Ham radio is a hobby around what communication was like back in the day. There used to be no Internet, long-distance telephony was in its infancy, and radio (whether "ham" or official) was literally the only way to communicate in real-time at a distance, and those radios were relatively crude, required lots of knowledge and manual operation because digital logic wasn't advanced enough yet.
Nowadays that is no longer true. Except in very specialized applications, analog radio is not typically used for communication, and digital isn't using manually-operated radios either, it's stacks of dozens of layers that eventually end up transferring IP packets or similar.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but since ham radio no longer represents how the majority of people communicate today, maybe we shouldn't be holding onto the past and instead focus on how people communicate now? Maybe IP networks should be the future "ham radio", and we should have clubs around these things instead (and existing ham clubs should embrace them, instead of siloed things like digital modes over radio which are innovative but near-useless in real-world usage)?
Even in emergency situations (which is one of the arguments for ham radio), a satellite phone/modem will get you online pretty much anywhere in the world and the only barrier is the equipment, which doesn't seem too different from a ham radio where a good set costs decent money and can't easily be built from scratch and especially not in an emergency situation.
Imagine if ham radio involved into what I described above in which case being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.
> being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.
Sadly FCC regulation prohibits hams from relaying messages for non-hams, so you're not allowed to build transmission infrastructure which can be used by the general community outside of licensed operators (though operators can still communicate among themselves during emergency situations to help the community). Perhaps this needs to change; I suppose it keeps ham radio networks focused, but prevents them from gaining mainstream relevance and challenging the Internet and corporate cellular networks.
On the subject of challenging ISPs and cellular networks, how is mesh networking doing these days? I don't think there's any meshnets near where I live though.
Nowadays that is no longer true. Except in very specialized applications, analog radio is not typically used for communication, and digital isn't using manually-operated radios either, it's stacks of dozens of layers that eventually end up transferring IP packets or similar.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but since ham radio no longer represents how the majority of people communicate today, maybe we shouldn't be holding onto the past and instead focus on how people communicate now? Maybe IP networks should be the future "ham radio", and we should have clubs around these things instead (and existing ham clubs should embrace them, instead of siloed things like digital modes over radio which are innovative but near-useless in real-world usage)?
Even in emergency situations (which is one of the arguments for ham radio), a satellite phone/modem will get you online pretty much anywhere in the world and the only barrier is the equipment, which doesn't seem too different from a ham radio where a good set costs decent money and can't easily be built from scratch and especially not in an emergency situation.
Imagine if ham radio involved into what I described above in which case being a ham could actually give you immediate, real-world benefits to you and your community in working around bad/nonexistent ISPs by building your own infrastructure? This would bring a lot more people into the hobby because those skills allow them to solve actual problems they/their community is facing.
(comment I originally left on a different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808659 but I feel is just as relevant here)