Join us on Wednesday, July 13 at noon Pacific for The Digital Ham Hack Chat with Rosy Schechter and John Hays!
For most of its existence, amateur radio has been the quintessence of the analog arts. From the very earliest days of radio, hobbyists have been piecing together circuits to ply the radio spectrum, using whatever bits of RF wizardry they managed to pick up — or invent — along the way. From the architecture of the radios to the nature of the conversations they had over the airwaves, ham radio was very much an analog experience.
But if hams are anything, they’re resourceful, and they’ve got a long history of leveraging whatever the current state of the art happens to be. And so when electrical engineering began to dive into the digital world, so too did the hams. Radioteletype, facsimile, and other text-and-data modes lead to things like packet radio, which in turn gave us powerful tools like APRS, FT8, and PACTOR, upon which the current rich infrastructure of location reporting, weak signal digital contacts and beacons, and email service independent of an Internet connection have been built. There’s even a complete TCP/IP network using amateur radio as the physical layer, which even predates the widespread public Internet by many years.
Amateur radio always has been at the forefront of digital communications, but it takes work to keep hams in their leadership position in the field. To help with that, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) was established. ARDC is a non-profit dedicated to supporting amateur radio and digital communication science and technology, chiefly through their programs of grants that are available to fund the development of technically innovative open and non-profit projects in amateur radio.
For this Hack Chat, ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter (KJ7RYV) and Staff Lead John Hays (K7VE) will be joining us to discuss the world of digital communications on the ham bands. Here’s your chance to share your experiences with digital modes, find out about what’s new in digital comms, and find out how to participate in the ARDC grant program and possibly fund the next big thing for the digital ham.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 13 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.
Featured images:
Chrumps, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ptolusque, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Once you start realizing how deep into nothing digital modes can grab a signal the world becomes a different place. #JS8CALL
Or you could go back sixty years and find articles in the ham magazines about under the noise reception. Moonbounce was a fairly new thing, andyou needed big antennas, and probably parametric amplifiers. So ifyiucould receive under the noise, it would help.
No software needed. But it’s really the basis of this current day software.