Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "" video.

Ham radio was once an interesting and very rewarding hobby. But not now - being able to call anyone in the word on a cellphone, or send an email, makes it look stupid. But the reasons for its demise as a popular hobby predate cellphones and the internet and are evident in this old 70's film: Store-bought equipment and obsolete technology. While it talks about making your own equipment, almost all the gear shown is store-bought. There's not much fun, and no real gain in knowledge, in being an appliance buyer. When I was in junior high school (early 60's) I decided that ham radio was just the thing - I had been reading electronics magazines and had successfully designed and built a solid state stereo system. In electronics generally, tubes were going out and transistors were coming in. So I built a receiver for a ham band (all solid state) and set about building a 10 watt transmitter, also all solid state. As the licensing authority here in Australia essentially limited novice hams to the VHF bands, this was quite a challenge, but I mastered it. Up to that point, I had not met or spoken to any other hams. But once on the air, the universal response was "You built in yourself? With transistors? Are you nuts? You should have just bought an old tube-type taxi transceiver and changed the crystals." (Lots of these old tube transceivers had been scrapped because the Govt had decided to halve the channel spacing). I was disgusted. I was under a misapprehension - I thought ham radio was about designing and building it yourself, so you could learn the technology, learn some radio engineering, and help advance the state of the art. Silly me - it's not that at all - its about old men having a gossip. After a few weeks I forgot all about ham radio and never went back to it. You'd think they would want to see photos and the circuit. No, they were not interested - they thought it was stupid. Since then, the odd ham has said to me something along the lines of "oh, but we are researching propagation, advancing that field." Well, sorry mate, no way. In the 1950's and 60's the US military did and sponsored a heck of a lot of research into propagation. It's all available in professional journal papers and textbooks - far beyond what any ham would know.
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@lizzyfan1986 : My comment above is a very old comment now. It says all that needs to be said. As only a single response has been made - yours - I guess I hit the nail on the head. If any hams can come forward and refute it, well and good. It would be great if there is still a place for ham radio. But none have.
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@bill-2018 : That makes you a "proper" ham, and not a mere appliance buyer. Great - but you are in a minority group. I like building things too - but my own designs, not someone else's. That is usually just enough challenge to give me a buzz when it's finished and works. Designing electronic products was my day job for many years. I let my VK license lapse when it came up for renewal at the end of the first year. No point in it when one's right-up-to-date solid state design is viewed with sneering disdain by other hams, who think it a stupid thing to do. Nothing wrong with enjoying valves of course - in fact one of my hobbies is restoring vintage (valve) test equipment - but that sneering disdain made a ham license pretty pointless.
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@swlmiami6605 : Ha! SWL! Short Wave Listener! Another strange breed I didn't think existed anymore. For the information of those who have never been a ham, ham radio clubs used to issue certificates entitled "Registered Short Wave Listener" supposedly to encourage schoolboys to study and pass the government exam to qualify for a transmitting licence. You kept a list of stations heard for a few weeks and paid a fee - ah that's it - paying money for no good reason to a bunch of old men so their clubhouse tea got paid for. Do clubs still issue SWL certificates? I could never see the point in such a thing. Before the internet, shortwave receivers were very common, and lots of people that had no interest in ham radio at all used them to get news reports and music from the country they or their parents came from, in their own language. Basically, any twit can use a receiver. The internet has rendered shortwave radios obsolete.
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@stargazer7644 : Yeah, there's other things like attending club meetings to gossip, talking gossip over the air, talking about things you know almost nothing about, gossiping ......
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@stargazer7644 On paper that is true. But authorities such as the ARRL estimate that only 10 to 20% are actively engaged technically, as distinct for just on-air chit chat. In previous decades the percentage was much higher. in 1935 the percentage was over 80%. In 1955 it was still 50%. Thus between 1955 and today, the real number of technically active hams in the USA has declined from ~160,000 to ~80,000, while the general population has more than doubled. In the USA a license is granted for 10 years. In most other countries it has to be renewed (fee paid) each year. This means that Americans suffer virtually no penalty for retaining a license they are not using, and people who dip their toe in and quickly leave are on the books for 10 years regardless.
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@stargazer7644 The thing is, if what you do is buy equipment and use it to talk on air (whether voice or packet data or whatever), the novelty is likely to wear off, since you are not doing anything your neighbour can't do with his mobile phone. But if you design, engineer, and build your own gear, you can do something the neighbour can't, and you are much more likely to stick with it and keep up with the technology. Sure it can cost more to build your own than to buy, but just about any hobby costs you money. That just means there is not so much fun in building someone else's design or a design published in a magazine. You get a LOT more out of it if you design and engineer your own. I figured out how to design circuits when I was in primary school and germanium transistors were the latest thing. 70 years later I'm still designing and engineering circuits - its still fun. Not ham radio circuits though. My experience described in the head of this thread is why. Those guys who spend $6,000 on an IC-905 or whatever and be on 10 GHz the same day - are they real hams? No, they are just appliance users. The entry hurdles to get a license are not significant. I did it when I was a 13 year old schoolboy. The requirements are a lot less stringent now. I didn't do a club course - I just bought the ARRL manual and read it. It was more than sufficient to pass the exam (which required candidates to draw circuits and write words explaining how they worked, no silly multiple choice tick the right box jokes.) I own a couple of high performance general coverage receivers - they are quite useful in various ways in a home-based electronics lab, especially since I designed and built them and calibrated the AGC for accurate dB readings. Ham bands are pretty quiet these days. There is more "hash" these days due to the proliferation of computers and switch mode power supplies in consumer equipment, etc, so a signal has to be a few dB stronger than in the 1960's and low cross modulation in receivers is critical. But even allowing for that, the ham bands are pretty quiet compared to what they used to be. Maybe you live in a much larger city than I do, so more transmitters within line of sight for the VHF and higher bands for you. Just as a check for this post I checked the HF ham bands using one of my old general coverage receivers - found only 3 or 4 weak voice signals and some kind of piccolo code - probably an embassy somewhere on a channel they shouldn't be on. I checked with a WinRadio card in one of my PC's for activity up to 2 GHz - no hams on the air this evening. Admittedly the WinRadio noise floor is a bit high. I have no idea how the ARRL has estimated how technically active hams are. I freely admit - how long is a piece of string? Only about 20% of American hams are members of the ARRL (because of the cost??) - did they just estimate for members or hams in general? I do not know. some years ago I trialed a subscription to QEX but the quality of articles was not very good.
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