Comment on Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ?

• thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  lol - great question. I was very excited at the start and did things like talk to a guy in Spain with 5W and a long bit of wire out in the bush, talked to people 400 km away by pointing a handheld antenna directly at a satellite as it passed overhead, received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS, met a heap of smart old guys who were doing interesting things with radio - designing antennas, setting up repeater networks etc. I went in a couple of competitions (in ham radio this is usually about how many contacts you can make over a time period). But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don’t need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don’t know. So now I’m more into Linux and self-hosting which scratches a lot of those same itches.

  I still have a short range radio in the car and a couple of handheld radios. With these I can key into that Raspberry Pi, have the audio travel over the internet and pop out anywhere in the world there’s another AllStar point and go over the air to radios there, but I’ve sold all my HF gear (that allows you to talk direct to anywhere without infrastructure).

  It is an interesting, and quite diverse hobby, and there’s a lot of cheap Chinese radios, and a bottom tier license in most countries that’s easy to obtain (for example without learning Morse code). I’d recommend it to people interested in tech stuff. It’s a hobby that might not exist in 50 years - a lot of the radio spectrum allocated to ham radio in the old days was considered worthless, but now governments regard that as a valuable public asset that can be sold to telecommunication companies. Also there’s growing interference from digital gadgets and wireless devices that requires innovative solutions to overcome.

  source

  • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don’t need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don’t know.

    This is exactly why I’ve never taken a legitimate look into the hobby.

    received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS

    This concept makes sense but I always assumed ham radio was just about audio. That’s pretty cool

    So now I’m more into Linux and self-hosting

    You probably know about this already but just in case, since you have an interest in radio and you have experience with antennas, you might have a cool project that could benefit from LoRa. There’s a few open source projects that incorporate the tech to make sensors for crops or messaging friends at festivals when cell towers are overloaded

    source

    • thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’ll check it out, I can probably buy some stuff and add it to my half finished projects pile :-D

      This concept makes sense but I always assumed ham radio was just about audio. That’s pretty cool

      Digital modes is one of the big growth areas in the hobby, along with the revolution of SDR

      source