this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I don't think smart phones are conventional communications. The are smart. They are still the "tech of tomorrow".
Smart phones use conventional communications to do very clever things. But those clever things are range limited and require specialised equipment. They also have absolutely no "hackability" without specialised equipment (easy to get, sure... But still pretty much single purpose)
AM is literally a couple caps, inductors, resistors (edit: and diode) then an amplifier (a couple transistors and resistors). And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
It's just that it takes some experience to operate on these frequencies, and their bandwidth is limited.
Smart phones do away with the experience requirements, and trade higher frequencies & higher data rates for range (and I guess trade digital encoding for simplicity)
I see parallels to software.
People are nervous to "side loading apps" on their phone, but have no issues downloading and installing an exe on windows.
Smart phones give you the "this is how" kind of experience, and abstract away the sheer amount of technology they leverage. Which is amazing, and is what makes them smart!
But the underlying technology is phenomenal. And I feel it's a shame that the majority of people don't have any understanding of "installing an app" or similar (like calling internet access "WiFi".... 2 distinct things!)
Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level) and passes a test to acquire a license. Some of the equipment can either kill you or cause way too much interference potentially killing others indirectly
Not for nothing but I got my novice and tech license in grade school.
I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Looking back it was basically brain dumping (and learning code well enough to pass the 5WPM test).
Ended up getting 13WPM and general and advanced in 7th grade.
I still have my license, just renewed it a couple months ago. But haven't keyed up in maybe 15 years. Ain't nobody got time for that. I just got a little handheld transceiver on temu and haven't used it at all.
My local 2m is just old guys talking about Trump/conservative politics and their health conditions sadly.
You don't need to know Morse code any longer for the exam, btw.
Huh. I wonder how you do that. If the wind knocked down a tree and the tree killed someone, would the wind indirectly have killed someone? That’s kind of like the old adage “speed doesn’t kill, it’s the sudden stop”
If you're fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn't and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn't get to the hospital in time.
You didn't directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.
Same reason why power-line can do that; interference with emergency services radio.
No, not really. You just need to memorize a few symbols, remember like two equations, and know metric prefixes. You could learn it in a week or so just doing practice tests.
"Fragility" is the typical descriptor for this sort of thing. Advanced technology is very powerful, and that is obvious to see, but it also tends to fail readily without long-term planning, in disaster and war, of course, but also in more benign ways, like when a consumer becomes reliant on the technology for a way of life, and a corporation abused their unique ability to maintain the technology, and the consumer has no recourse.
Weren't there some hobbyists that communicate via bed springs and a few Watt from Australia to USA?
On the other hand. Actual ham radio needs exotic and antiquated equipment, and for all of that you will get a clunky walkie-talkie that can't do the walkie part and has extremely limited bandwidth, that would collapse if even 0.1% of the population tried using it.
If you do have all the gear and license and just tried to find how to send even 2400 bits per second to another ham radio operator, it would take weeks just to find one another and setup this feat of engineering.
Modulations are obsolete, not even QAM64. There has been no attempt beam forming on HF so there is only very few channels that can be used concurently.
All in all it's like CB but with extra steps.
A hobby, not a reliable, practical method of mass communication and very stuck in its ways where preserving the spectrum is more valued than communication.
You kinda made my point with the whole "try and find another operator to send 2400bps to" part. The digital communication is not conventional, it's revolutionary.
Analog communication is conventional. And radios and their components aren't exotic.
Yes, modern communication is fantastic. But analog will still be more reliable