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Ham It Up!
Notebook
BY CLARISSA LITTLER
If there's any current trend in tech that I love right now it's that people are constantly finding new ways to repurpose old technologies. Along those lines, we're going to talk about the world of people who have built an alternative internet over amateur radio, often called ham radio. Before we dive in, we need to talk a bit about what radio and
forms a webpage you access on your phone; or it can be individual frames that make up a television signal.
What isn’t a radio? Even though, when we say radio, we usually mean "a thing that broadcasts music or talk", from the perspective of science, radio is actually a huge range of things including: your wi-fi, the cell WIKIMEDIA COMMONS network a phone connects to, and the free tv stations that exist in a lot of places that only show fifty year old tv shows and the news. These are all types of radio. We're just constantly swimming in all these signals; this light that has waves so big not only can we A typical amateur radio set-up. The term "ham" was first used in professional wired telegraphy during the not see them 19th century to mock operators with poor Morse codebut the waves sending skills ("ham-fisted"). (Wikipedia) pass through us like visible light amateur radio are. On a physical through clear glass. From the radio level, radio is electromagnetic signal's perspective, humans don't waves—the same as light— even exist. It's pretty cool, but broadcast out in all directions and maybe a little weird if you think picked up by antennas. Antennas about it too hard. are material, often pieces of metal, So if wifi is a kind of radio, have that get "shaken" by these waves in we reached the end of this article? a way that creates electricity. Admittedly, it'd be pretty funny The electricity in the antenna if I said "to use the internet over can then be used for all sorts radio, turn on your phone" but of things: for a radio station it instead we’re going to talk about becomes the signal that drives something much cooler by far: a speaker so you can listen to amateur radio. music; it can become the data that Amateur radio is a very old
standard of communication that takes place on specific radio frequencies that have been reserved all across the world to be freely used by everyone. In most countries you do need a license to legally broadcast, but licenses generally are free, available with a very low or no minimum age limit, and easy to get When you're licensed, you also get a call sign, which is almost like an internet IP address. For amateur radio, a call sign identifies the broadcaster. It's assigned to a person, not the radio. Ham radio is often used for people to talk to each other hundreds, even thousands, of miles apart. But that's not all the ways amateur radio is useful. Since ham radio is, on a physical level, the same kind of thing as wifi, it should be possible to convert the sound-oriented radio signals into digital signals computers use with wi-fi. Then you have a reach of miles and without needing to pay an ISP for internet access. What’s your call sign? There are a few different ways to use the internet over the radio. One of the most popular is the automatic packet reporting system (APRS), a system people have set up where everyone tunes into the same frequency and uses software or hardware to convert their radio signals into packets, just like the bits of data that get sent over the normal internet. The same way an IP address on the normal internet is used to find the computer that's supposed to get a message, the call sign of the radio operator is used to let someone's computer know if a packet sent out across the radio is meant for them. APRS technology predates wi-fi entirely. People commonly set up raspberry pis to manage encoding and decoding the APRS signals and to help provide infrastructure to
