The Heart of Ham Radio

Around eight years ago I thought it would be funny to become a licensed ham-radio operator. For those who don’t know, ham radio is a hobby that revolves around radio communications. I was always fascinated by radio and I was a romantic about the idea of talking to people over the radio. The process wasn’t too hard. I learned some basic electronics and regulations around radio communications. I took a test and submitted it to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and a few weeks later I was a federally-recognized radio-operator with a callsign and was permitted to transmit on a small corner of the radio spectrum. The technology was fun to learn and operate but frankly I found the company among other US hams problematic. The majority of conversations in ham radio are totally benign—just ham radio operators talking about ham radio on their radios. But if you listen long enough, the airwaves can be home to the type of talk common among conservative and libertarian voices. There were vocal opinions about the liberal forces of society encroaching upon the conservative way of life, antagonistic rhetoric toward big government, and the “liberal agenda” it was imposing on Americans.

I was scandalized by the culture when I first started dabbling in ham radio, partly because I’d never actually interacted with people outside my east-coast liberal bubble. In those days, I was a pretty mainstream liberal progressive type. I felt uncomfortable taking part in a hobby that was home to so many people I disagreed with culturally and politically. On one occasion, I heard two guys casually talking about how they felt threatened by the presence of a young black man at a fast food establishment and how they would have “defended themselves” if he had tried anything. There was open talk about gun rights at a time when anti-gun sentiment in my corner of America was riding high. I liked the hobby fine and I didn’t want to leave it because of these people so I tried to be the change I wanted to see in ham radio. I attended radio club meetings and tried to make ham radio visible to a younger, more like-minded segment of the population. I posted on local reddit forums to try to spread the word about ham radio in an effort to bring in a younger, possibly more progressive crowd. Unfortunately I found that among my peers, there was very little interest in radio communications let alone any desire to expose themselves to a culture they found distasteful. The only young people I could find that were interested in the hobby were preppers, off-roaders, and gun-people—exactly the people I was trying to get away from.

Eventually, l learned to “spin the dial”—a ham radio term for moving to a different frequency if you don’t like what you hear. I moved away from talking to people on the radio to the more fun aspect of building and tinkering with radios and antennas and contesting. I retreated from trying to singlehandedly change the culture of ham radio and instead focused on what I liked about ham radio. During this time I decided to challenge myself by getting into what’s called SOTA (Summits on the Air.) Summits on the air is a form of radio contesting where radio operators set up a station in remote places (usually summits of mountains) and try to establish as many contacts as they can from these places. It involves building a portable station that can operate completely off-grid. It’s a fun and rewarding experience to reach a designated spot on a map and transmit from that spot. After a few of these “activations” as they’re called I realized that I wasn’t just making contacts for fun. I was learning to be a fully self-sustaining unit of my own. Everything needed to send a signal from a remote area needed to fit inside a backpack that I could carry. If I forgot a critical component, the activation would fail. I was proud of my ability to be able to make a fully operational radio station in the wilderness free from the grid.

Early in my radio career I remember driving around my hometown and looking at all the antenna towers that need to be built in order for us to communicate over the phone. I realized early on that we were all using radio, but we were all relying on existing infrastructure to do so and we pay a premium to do so. Not to say that the money we pay for this infrastructure isn’t worth it. Cellphone technology is a marvel of modern communications and has enabled so much of our modern way of life. Still, I hated the idea of being totally and utterly dependent on it. I hated the idea that in the (unlikely) scenario that if all this infrastructure were to fail, our modern methods of communications would be completely lost. Over time I came to see the ability to communicate using radio as a form of self-reliance. I was taking back my ability to use wireless communication back from the government and corporate power. This in turn led me to understand why ham radio was popular with a segment of the population that values self reliance over government reliance. A lot of work goes into making a contact over the radio. Individuals in ham radio go to great lengths and build extraordinary things to simply establish a contact with someone new. Beneath the contesting, long-winded conversations known as “rag-chews”, the banal weather reports, and daily “nets” is the heart of ham radio: The ability to communicate wirelessly when everything else fails.

Societal cooperation has obviously allowed us to do a great many things, and we are all better off working together. So what if we use cell phone networks and never question our reliance on the network? So long as everyone is paying their bills, and relying on the government and the cellphone companies for the network, then everything is fine. Until it’s not. It doesn’t happen often these days, but every so often it’s ad hoc networks of amateur radio operators that are best able to respond when telecom networks fail.

My involvement in amateur radio didn’t make me into a commando, but it did open my eyes to the many ways I’d been utterly dependent on systems that had the potential to fail. Everywhere I looked I saw a system of dependencies. I had seen all the ways I and many people around me had taken for granted these systems—food systems, communication systems, healthcare systems, etc. The worst part was that many of these systems didn’t always have my interests in mind. Their interest was in revenue generation or political power. We take so very much for granted in this country to the point where we’ve lost the ability to fathom what it would be like to live without these dependencies. We assume that nothing so bad could ever happen to us where we would need to learn to navigate with map and compass because we just assume that Google Maps and all the satellites and software that make it happen will always work. We assume that we’ll never have to defend ourselves because we believe a cop will always be there to help us when we’re in danger.

Even as I evolved spiritually, I came to see dependency and community in new ways. To be a person of faith is to be dependent on a power greater than yourself. But that dependency does not mean passivity. The work of any faith begins with the individual—the prayers and meditations one performs alone, the discipline and the willingness to try something new and the accountability no one else can carry for you. The same rule applies: you have to help yourself so that you can help others. A broken vessel cannot hold water.

I honestly don’t know what I am now politically. All I can say is that I’m not what I was when I first started my journey into ham radio. To understand ham radio is to understand my political journey over the last ten years.

Some people call this paranoia. Some people outright believe it’s good to be entirely dependent on systems. They don’t see any issue with being entirely dependent on the government or on corporations for basic things. They actually believe that we should be more dependent on the government. They believe we should increase the size and scope of the government’s reach further into our lives. Instead of fostering an ability to live without these dependencies, some people look for ways to undermine those abilities. I’m not against being dependent on systems, I’m very much a creature of dependency (looking at you, Costco), but I am against not nurturing our individual abilities to help ourselves so that we can help others. We should all be trying to foster some sort of individual ability within ourselves so that we can help our immediate communities, our family, our towns, our schools, not politicians in a bureaucracy in Washington DC or some Silicon Valley corporation that only seeks to enrich themselves.

I don’t advocate for individualism. We have enough of that in the US and it has been poisonous to our sense of community. What I do advocate for is fostering and training our abilities to be able to live without these systems-level dependencies so that we can take care of our neighbors when these safety-nets fail. When the cell phone networks in North Carolina went down, following a hurricane in 2024, it was a loose community of Amateur radio operators who came together to help getting messages in and out of the immediate disaster zone. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. Verizon and AT&T eventually came, but it was people who took the time to learn to communicate without the cellphone network that were able to help their community. It was an ad-hoc network of individuals who were best able to help. The federal government isn’t what makes America great. It’s the individuals and talents that form communities that make America great.

I’m close to needing to renew my radio license which means it will have been ten years since I first started transmitting. I still denounce extremist and inflammatory voices that are thankfully a minority on the airwaves. I am however, much more sympathetic to the larger philosophical view of self-reliance and resistance to big government. Ham radio taught me self reliance for the ultimate goal of being able to contribute to society instead of just taking for granted all that it gave me. It’s about empowering yourself and being accountable for the ultimate purpose of serving your community.