Folks, if you’re interested in this hobby I highly suggest you start studying for your technician license right now on hamstudy.org. it’s a great site and free. You can use it as a guest if you don’t want to make an account. The reason I say this is because it can take a few weeks to find a place to take your exam and then get your license. The waiting period sucks. Especially when you want to get into it right away.
Just listening is free and requires no license.
The exam is ~$15 depending on where you take it. The FCC fee is $35. The license lasts 10 years.
Some entry level radios I think are good enough to just mess around with before seeing if you want to dump more money into the hobby are:
- Baofeng UV-5R. ~$20. The original cheap handheld. You’ll see folks shit on it, but that’s about it’s overall quality, not quality for the price. Obviously a $100 radio will be better. It’s good enough for seeing if you want to pursue the hobby though.
- Tidradio TD-H3. ~$30. Came out this year I think. It’s basically the UV-5R on steroids. It can receive way more frequencies and be programmed over Bluetooth. The Bluetooth programming app is annoying to use but it’s still a nice feature. Supposedly it can be programmed via USB C but I couldn’t get this to work. Other people have. It could be that all the USB C cords I have are power only.
- Quansheng UV-K5. ~$30. Also known as UV-K6 and UV-K5(8). They’re only cosmetic differences. I personally haven’t used this. The thing that makes this cool is that the firmware can be flashed with custom firmware! I know there are a lot of techies here on Lemmy so this might be a cool one to get.
Most of these come with accessories. Most of them are garbage. The longer antennas are nice. The programming cable is very important. Once you get one they seem to work with everything. You really need one, especially if the custom firmware on UV-K6 interests you. There is a program called CHIRP that lets you program them. It’s very useful.
What I find unfortunate is that it seems a lot of amateur radio software, especially for like the DMR radios, are all windows only, and I am exclusively a Linux user.
I don’t remember how I did it, but I could swear that I got chirp to run on Mint
I don’t have a lot of experience but I was able to get Baofeng’s GT-18 programming software working and programming on wine. If I was already an experienced wine user it would’ve been easier. It’s the first time I dove in. Even the serial programming worked fine, I just had to see which /dev/ was linked to which COM. Still, native Linux (or CHIRP support) would be better.
Are there any active communities for ham on Lemmy? I recently got into the hobby. The only one I found is !amatuer_radio@sopuli.xyz but it only has two posts, one of them mine.
Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think. You can get fairly inexpensive (comparatively anyway) Chinese software defined radio by Xiegu, and literally just stick a long wire in the back as an antenna and since the radio has an auto tuner, all you need to do is get that wire as high in the air as possible. I don’t have that radio so I use a manual tuner but a setup like that is the only way I can get on the air from my current house.
Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think.
Also because the sun is in the middle of some kind of ~10 year cycle that means a ton of sun spots! That makes propagation go further.
Yeah, we’re not too too far removed from the last solar minimum either, so we got a good deal of solar cycle left before the next minimum too. I say this all the time but hams are the coolest sun worshiping group I’ve ever been a part of.
What will the auto tuner in that radio handle? I have an ICOM 7300 and it will handle 3 to 1 SWR and I think it will handle 10 to 1 with lower power in an emergency mode setting. But I use a manual tuner myself.
Ive heard people say that they can get their random wire antennas fed right into the g90 with little issue, I don’t have the tech specs but Id assume its near 9 to 1 if their random wire is working, and that’s made me curious to try the unit since I don’t have any SDR yet. The unit only pumps out 20w max so thats probably a factor. On my Yaesu ft 891where I can run 100w easy I use an external LC tuner and a counterpoise to mitigate rf buildup on the chassis though.
That’s actually pretty impressive if they can just feed a random wire directly into it and get it to transmit.
I always say this when someone asks why I am interested in radio, when you can make phone calls for free from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else.
One day, all that infrastructure may be switched off, or just gone. But I’ll be able to take a piece of wire, hoist it into the air and have a two way conversation with people thousands of miles away.
It’s also just very interesting I think, the way the signals are propagated differently at different wavelengths at different times.
I’m really close to being ready to do the test for my HAM license. It’s been enlightening to see all the applications and components tied to it. For anyone interested, even just getting started with a simple SDR setup can get you going on learning the basics about the various bands and intricacies involved.
I saw the most amazing thing. You know those meshtastic devices? Well, apparently, somebody has made something like that. Exactly for amateur radio operators, and you can text message and location share, etc. with one watt of power. I think the meshtastic devices are probably limited to 0.1 watts of power. So that would be a major, major improvement. You just plug this tiny box into the USB Type-C port on your phone and it becomes a one-watt HT with voice and text capability. Or at least I think it said it had voice.
Oh that’s really neat. It would be extremely helpful for situations like the hurricanes in the US these past months.
Yeah, tell me about it. And apparently, it only takes $35 worth of components and a 3D printer to build it.
In preparing to get my ticket in 2020, I hopped on the Utah WebSDR and even got a shortwave listener (SWL) QSL card from a guy in the Cook Islands (E51JD).
Earlier this year I made a two-way QSL (contact) with him using my rig and 100W.
There’s a ton to learn, do, or accomplish if you want. So many facets to amateur radio.
I’m working on CW now!
