When I was in Vietnam, I once used a MARS (Military Amateur Radio System) to call home. A deuce and a half with a canopy top came to our company area with ham radio equipment and telephone hook ups. The Mars operator called a ham operator in the US and gave them the telephone number of the person I wanted to call. The US based operator then called that number and set up some kind of link with his radio. You could have a somewhat normal telphone conversation except that the US radio guy had to key his mic and both telephone users had to say “over” when they were through talking. I remember the conversation were supposed to be 5 mins but that was not enforced.
A lot of folks don’t realize that the emergency stuff is the reason for existence of ham radio. It’s a nice hobby and all, but there’s no way the FCC would set aside such a wide band of precious spectrum just for the sake of a hobby. But whenever there’s some major disaster affecting a city or larger region, the first communications re-established with the outside are ham operators: Many rigs don’t require anything more than someone to turn a crank and someone else to tap out Morse on a switch. They don’t depend on any external infrastructure.
Around here, there are quite a few regulars that talk all day. They talk about work or trips they went on or local news, and lots and lots of right wing politics, but I do live in a red state.
I remember a friend’s dad calling home via this method during the same time period, it did the family so much good to hear his voice*. Thank you to all ham operators who helped with this kind of thing.
*he came home safely.
Not the reason. Part of the social contract.
If you have to have a reason, it’s because it was better to have the Ham operators inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in: Just like the commercial operators, amature and CB operators were given bands in return for keeping out of the rest of the spectrum.
You should probably keep in mind that for quite a lot of ham operation the entire point is making the contact in the first place. The driving idea is to tinker with radio operations, not to chat. So, for example, many hams built their own radios, and I think most still build their own antennas. Many explore low power operations, or portable operations in strange places (atop mountain peaks, on isolated islands), or design and use unique modes of transmission, or try to make contacts over large distances by unusual means, such as bouncing radio off the Moon or the ionized track made by meteors and lightning. In all these cases, the goal is to make contact with some target person, who is the desired location, or using the desired equipment or frequency. Once you make contact, and verify identity, you’ve achieved everything you wanted to do. You can chat a bit if you want to, but that’s not really the point.
This mode rather dominated ham radio in the early days, from say the 20s through the 60s. When FM radios became cheap in the VHF bands, chatting became more of a thing, in part because the limited range meant the people talking to each other lived quite close, could easily be in the same club, and because it meant there was no real discourtesy in hogging the frequency for 20 minutes at a time. In the 70s amateur operations in the VHF bands were pretty much like cell phones today – well, let’s say cell phones 10 years ago, text messaging today – a way to yak with your friends while out and about. But even then, amateurs experimented with all kinds of clever ways to build repeater networks, patch into the phone lines, control stuff remotely, do direction finding to locate transmitters, and so forth.
With the ubiquity of cheap and easy worldwide communication today, the interest in just talking, never actually dominant, has clearly diminished further. But the fascination of trying to build means to communicate over great distances yourself – not relying on any commercial operation to do the technical work for you – is still compelling to people. It’s kind of how some people are attracted to the idea of biking across the United States, even though it would cost way more and take far longer than jumping on an airplane. Or how some people who like programming aren’t satisfied with mastering Ruby or JavaScript, but learn to write assembly and hack hardware.
That would be their early warning radar: Duga radar - Wikipedia
You can see one of them if you visit Chernobyl on one of the tours. I’m planning to go next year hopefully.
They can talk about most anything they want, except financial items which benefit one party cannot be transacted over the air.
Some nations have more restrictive laws about subject matter, such as no political or religious statements whatsoever. In the US that is often good practice but there is no law against it.
There are FCC advisory statements encouraging subject matter which helps advance the state of radio art. IOW talking about signals, modulation, antennas, etc. Practicing emergency communications methods and testing related equipment is also encouraged. However these are recommendations not rules.
Hams discuss things which they are interested in and accustomed to based on their background. E.g, older hams may spend lots of time discussing their grandchildren or health issues. Those who have known each other for years may simply chat for long periods about what they did that week.
Hams who participate in contests discuss that: Contesting - Wikipedia
Other hams who are more technically oriented may discuss technical items. This is more common for hams using newer, more advanced equipment such as computerized “Software Defined Radios” (SDR). Here are two examples:
FlexRadio 6700: https://stationproject.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/flexradio-6700.jpg
Here is Nobel laureate Joe Taylor, K1JT, using the 1,000 foot Arecibo dish to communicate with hams by bouncing signals off the moon:
http://www.radiocronache.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/K1JT_WA3FET_Arecibo.jpg
It isn’t just a red state thing. Hams tend toward an older demographic, so there is a strong rightward list in political discussions. Also, just like in general society, the more rightward a person leans, the prouder they are to proclaim it.
“BUILD equipment”
In the Seventies, a college friend was a big ham radio operator when it was already dying out. He was an artiste when it came to antenna construction.
During the Depression, my father built his own ham radios to talk around the world–never leaving dumpy Philadelphia (I still have hundreds of his QSL cards from all over. Some are quite beautiful.) His family couldn’t afford college, so he joined the army air force in '39 as a private. He got out in 1945 as a colonel after working radios and paperwork in India, Tibet, China, and the the Pacific. Then he saw a lot more of the world for the next forty years doing work for RCA, NASA, Northrop, DOD, DOE, the RAF, the RSAF, and others. I think his first big project was working on the production of color TV sets (we had one of the first ten in the country) and his last project was overseeing TEMPEST installations at the Pentagon. So I think it paid off for him asking others around the world how he was coming through.
I wouldn’t have thought that that was possible.
If you mean “home brewing” or building your own equipment from scratch, that has been slowly dying out due to the increasing density and sophistication of integrated circuitry. E.g, to build or repair this Elecraft KX-3 at the chip level would require a high-end surface mount repair station: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-HMCDF8L/0/O/i-HMCDF8L.jpg
OTOH the total number of licensed ham operators is not dying out but has been increasing for some time, at least in the U.S: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-Ds62pmd/0/XL/i-Ds62pmd-XL.jpg
Here is a modern software-defined ham radio deployed at a public service event last year. It digitizes the entire RF band and presents it as a scrolling waterfall display, similar modern submarine sonar displays : https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-WKbjv5b/0/O/i-WKbjv5b.jpg
I’m having flashbacks to being in the room while my first husband carried on conversations in incredibly faint, staticky Morse code. It always sounded like something from a movie.
Adding a topic of conversation: my mom and younger brother both got their licenses this year (and are after me to get mine). They have a network of affiliated churches and friends that all contact each other in order by region like a phone tree - in case of apocalypse.
They touch base once a month to make sure the network is still up and running right, and that everyone is in contact, and they chat about God, Jesus, church, and prepper stuff. VERY odd to hear serious-sounding numbers and call-signs and the official call-and-response (in case of infiltrators, I shit you not) and then a segue into praise songs and a recap of Sunday’s sermon, and a question about long-term catchment of rainwater from roofs.
“Are you bald?” *
*Family Guy joke
When I was in retail electronics I worked with a guy who was into Ham Radio in a serious way - had a licence and built an antenna in his backyard; had a pretty decent rig and all that. I mentally imagined his office at home looking like the radio room on a 1930s steamship.
Anyway, he was an older chap but there was apparently a surprising number of people with Ham licences in the city (and the rest of Australia) - most of the stuff they talked about was the usual general chit-chat people talk to people about, but there were more than a few Conspiracy/Tinfoil Hat [del]nutters[/del] enthusiasts there as well.
This was about 10 years ago though, and even then most of the people who might have been into Ham radios had migrated to the internet, which didn’t require complicated radio gear or licences from the government.
Wow, Lasciel, you mean there are actually some doomsday preppers who develop skills and equipment that would genuinely be useful in the event of doomsday? That’s a first by me. Usually, they seem to focus on gold and on more firearms than they could ever possibly hope to wield.
A friend of mine is a ham operator. He’s a fairly wealthy guy, retired. He has a huge tower in his yard and when he’s not buffing his Ferraries (he has two), he buys and rebuilds old radio equipment and re-sells it to fellow enthusiasts. I never quite got the attraction of ham radios except for the one really cool thing he showed me – he bounced a radio signal off the moon. (!)
I’m sure if they had the funds for it, the gold would be on the list too, but this is the south - there are already more guns per capita in that group than they know what to do with. 
But surprisingly, yes, they’re focusing on usefulness - my moms church paid for the entire congregation to get first aid training through the Red Cross, and they all started Holiness Gardens this past few years (at least, the ones who didn’t already have farms and gardens) and they have bible school lessons on canning produce, how to build a useful bug-out-bag and first aid kit for your home and car, and they go on Sunday nature walks where they learn to identify edibles and bad stuff.
I’ve been a bit shocked at the practicality of most of it. The talk is crazy, but at least the skills are useful for other emergency situations.