this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
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people would try to pick each other up over ham radio and have others break in to remind them that a large portion of the globe could hear them
“radio amateurs are waiting on your call. come play my lord”
god I’m imagining how this all must have went given the personalities of some of the radio hams I’ve known
I’ve actively stayed a pirate because I don’t want to deal with the majority of local HAMs (a necessity if I were to pursue a license locally)
I’ve been recommending alternative bands (LoRA is cool, or GMRS) over HAM unless the person I’m talking to has an interest in radio and significant time for the licensing process itself, because the HAM bands sure aren’t worth it for the conversation
like fuck, even the folks doing ultra-long-range HF work have automated away the part where you have to ever talk to a member of the HAM community
there is still cool shit you can do with an amateur license (ultra-cheap radios and $5 antennas made partially out of trees that do international comms, SSTV, fucking with SDRs, long-range unencrypted LoRA) but a ton of the HAM community will actively discourage you from doing any of it because most of them are laser-focused on gear acquisition, contesting for bullshit accolades, and elitism
and to be honest, the license is the least interesting part of any of it (or is a gigantic opsec risk, depending on the tendencies of your local radio community)
i was just thinking about the gearhead urge in electronic music
I am not familiar with either hams nor electronic musicians, but being peripherally involved in photography and reading about other hobbies has led me to the unscientific conclusion that this is a Guy Thing.
(It's possible the same tendency is present in hobbies that are traditionally female-coded, in which case it's human)
hah yeah lora is fun, I actually built a lora network a few years back (end to end, incl. some v1.0~if-you-squint prototype boards during dev phase (found a decent vendor for the rollout)). also done a bit with SDR going back a fair while (been following that since it first started becoming popular around 2009? 2010?)
this side of the world HAM is the lowest class amateur license you can get afaik, which is unfortunately a bit sucky. and yeah opsec shit
I do want to find myself a UV-KR after what I saw recently.. (yes, not a -5R, a KR)
this made me remember some of the most annoying fucking people I ever met at wugmeets (from these, which are sadly nowhere near as big as they used to be)
I need to do a lot more with my LoRA gear! last time I played with it, it was still frustratingly too impenetrable for my friends to pick up, but I had a lot of fun building a setup that’d work over a couple miles of obstructed terrain
huh, what’s cool about the KR specifically? a quick search didn’t turn anything up for me, but I’m always on the lookout for an inexpensive radio to play with. I love that I can basically hand off a Baofeng or an RTL-SDR off to a friend and they can get rolling on whatever we’re doing that needs radio
ah sorry typo (well, misremembered), "UV-K5": https://spectrum.ieee.org/quansheng-uv-k5-hacking
oh dear, you might have just replaced my baofeng
pretty much exactly the feeling I had about mine too 😅
my main problem is I can't seem to find stock locally, and I don't feel like dealing with couriers and customs. so I guess I'll have to wait for whoever to get some