No Ham License? Listen Anyway In Your Browser

Full disclosure: ham radio isn’t for everyone, and there are many different facets to it. What appeals to one person might bore another to death. One area of ham radio that has changed a lot in the last few years is more or less local and typically mobile operation on VHF or UHF. Not long ago, hams used HTs (walky-talkies or handi-talkies) or mobile radios via repeaters to talk to each other and — the golden prize back then — make phone calls from their cars. Cell phones have made that much less interesting, but there is still an active community of operators talking on repeaters. However, the traffic has gone digital, the Internet is involved, and people with inexpensive, low-powered radios can talk to each other across the globe. This is nothing new, of course. However, having digital services means that operators with special interests can congregate in what amounts to radio chat rooms organized by region or topic.

There’s a long history of people listening to ham radio conversations with shortwave radios, SDRs, and scanners. But with so much activity now carried on the Internet, you can listen in using nothing more than your web browser or a phone app. I’ll show you how. If you get interested enough, it is easy enough to get your license. You don’t need any Morse code anymore, and a simple Technician class license in the United States is all you need to get going.

A Quick DMR Primer

There are several digital ham networks around and like real networks, you can have different physical transport layers and then build on top of that. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on DMR (digital mobile radio) on the Brandmeister network which is very large and popular ham network. You won’t need a license nor will you need to sign up for anything as long as you are content to just listen.

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Hackaday Europe 2025 Tickets On Sale, And CFP Extended Until Friday

We’re opening up shop for Hackaday Europe, so get your tickets now! We’ve managed to get the ticket price down a bit this year, so you can join in all the fun for $145. And if you’re reading this right now, snap up one of the $75 early bird tickets as fast as you can.

Hackaday Europe is going down again in Berlin this year, on March 15th and 16th at MotionLab. It’s going to be a day and a half of presentations, lightning talks, badge hacking, workshops, and more. This is where Hackaday hangs out in person, and it’s honestly just a great time – if your idea of a great time is trading favorite PCB design tricks, crafting crufty code, and generally trading tales of hardware derring-do.

In short, it’s the best of Hackaday, live and in person. Throughout the weekend, all the meals are catered, we’ve got live music at night, and the soldering irons will be warmed up for you. It’s going to be great!

If you’re in town on Friday the 14th, we’ll be meeting up in the evening to get together over some pre-event food and drink, sponsored by Crowd Supply. It’s a nice opportunity to break the ice, get to know the people you’re going to be spending the next 48 hours with, and just mingle without missing that great talk or wonderful workshop. Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2025 Tickets On Sale, And CFP Extended Until Friday”

The Many Leaning Towers Of Santos, Brazil

If you’ve ever gazed at the shoreline of Santos, Brazil, and felt like something was tugging at your inner eye level, you’re not alone. In fact, you’ve spotted one of the world’s most bizarre architectural phenomena.

Santos is an interesting contradiction—it’s a sunny coastal city with pristine beaches that also plays host to a bustling port. What draws the eye, however, is the skyline—it’s decidedly askew. This isn’t a Photoshop job or some avant-garde urban planning experiment, either. It’s a consequence of engineering hubris, poor planning, and geology just doing its thing.

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Raspberry Pi Hack Chat With Eben Upton

Join us on Wednesday, January 15 at noon Pacific for the Raspberry Pi Hack Chat with Eben Upton!

join-hack-chatThe Hack Chat has been on an extended hiatus, but we’re back for 2025 and coming strong out of the gate! We’ve been trying to get Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO Eben Upton on the chat for a while, but there was that whole thing of taking the company public that probably distracted him a wee bit. That’s fine though, because we know he loves getting in the trenches with the hacker community and talking about the things we all love to talk about. It’s not often that you get a chance for a one-on-one like this, so make sure you join us with all your Pi-related questions.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

[Image credit: Sniper Zeta, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Holey And Wholly Expensive Keyboard

An Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (UHK) with DIY rainbow keycaps.
Image by [jwr] via reddit
The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (UHK) line is, as the name suggests, a great choice for a lot of people. They’re each a toe-dip into the ergonomic waters with their split-ability and those beginner thumb clusters.

However, [jwr] was not completely satisfied and decided to make a custom set of keycaps. The idea was to create ‘caps without the “annoyingly abrasive texture of PBT”, that are larger than average for larger-than-average fingers. Finally, [jwr] wanted the Function row to tower over the number row a little, so these have a taller profile.

So, what are they made of? The look kind rubbery, don’t they? They are cast of pigmented polyurethane resin. First, [jwr] designed five molds in Fusion360, one for each row. Then it was time to machine master molds via CNC in foam tooling board. These were filled with silicone along with 3D-printed inserts, which produced silicone molds for casting keycaps four at a time in resin.

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Hackaday Links: January 12, 2025

The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning intensely enough to create their own winds, consuming everything in their path in a horrific positive feedback loop. We’ve even seen fire tornados caught on video. We’ve got quite a few connections to the affected area, both personally and professionally, not least of which are all our Supplyframe colleagues in Pasadena, who are under immediate threat from the Eaton fire. We don’t know many details yet, but we’ve heard that some have lost homes. We’ve also got friends at the Jet Propulsion Labs, which closed a few days ago to all but emergency personnel. The fire doesn’t seem to have made it down the mountain yet, but it’s very close as of Saturday noon.

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Retrotechtacular: The 1951 Telephone Selector

Telephone systems predate the use of cheap computers and electronic switches. Yesterday’s phone system used lots of stepping relays in a box known as a “selector.” If you worked for the phone company around 1951, you might have seen the Bell System training film shown below that covers 197 selectors.

The relays are not all the normal ones we think of today. There are slow release relays and vertical shafts that are held by a “dog.” The shaft moves to match the customer’s rotary dial input.

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