So, is Ham Radio like the spiritual ancestor of something like Discord Voice Chat? I’m trying to understand why people do it, besides the technical/tinkering aspects.
Why? Because you can. But in terms of useful reasons?
Cellphones, Internet they need infrastructure to work, and that can be disabled either during a natural disaster or war situation. Even by your own government in some cases.
But if I want to communicate, I just need a piece of wire, somewhere to hang it, and a 12v battery and I can communicate for thousands of miles.
Personally I just think that’s cool.
To answer you seriously, yeah kinda! It’s a way of communicating without any internet access. You can talk with people around the world if you want. And it opens up to a whole community of people that really like the hobby.
So people pick a topic and just start talking? It’s kinda a niche hobby, so there’s probably a lot of like-minded people, but what if somebody starts going off on a tirade?
Then you switch to someone else. Also its not just about talking. You can track a number of things: sensor readings, track satellites, airplanes, boats, etc…
What is the practical application of tracking stuff, like are you guys literally just telling each other where stuff is or what does an average tracking session look like?
Edit: I’m very interested in the idea of amateur radio operating, but I guess I’m trying to picture what it would be like practically and wondering if that’s something I’d be into, you know?
Sometimes, in times of disaster or something like that, ham radio operators can keep the flow of information in and out going when Internet or phone communication lines are down.
Other than that, it’s mostly just experimentation and trying to push the envelope of wireless communications. People flex on each other by making contacts further and further away, and as the other person said, doing cool shit like talking to the ISS.
For local reception, receivers with RTL2832U chips are a cheap option. They are also called RTL-SDR. I have simply been using a long wire as a “random wire antenna”. Some of the older dongles also need an upconverter to be able to tune into low HF frequencies:
An upconverter for the RTL-SDR translates low HF frequencies ‘up’ into ones that are receivable by the RTL-SDR. This is a different method to the direct sampling mode used in the V3 dongles to achieve HF reception.
Quoted source: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/a-homebrew-one-transistor-upconverter-for-the-rtl-sdr/
rtl433 on github is a joy to collect data and send somewhere
Thanks for sharing. It seems like there’s a lot of supported options. Many of them, I have no idea what are, but cars and doorbells are easy enough to understand, at least. Do you have any examples of interesting, less obvious use cases of your own, or of others’?
sure. well i am cheap. my neighbours arent. they have fancy stations like Bresser Weather. so why not share data like a proper pirate? i bought several rtl sticks by now. one i use in a pi/nuc/etc to just run https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which has the excellent possibility to send the captured data over mqtt. so one line in terminal gives me weather data.
you could also grab flightpositions with the stick…if you share those you get even more data: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl433-plugin-for-sdrsharp-updated/
still too boring? gnuradio could helpp find interesting frequencies and you might wanna google what they are for. you can also grab an send sensordata from busstationdisplay, temperaturecontrol of houses, tire pressure of passing cars etc. you could use that data in homeassistant/nodered or whatever to trigger alerts…like that police car is close by, shutdown shutdown… and so on. new cars are so chatty.
