed many hams who really never should have gotten half-smart.
Hams are amateur electricians, hilarity /will/ ensue and it won't all be funny.
The smart ones know they just know enough to be dangerous - a foundation of knowledge, not the whole book.
Some of the best RF guys I know, have no formal training - because there is important theory around RF - it doesn't always work like projected.
In my industry a Ham Ticket has taken the place of a GROL as something employers look upon favorably, because it means you generally should already have a foundation of RF theory.
If you're broadcasting at higher powers (to send over longer distances) there are risks from high RF exposure and electrical hazards. The HAM radio license exams focus on these safety issues quite a bit.
Sounds like you have never had an RF burn before. The sensation is a lot like a sunburn, but is hard to get if you are electrically close to the ground. Higher frequencies can still give you RF burns when you're standing on the ground.
RF exposure on the ground from an aerial are likely non-harmful. Right next to the antenna can still give burns. There's also issues of arcing, lightning, and other electrical issues when dealing with high power radios.
Electricity is unforgiving and a lot of the safety rules in licenses above Technician try to instill that fact.
Lots of people hurt themselves when falling off a ladder trying to put up an antenna.
Joking aside, there is a minor risk of RF burn if you do really stupid things that you have to learn not to do to get a license. I can’t really imagine someone getting hurt by the radios themselves.
You can also easily cause interference, which might not be directly dangerous, but can certainly be problematic if you're causing problems on important communication channels.
I got my Technicians license about a year ago but have struggled to find much to do with it. I check into my local nets every once and a while, but the repeaters are nearly silent otherwise. The CW privileges are ok but hard to use. Seems you need a General to do all the cool stuff. Any other technicians here who have found a great use for the license?
Don’t discount 10m voice or digital modes. You can absolutely work the world with minimal equipment and power on 10m, especially when the sunspots are active.
Not from US so I'm not sure but I think you can access the 10 metre band with technician? If so, doing Parks on the Air or Summits on the Air could possibly be something you might like.
Even with Technician you may be able to do POTA or SOTA successfully on VHF.
I joined my local SKYWARN to get a license to do storm spotting which all happens on the VHF bands. We get a lot of severe weather where I live so this allows me to be on those bands more often than I otherwise would.
But I do agree, the real meat of ham radio is when you get your General and get on HF. It opens up the door to the rest of the world, not just your local city.
my first few contacts were POTA contacts before that was a formal game. Just take your radio with you wherever you go and try to dial up repeaters or VHF/UHF simplex call frequency. for POTA formally you have to contact via simplex but you can coordinate on a repeater.
DMR has a lot of traffic and you can get a decent DMR handy-talky for about $150 so it's worthwhile.
Yeah activity is really really low compared to the 80s especially on VHF and above. I don't do anything below that for lack of antenna space. So it can be boring. Digital is a bit better because it links repeaters in large groups.
But the heydays are over. During the 80s/early 90s it was really hard to break into the chat when I was driving to work. So busy. Back then there were no legal issues with speaking into a microphone while driving either. So it made the morning traffic much more fun.
But then the internet came and the whole "speak to people all over the world for free!" thing really lost its shine. The home computer before that did a lot already too (until they came on the scene pretty much all geeks were hams)
It's interesting how I read so often of people calling this HAM. Such as, "Is Ham that hobby?" below.
I first got started in amateur radio with my novice license in 1966. We always called it "ham radio" or "amateur radio" or said I was a ham radio operator but no one ever called it HAM or spelled it in all caps. On HN, at least, I see it every time the subject is brought up. And it seems to be a fairly recent event.
Probably a self fulfilling prophecy. You see it a few times and if you don't know any better, you assume that's how it's supposed to be.
The same as people talking about hams "broadcasting". It's very obvious anyone talking like that is not a ham, but they don't know why that's incorrect. Basically you don't know what you don't know.
It infuriates me to see people spell it as "HAM". (Extra since 1977, also First Class Radiotelephone with Radar Endorsement, and First Class Radiotelegraph.)
Can you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it a great deal lately. We have to ban such accounts, and I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: on a closer look, your account has been breaking the site guidelines so consistently that I think we have to ban it and I've done so.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You can listen to ham radio in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Surprised it hasn't been shut down yet, since they're unlicensed. Shows an interesting part of NY that usually isn't discussed.
Ham radio is not pirate radio. Ham radio refers to government licensed amateurs (amateur simply meaning not paid) communicating on frequencies they are explicitly allowed to use. Hams very much don’t tolerate pirate radio.
Pirate radio is unlicensed use of radio frequencies, sometimes commercial, sometimes political, sometimes amateur.
I have an amateur extra license and think pirate radio is awesome. It is a rich, important, culturally & politically influential tradition in its own right.
Me too (well my ham ticket is expired), but my point is that ham and pirate radio are very different things. And even if you think its cool, I really doubt if your would tolerate a pirate stepping on your local repeater frequency.
But there are things that are illegal to listen to, depending on your locality.
I knew somebody who demonstrated a POCSAG decoder using an SDR in a classroom instructor setting. A law enforcement agent taking the class pulled him aside after the class and let him know that it was illegal to decide POCSAG in the that locality.
Also, if you want to read the book, you'll find it going for a cool $245 a copy (as its very out of print), however a quick google search located a PDF (which is often the case for out of print technical books).
I had a great time on ham (not HAM) radio today, talking to people participating in a "Summit on the Air" event from Mount Umunhum. Then I spent some time building a "Class D" PWM AM radio transmitter using a circuit a guy from Bulgaria posted to a forum a few months ago.
I take a little portable "truSDX" with me in my travels, and enjoy making contacts on FT8 and CW with it using a wire I hang out of my hotel window. In the past year, I've done this from Tokyo to Tel Aviv.
I feel the opposite. Morse code was a major barrier into HF for many different people. Folks who are musically challenged would fail to copy. People with hand disabilities faced major hurdles. Hearing disabilities made it impractical, even though there are plenty of visual-only modes (sstv, digital tty modes, etc).
Removal of morse has allowed far more people to reach more technical levels of ham radio. And, in my anedotcial experience, dropping the requirement hasn't impacted the popularity of morse code. I'd wager its more popular than ever because of how many more hams have HF access compared to limiting access to folks who learned code just to pass a test and to promptly throw away their key.
Morse code is fun! It's not just an emergency mode either. Those mountain climbing SOTA hams love code because CW radios are so simple that they can cram several bands into an absolutely tiny QRP rig. Collectors practice on their 80 year old rigs. There's even a club dedicated to making contracts only with straight keys.
Fear not. Code will be with us for decades to come.
Morse code is flourishing even without it being a requirement. People are discovering what a fun mode it is -- the low power portable people love the reach you can get on 5W, others enjoy the mental challenge, and it's prevalent in contesting.
You can be as connected to the past as you want in this hobby. It's at the point where we have people getting remote islands on the air by driving a boat onto shore that has a radio and an amplifier, raising an antenna, and then people can operate from either a boat anchored off shore or back home over Starlink. And they're doing it in Morse code, so you have this nice blend of the old and the new.
And making wagon wheels requires considerable skill. When you've mastered that you've almost certainly got a second trade of woodworking under your belt. And perhaps even iron-working skills.
As someone who learned woodworking I'd not like to make a wagon wheel without guidance from a master.
One of the problems of inexperience is not being able to appreciate the subtleties, and how many seemingly disparate things relate in ways that end up being important.
It's very true ham radio has a very rich almost unique culture.
I obtained my license many years ago whilst I was still at school and I've developed many friendships with those within the Amateur community, and despite me not having been on air for many years, many of those friendships forged in the days when I frequented the airwaves have endured to this day. In fact many have turned out to be more rock-solid and stable than just about every other friendship I've had.
I'm not alone, when questioned many amateur radio operators will express exactly the same view.
Why this is so is perhaps up for debate, but I'd put it down to a number of reasons: Amateur Radio is unique amongst hobbies in that it operates in a very different way to most other hobbies perhaps the most significant of which is that it requires a government-issued license before one can operate on air—and to obtain that one has to demonstrate both technical and operational proficiency in radiocommunications by way of passing examination. There's no shortcut or other way around to obtain an Amateur license, as passing the examination is a mandatory requirement.
Of itself, that requirement alone binds amateurs together. Thus not everyone can become a member of this unique club, as it's only through the involved procedure of passing the Amateur examination that one is able to be initiated into the Amateur fraternity.
One's solidarity with the the Amateur movement becomes even more solid after one learns the rules, procedures and etiquette of Amateur Radio culture. In a sense once one becomes an Amateur one then becomes indoctrinated into this long and esteemed culture that owes many of its origins to government-necessitated rules and procedures—rules that have still deeper origins in that they derive from ITU—International Telecommunications Union regulations.
Having to conform to ITU regulations is perceived by Amateurs more as an necessity rather than an imposition, as by the time one becomes an amateur radio operator, one knows that he or she—along with others—has the privileged responsibility of ensuring that the electromagnetic spectrum is properly managed. Not only is that responsibly not seen an imposition by Amateurs but rather it's seen by them as a necessity, as proper management of the spectrum is vital for all radiocommunications services to operate in an optimal way. Mismanagement of the spectrum would result in interference between services and from external sources, radio regulations and procedures ensure that interference is kept to a minimum.
Being part of the worldwide fraternity that sees itself as having such an important responsibly—a responsibility that doesn't flow from being paid but out of the love of it and of one's hobby—further strengthens bonds between Amateurs.
Even though I've not operated on air for many years I still consider myself to be a member of this tightknit community. Once an Amateur radio operator it's forever.
I'm glad someone here says this. I'm also an amateur radio operator, and I very frequently see people who are otherwise against public resources being exploited for commercial purposes arguing against many of the regulations that ham radio requires, oftentimes the restriction on encryption. Few other hobbies have the idea of protecting their existence as baked in as amateur radio, and it keeps me hopeful that it will continue to exist as the years go on.
Something about the hobby lends itself to forging lasting friendships, perhaps the reasons you've enumerated? The friends I made in high school and as an undergrad I've lost track of, all except for the hams - they remain, 40+ years on. Just yesterday one from high school texted me out of the blue with a snapshot of an old shared Heathkit 303/401 HF pair.
Numbers stations are government run, transmitting one-time-pad encoded messages to assests located in other, hostile, countries. WHy on earth would the government shut down their own stations?
Is Ham that hobby? I am genuinely asking. A few days ago a thread here had lots of people agreeing it was mostly old dudes being boring. But I like the idea that maybe I (in Europe) can talk to my friend (in the US) by bouncing radio waves off the moon, or some such, and not relying on intermediaries.