Image someone is alone in an emergency or survival situation where they need to call for help and their only means of communication is a ham radio. For instance, a lost and injured hiker comes across a remote cabin with a ham radio in it. And assume that this person has never seen a ham radio and has no unique experience with radio electronics. How difficult would it be for the average person to figure out how to power it up and get in touch with someone?
Ooh, mememe!
There are all sorts of radios but many are channelized like a television or AM/FM presets and will be preprogrammed for that channel setting. Those could be as easy as clicking the Big Knob until the lost hiker hears something. Using the microphone does require the push to talk button (PTT) but I think that part is intuitive.
But it could be as difficult as, dunno, the lost hiker shocking themselves to death on a high voltage power supply.
With this or any other radio, is there usually a designated SOS / mayday channel? Or do you just try to send on every channel until someone acknowledges it?
No. First of all, ham radio frequencies (with very few exceptions) aren’t monitored by any public safety/first responder type organizations. If you’re skilled or lucky, you’ll get another amateur radio operator on the other end who can relay a message for you. If you’re reallly, really lucky, the public safety responder might be able to wrangle a ham radio to then respond directly, but typically the radios they would have available neither receive nor transmit on ham bands.
Yesss… a handheld VHF/UHF ht (a walkie-talkie style radio) might well have a number of locally useful frequencies stored in a channel mode, but the VHF and UHF bands are not channelized per se. So the question is who might be listening on those programmed frequencies? Really depends on what the owner was using that radio for.
Did the owner set it up for his favorite home-town repeaters and just left it at the cabin as an in-case item? Unlikely that helps at all. Did the owner set it up to talk to his hunting buddies directly? Also probably no help. Did the owner set it up for local repeaters? Well, maybe we’re on to something here, but local repeaters are thin on the ground in the kind of areas with remote cabins. And often there’s no one monitoring them.
The thing with these little handhelds is that they’re limited to line of sight comms. So a couple miles range from radio to radio directly, maybe 20-40 miles if you’re accessing a repeater (a dedicated radio that rebroadcasts your transmissions to boost range) mounted high on a peak.
The other thing about the little handhelds is that they are nearly universally MADDENING to program from the keypad. Most folks set up their frequencies in a computer app and download them to the radio over USB. I gotta be honest, I own several of these radios and have used them for years, and if you told me “hey program in a repeater for me” or “set this up on a simplex frequency” I don’t know if I could do it without the help of Google.
Now I’ve avoided what most people think of as ham radios, the big ol’ box on the desk connected to a honking great antenna outside. I have one of those, one of the most user friendly ones made today. To talk to someone on that you’d have to figure out how to…
- turn it on
- turn on the antenna tuner
- pick a band to use based on time of day, solar conditions, black magic, etc
- choose the right mode (data, AM, USB, SSB, etc)
- tune the frequency
- tune the antenna
- transmit and hope someone’s listening.
- Lather, rinse, repeat
It’s not like flying a plane for example, but there are shit ton of buttons and switches, both touch screen and physical and many of them, set incorrectly, mean you’re shouting at no one farther away than your voice carries. I don’t think a noob is gonna find success.
73 de N6WK
I used the term channelized to visualize the knob indexing but I think presets is an overall better term because so much can change from one to another. Frequencies, mode, tones, NAC.
Most ham radios do NOT have a panic button or EMER or SOS key that would be useful. Some public safety radios do, for example prison staff issued or fire turnout radios. They may also have motion detectors: sound alarm if motionless for too long. Aircraft radios have guard channels/switch, CB chan 9 but hams are off on our own.
Good post.
I have a Technician License and own a number of 2-meter transceivers. If you’re an unlicensed person and there’s an emergency, just figure out how to turn it on, and then try and figure out how to change the frequency. Keep changing it until you hear someone talking fairly clearly. And then butt-in to the conversation. If no one responds, try a different frequency. (There are a lot of nuances to doing this most effectively, but I’m just trying to keep it basic here.)
Many decades ago I was told that sometimes criminals that had stolen sets were able to get on the air, which implies it was not too hard to figure out how to operate the sets. (In this case the criminals were ignored, since it was easy to tell they were not knowledgeable operators.)
It really, really does and, even with best case assumptions, I probably wouldn’t spend too much time trying to use the radio myself and I’m /AE and an EE. If it’s a new, unprogrammed/un-preset radio, no way a beginner gets anything out.
A ham radio is as easy to use as a spreadsheet.
Yeah, exactly. I would guess that a modestly tech savvy user could grab my most user-friendly ht, turn it on, then scroll through my preset frequencies. But in the as-described remote cabin, is there anyone …
- In range (anything from <5 miles to maybe as many as 20 miles)…
- With a radio on…
- Tuned to that frequency…
- Able to help
I’d guess 99%+ of the time, the answer is no.
That’s why most hams I know don’t bother carrying an ht into the wilderness, but things like the Garmin InReach for satellite comms. Those have a big red SOS button that anyone can figure out, and have guaranteed response coordination on the other end, even if you never do anything but hit the button.
What about those end of the world senarios where some group survives in an underground bunker and then reaches out to other possible survivors? Would they even be able to power them up enough to send signals around the world?
Assuming sufficient solar and/or battery power, sure.
Side question(s): Is there any way to send data (like text messages or coordinates) over ham frequencies? I think there are some implementations over GMRS, for example. It would be really cool to be able to text across the world without going through the Internet, either in an apocalyptic or political censorship situation (though I understand encryption is mostly forbidden for civilian radios in the US, right? would steganography also be, or simply speaking in code?)
And can ham devices utilize any digital signal improvement technologies, like frequency-hopping spread-spectrum or even digital audio compression? Or is it mostly analog? I’ve been reading about LoRa and Meshtastic networks, for example, and wonder if it’d be possible to set up a global radio repeater-based SDMB network…
For one data point: I had a housemate back in the 90s who had a ham setup in our house. I was able to fart around with it on my own and talk to people but I am very technically inclined. So that is a bit of evidence that a technical person could make an already set up one work.
For sure! There are many data modes in use, and I’l loosely bucket them into two categories…
- Store and forward models - you send your data to an upstream node which will then further relay it, until it eventually hits a node that hold the data until you login to download your messages. Packet radio, APRS, DMR and Winlink do this sort of thing, among others.
- Direct connection models - You and I send data back and forth to communicate in real time. If you aren’t on frequency and receiving me when I send, the data is lost to the ether. RTTY (the old teletype standard), FT8, JS8, Olivia, the list of data standards is as long as your arm.
Thanks!
Is there some sort of standard machine/device that people would generally use to do these things? Like if I wanted to get a ham license and a join the “store and foreward” network, is there a standard or popular implementation of it?
Can I join a global “chat room” of sorts through these technologies, or are they mostly peer to peer and small groups?
I have to say that I’ve never even seen a ham radio much less tried to use one. Looking at the @Pork_Rind list, I’m thinking I have a decent shot at successfully completing step one. Then it would be, turn on the what?
I’m guessing that there might be a difference between older people who grew up with electronics like component audio receivers, dial TVs, and CB radios versus younger people who only know modern electronics where everything is simplified. Someone who has physically used something like a CB radio might have gained some related practical experience that would help them figure out how to get a ham radio working.
Very good point and this happened in 1995 and I am old.
Sure. You’d need a ham radio and a computer. Most radios these days have USB connections, so you’d just download the tools for data comms format you intend to use and plug your computer in. Note that ham radio enthusiasts don’t necessarily spend a whole lot of time thinking about best practice in UX/UI so many of them are genuinely terrible to look at. But at least they’re usually free.
Prior to the advent of the USB port on the radio, you’d use something called a TNC (terminal node controller) sitting between the computer and the radio. The TNC acts as a modem that turns your computer’s output into the modulated audio that would then get transmitted, and vice versa.
Yeah, absolutely. “Global chat room” is practically the definition of ham radio.
My great uncle was an electrician and a ham operator. He was born in 1905 so I assume he was a fairly early pioneer in both fields. I remember as a child looking into his bedroom and thinking it looked like a mad scientist’s lab. It seemed there was a whole wall full of radio equipment, covered with knobs and dials and switches. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to even turn the power on. Of course my memory may be faulty but I assume that modern ham equipment is much more user-friendly than the antique contraptions that he had put together in the early 20th century.