2025-11-28 — More Thoughts on a new (Western Hemisphere?) Amateur Radio GEO, 29 MHz DATV, EvoHam.com Digital Voice reference website, Young People Aren’t Interested in Amateur Radio
Since DirecTV uses Ku & Ka bands (12–18 GHz & 26.5–40 GHz) using a small dish that is not that hard to aim, we should also think of the 24.0–24.25 GHz and 47.0–47.2 GHz ham bands for GEO sats. I of course totally agree with you that it should be data based. If someone wants to transmit speech, they can use one of the many available codecs out there. Besides, a Geo-hop (from earth to Clarke orbit, and back again) is about a quarter second which makes full duplex voice comms annoying.
-Joe w7com
OT: Shout out to F4JXQ from someone that works for the French as his $dayjob.
Joe - To me, Dish and DIRECTV isn't quite a valid comparison to an Amateur Radio GEO because 1) we're not uplinking to those sats at those frequencies) and 2) those sats have massive antennas with contoured coverage patterns, and massive power. Thus it is easy to receive those signals - by expensive design, and construction, and launch of a big GEO satellite. And, that works to our advantage if we ever do rent a transponder for "radio experimenter" use.
One of the advantages of Amateur Radio is that we rarely actually use full duplex for voice - we transmit, then listen, transmit, then listen, so the latency to GEO isn't much of problem for us.
I need to preach a bit more in Zero Retries - just transmit bits... not special video bits, or special voice bits, just bits, and figure it out at the receiver.
True, the DirecTV sats are about the size and weight of a Greyhound bus. But I could see 10GHz up and 24GHz down as a usable system. Looks like another big chunk of C-band is about to be auctioned off: https://www.phonearena.com/news/t-mobile-verizon-at-t-fcc-c-band-auction-2027_id175988 so there goes any plans of using guard band space on transponders for "amateur" use.
I agree, ham radio should be able to offer UDP/TCP type content agnostic data services. One main issue is the "encryption everywhere" mindset of current IP transport and ham's open content edict. Ham radio may be stuck in the world of the three digit RFCs.
Furthermore, "it's incomplete" because the EvoHam.com fails to mention the utility of Repeaterbook.com ability to program radios from their application. Any repeater or simplex frequency can be programmed, including "code plug" and talk groups.
Ah... this is in reference to your first comment! Gotcha. Note that once a comment is posted, the author can edit their comment. I've edited some of my comments multiple times.
Lloyd - I'll forgive EvoHam.com a lot because it's new and just finding its footing. And yes, that feature of Repeaterbook.com is highly useful and I'll guess EvoHam.com will eventually mention it. There's lots of room in Amateur Radio for alternative approaches to the same utility.
Digital modes can completely change your ham radio activities!
For three years VarAC HF has been my nearly exclusive mode. The station is QRV as long as I am at home. I have activated a few of the alert sounds VarAC offers: received CQ calls, connects, call signs of certain stations being heard. I can hear these sounds all over the house, the YL has not complained yet. OK, I do not jump up from dinner...
The typical complaint about all the beacons and no CQ calls would be off the point if more hams would use the sound system. Of course it makes no sense to send beacons for days and pay the station absolutely no attention.
A VarAC QSO ending within 10 min is short and mostly uninteresting. 30 min is quite common. Beyond an hour happens frequently. The contents of the QSOs often goes way beyond 59/73. It even happens that a station connects, hoping for another "chat over the fence" - only that the "fence" is 1000 km wide :-)
It is quite common that we find some common ground and continue the discussion by email for days or even longer. Without ham radio we would never have met. The question whether these emails are ham radio activity or not is relevant.
Alexander - We're in violent agreement about the utility of VarAC and that mode of operation. I would expect to conduct long ranging conversations with Amateur Radio friends via RF over our common interests, very similar to the way we do it now in email lists over Internet.
My only complaint about VARA HF and VARA FM (and, I think VarAC) is that the authors don't seem to have made any provision for multiple instances operating on different frequencies - for example, HF + VHF / UHF. For me, I'd like to have VARA FM operating simultaneously on HF, 6m, 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm, and seeing all the activity as a single "console". But I'll forgive them that for the otherwise fantastic utility of their respective applications and partition multiple instances of VARA and VarAC if necessary.
I think future GEO satellites should have signal regeneration capabilities and provisions for new ideas. There are enough low power SDR systems that could enable new ideas on the satellite. There is no need to define much more than system bandwidth and a few resources like storage space at this time.
Example: It would be difficult to implement time division multiplex (TDM) schemes for uplink. But for downlink, TDM could use bandwidth much more efficiently. See for example one-to-many store & forward systems where the receivers could request their "private" download. One use case: EMCOMM where many stations are not QRV all the time to conserve power.
Alexander - It's one glaring lack of Zero Retries that I haven't yet aggregated all of the various articles I've written in Zero Retries about a subject such as an Amateur Radio GEO. I think that the proposed "5 and dime" GEO for the Western Hemisphere was a great idea - partitioned channels on the uplink (dynamically assigned upon confirmation of being an authorized user, like trunked radio) and a single wide bandwidth bitstream downlink where each user would parse out the relevant parts of the bitstream.
What was different from all other Amateur Radio satellite systems (that I'm aware of) is that it was an entirely digital / data approach... not analog. Yes, there was some risk in that, but it was clearly relevant and usable in this era. I think it would have been a great idea, and I think it should have been pursued as a "groundsat" demonstration, but no group since then has attempted it, which is a shame.
Steve, I think a lot about EMCOMM, grid down, and distributed systems. I also have seen real QO100 traffic on both transponders.
We could create a system where you use a standard procedure to reserve a certain combination of bandwidth and mode for the upload channel.
Depending on the mode your upload comes down on a certain sub stream and time slot. It might be interesting to find a way that the receiving ground station needs not decode a wideband signal, providing quite some system gain.
The management system of the satellite gives you an exclusive upload frequency and bandwidth. Depending on your mode your signal is regenerated and included in the TDM downstream.
An extreme example: With LoRa, i.e. Meshtastic etc., you can use a 2.4 GHz groundplane and feed it a 20 W LoRa signal. It has been proven that this works from a driving car sending APRS data - over the analog transponder of QO-100. With regeneration of the LoRa signal in space you could gain several dB of system gain.
LoRa uses spread-spectrum technology. This would create special problems - lets call it opportunities.
In "Young People Aren’t Interested in Amateur Radio"
Your observations are dead on.I ha e neighborhood kids who are interested in amateur radio but they are interested in digital comms, space comms and anything that looks like a cell phone...
I can show them my phone on the AREDN network and they go crazy about it. But I start showing them legacy stuff and they rapidly glaze over and start asking about "real tech" as one put it.
One the satellite thing, I too am surprised, a fully digital satellite would open the door to any bits sent whether voice, video, or user data. A voice (I guess some sort of analog repeater??) what a waste of time. and a good sat slot.
Chuck - Thanks for the kind words. This issue just seems to be the "inconvenient truth" that most of Amateur Radio isn't willing to confront. Amateur Radio has a lot to offer to NewTechHams, but not the same old, same old stuff that most Amateur Radio Operators, organizations, and manufacturers want to promote.
Preach on brother, In trying to promote AREDN (every Emcomms I run into tells me "we need data not voice") I run into this all the time, I look to a certain extent on the fact that we now have all of these tools that depend on the internet for interconnection, yet many of them could function just fine with an amateur based RF network like AREDN or the 44 net. But when I point out that we have sort of built a city with no sewer or water system, just the buildings, and the background services are like running hoses to the buildings rather than building the infrastructure to carry our data. How long are we going to continue on concepts older than we are?? The dinosaurs will be the death of the service if we do not do something.
This doesn't invalidate any of your observations about young people, which are well taken, but one interesting thing I'm noticing is it seems CW is more popular now than any time in recent memory.
Several younger people in my club are huge into CW *but!* only when combined with outdoor activities they were already enjoying. If anything this adds to your point though as they're operating almost exclusively portable which is a departure from the typical shack setup.
As for the satellite, I found ORI's summary of the AMSAT-DL workshop most helpful:
My impression is there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but I agree the focus on voice is curious. I think 70+ GHz is doable with some good alignment apps and if that opportunity comes we should take it gladly. I do agree it's not as ideal as 5/10 GHz and is going to require some of that amateur ingenuity to fully exploit. The problem with renting transponder space is it's gonna be full-freight commercial pricing and represents an ongoing cost which is tough on the amateur community vice a one time cost. The moment we don't pay it's gone to another client that will.
Justin - Thanks for the kind words about ZR 0230. CW is an efficient mode, and until the advent of AI being able to reliably parse human speech and generate "listenable" machine speech, CW was the only "language" that was fully interoperable between humans and computers. One aspect of CW that used to be a "defense and promotion" was the very narrow bandwidth required for CW. But we now have data modes that are as bandwidth efficient and robust as CW. I get the attraction of CW, but it's an acquired taste, and using it as part of promotion of Amateur Radio has to be "handled delicately" or CW can easily be perceived as an exclusionary aspect of Amateur Radio (as in "CW is for real hams").
I continue to be impressed by the approach to CW that PreppComm (https://www.preppcomm.com) has taken - create Amateur Radio transceivers with CW as a built-in data mode. CW encoding and decoding is automated with a built in display and keyboard. That's entirely logical to me, and I applaud PreppComm for having spotted and exploited that niche in Amateur Radio so well.
I'm not so certain that renting a commercial GEO transponder is going to be prohibitively expensive. Not cheap, but not out of the question. Consider that Starlink has completely eclipsed consumer GEO Internet service, so a lot of that capacity on satellites in GEO is going unused. In my opinion, if you're a customer of a GEO Internet Access company like HughesNet, you're nuts for not having switched over to Starlink. There continue to be applications for GEO Internet access, but they're vanishingly few in the wake of Starlink, and especially the Starlink Mini terminal. And there's the collapsing market for Dish Networks / DIRECTV linear television programming. How much longer will it be commercially viable to push linear television via GEO satellite when the viewing (paying) population is below the cost of maintaining that service? I'm finding satellite receive dishes, including the receiver and the LNA, at curbs for free - the companies don't even want to recover the receivers or LNAs now, and they're so useless that there's no point in trying to sell them on Craigslist or eBay. So I think, perhaps, there might be some deals to be had for renting a GEO transponder for Amateur Radio use. It would take someone with the financial negotiating power of ARDC or perhaps ARRL (that... is fun to imagine) who had financial reserves to quickly complete a negotiation by writing a check... but I think it could be doable.
Yeah promotion of CW has been a bit of a challenge since it's kind of inherently a "solo" activity. It doesn't really lend itself well to being the "front door". We've found it gets young people interested who already have some level of interest in radio and want the lightest possible kit for hiking. Part of this may be related to the fact I live very close to the Appalachian Trail so hiking is a popular pastime!
Anyway, I'm on board for any way we could get a western hemisphere geo bird for the amateur community. What we really need is a wealthy benefactor haha. I do think anything above Ka band would be absolutely fascinating, though challenging as you've said. We do have 47.0-47.2 GHz (6mm band) which is closer to Ka (but still ~7 GHz away from the top). Perhaps that would be a better target, though the band is smaller. We are primary there however. I'm not aware of anyone using anything above Ka band for user terminals though, so we'd have to design our own stuff no matter what. High gain dishes could be quite small as a silver lining...
Superb analysis on why legacy amateur radio fails to attract younger operators. The point about young people being interested in digital comms but glazing over at legacy tech mirrors what I see in embedded systems: developers will enthusiastically adopt modern protocols like LoRa and Meshtastic but show zero interest in aging packet radio standards. The firmware fragmentation issue with M17 and MMDVM is a perfect example of why open source projects need sustainable maintenance models. Community forks can preserve functionality, but they also introduce compatbility complexity that discourages casual adoption.
"Neural Foundry" (interesting newsletter - just subscribed) - Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, the "fork to fossilized" isn't ideal, but the situation with MMDVM didn't leave much of an option. And it's interesting that most of those to whom M17 really mattered, only used their MMDVM >for< M17, so opting for the M17 fork isn't a major issue. And now, M17 is developing their own, more optimized, hotspots, and soon, will evolve past the need for hotspots to fully flexible systems like the LinHT. In my opinion, the portable form factor of the LinHT is just the first of many compatible variants. That compactness of the LinHT's electronics would be an idea fit for a future "MMDVM Hotspot" like unit.
Amateur Radio is relatively new to the "sustainable development" model of open source projects compared to, say, the Linux community / industry. I don't think that will be the case much longer as NewTechHams come into Amateur Radio and start forming up communities to provide long term support for important open source projects.
About the role of Hamvention in New Tech ham radio... I went to Hamvention 2025 looking for innovation in the hobby. What I saw was scattered bits of innovation, and also a higher proportion of young people than in past years, perhaps thanks to Hamvention's new-ish policy of free tickets for students 12-21. Thinking about what I saw relevant to "young people aren't interested":
1. The non-commercial specialty groups with good exhibits drew lots of attention, anything from the Collins Collectors Association to HamSci. True innovation was hard to find and scattered among the exhibits and forums.
2. The "new tech" in the Flex Radio Aurora is that polar modulation allows a high-power transmitter that doesn't need a separate power amplifier, and generates a fraction as much heat. But polar modulation is already a success in the QRP world, as are SDR and open-source technology.
3. Legacy ham radio activities have effective organizations behind them, but the truly innovative parts of ham radio are very scattered, and it's often hard to get the "big picture" about some new technical direction in the hobby. New tech hams could benefit greatly from a magazine similar to Circuit Cellar or Elektor, but directed at ham radio. An umbrella group, a Ham Radio Tinkerers Society (HRTS), could help the cause of ham radio experimentation by reducing the fragmentation among scattered homebrew and experimenters' groups, as well as facilitating access for newcomers to a particular niche or technology.
I think there are other ways to revitalize ham radio than adopting commercial services with an amateur "last mile."
1. At Hamvention, I'd settle for "interesting and engaging" to folks curious about radio technology (but not experienced with Amateur Radio) that would be approachable. Almost everything about Hamvention is pitched at the experienced Amateur Radio Operator who knows the basics and the vendors (including the non-commercials) are trying to woo those experienced Amateur Radio Operator to their product or aspect of Amateur Radio - satellites, low power operation, etc.
2. I guess I'll have to start disclaiming that the FlexRadio Aurora is COOL TO ME.
I realize (and have disclaimed numerous times in Zero Retries) that Polar Modulation the technology isn't exactly new... but if once youxxx >I< understood that I was looking at a 500 watt transmitter / amplifier, including an an antenna tuner, in a compact, cool-running package, that could be powered from a typical 120 volt 15 amp circuit... as I said, that was technical innovation, to me, and it was COOL TO ME.
3. I agree that an umbrella organization that helps to tie all the various specialty modes / products / innovation together with a single reference point... maybe even a new magazine... might work. I say "magazine" to refer to a new media entity that would be mostly a (free for all to access) website and some way to tie the younger folks (short reading) and older folks (longer reading) together, along with semi-technical (73 Magazine style) with deep technical (Ham Radio Magazine style) articles. And of course, videos.
As for
... other ways to revitalize ham radio than adopting commercial services with an amateur "last mile."
Um, sorry to report that "adopting commercial services with an Amateur last mile" is now an accepted part of Amateur Radio, from individual's Internet hotspots, to linking most digital voice repeaters via Internet. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that point.
One of the tenets of attracting and accepting NewTechHams into Amateur Radio is that they have a different perspective than the current majority Amateur Radio population. To them, Internet and powerful handheld devices (and apps that run on them) are just part of life. Trying to explain to them why Amateur Radio should eschew them is like trying to talk the majority current Amateur Radio population out of using grid power when it's universally available.
Your perspective could even be an argument that's refocused on Amateur Radio use of DMR, P25, NextEdge, TETRA, etc. - all are radio systems that were developed solely for commercial use with no provisions for Amateur Radio use and thus have to be adapted - "Amateur last mile".
North America is just too big geographically with thin populations in big parts of the continent to make full coverage across the continent via Amateur Radio practical. (Heck, AT&T with all its resources couldn't make a continent-spanning microwave networking fully practical. They made it work only at great cost, and abandoned microwave linking as soon as fiber optic cables were viable.)
Thus, as just one example, linking geographically separated AREDN networks via Internet tunnel is routine and accepted. I view my proposal of Amateur Radio use of a commercial GEO transponder to be just another Amateur Radio adaptation.
distinguish between VarAC, VARA HF, VARA FM, and VARA SAT.
VarAC is a user program with a KISS interface.
The VARA variants are different "TNC" programs using completely different transmission methods. VARA also works with other user programs, for example Winlink Express.
VarAC has a cluster mode where you can connect several VARA instances with a single VarAC data base using multiple VarAC instances. There are VarAC clusters with several VARA.FM instances on VHF/UHF channels, several VARA HF instances on different shortwave bands AND VARA SAT on QO-100.
If you want to send a short message ("vmail") through the cluster you can first request a list of stations that had been recently heard by the cluster or which VarAC station had heard a specific station. Then send the cluster or simple VarAC station a vmail to a specific call.
When the addressed station sends a beacon on any of the cluster's channels, the cluster sends him a broadcast (like UDP on TCP/IP) informing him about the vmail. Then the receiver must connect to the VarAC cluster to poll his vmails.
The cluster could actively connect to the receiver and send the vmail. I do this sometimes when the receiver sends beacons but the operator does not react. (I operate a single VarAC instance, not a cluster.)
I am in contact with Irad, 4Z1AC, the developer of VarAC. I am for example trying to convince him to add interfaces for vmails and broadcasts. Two possible applications:
* A disaster relief team uses Winword macros or other means to create CSV files that are stored in a network folder. VarAC polls this folder and sends the respective broadcasts or puts vmails (short messages) into its outbox. The inverse way could also be helpful.
* Consider IoT or Meshtastic applications creating such CSV files: A LoRa sensor measures a water level. An simple application creates a CSV and adds the static information of that sensor. VarAC distributes the information by broadcast.
Geez Steve, what is ham radio? I've struggled with the 'elevator speech' for years. At one time I wouldn't bring up the hobby because the conversation and explanation was too awkward. Since I retired I've become really passionate about the hobby. In ten years I've only met two people that were interested; one already had too many hobbies and the other is a work in progress. So, how does one create a spark that leads to a discussion?
John - Funny you should use the word "spark". If you're building a campfire from scratch, your "spark" doesn't do much good to light a "fire" unless there's some "tinder". As I've explained, I think for most of us it's a dead end to try to interest the average person into Amateur Radio, especially legacy Amateur Radio (HF, CW, voice operation, etc.). So I don't try that approach - don't try to talk up Amateur Radio to the average person.
My approach is to watch for an opening ("tinder") with potential NewTechHams - techies, EE students, software engineers, Makers, STEM students (or parents or instructors). Then try to apply the "spark" of talking up radio technology that they might have some familiarity / interest in - Meshtastic, long distance Wi-Fi, etc. If the "spark" catches that "tinder" then "fan the flames" to try to ignite the "fire" - relevant, technological aspects of Amateur Radio . Gently explain that Amateur Radio is all about experimenting with radio technology - building your own radios, figuring out your own types of radios with software (GNU Radio), etc.
Since DirecTV uses Ku & Ka bands (12–18 GHz & 26.5–40 GHz) using a small dish that is not that hard to aim, we should also think of the 24.0–24.25 GHz and 47.0–47.2 GHz ham bands for GEO sats. I of course totally agree with you that it should be data based. If someone wants to transmit speech, they can use one of the many available codecs out there. Besides, a Geo-hop (from earth to Clarke orbit, and back again) is about a quarter second which makes full duplex voice comms annoying.
-Joe w7com
OT: Shout out to F4JXQ from someone that works for the French as his $dayjob.
Joe - To me, Dish and DIRECTV isn't quite a valid comparison to an Amateur Radio GEO because 1) we're not uplinking to those sats at those frequencies) and 2) those sats have massive antennas with contoured coverage patterns, and massive power. Thus it is easy to receive those signals - by expensive design, and construction, and launch of a big GEO satellite. And, that works to our advantage if we ever do rent a transponder for "radio experimenter" use.
One of the advantages of Amateur Radio is that we rarely actually use full duplex for voice - we transmit, then listen, transmit, then listen, so the latency to GEO isn't much of problem for us.
I need to preach a bit more in Zero Retries - just transmit bits... not special video bits, or special voice bits, just bits, and figure it out at the receiver.
True, the DirecTV sats are about the size and weight of a Greyhound bus. But I could see 10GHz up and 24GHz down as a usable system. Looks like another big chunk of C-band is about to be auctioned off: https://www.phonearena.com/news/t-mobile-verizon-at-t-fcc-c-band-auction-2027_id175988 so there goes any plans of using guard band space on transponders for "amateur" use.
I agree, ham radio should be able to offer UDP/TCP type content agnostic data services. One main issue is the "encryption everywhere" mindset of current IP transport and ham's open content edict. Ham radio may be stuck in the world of the three digit RFCs.
Furthermore, "it's incomplete" because the EvoHam.com fails to mention the utility of Repeaterbook.com ability to program radios from their application. Any repeater or simplex frequency can be programmed, including "code plug" and talk groups.
correction at the end: "is IRrelevant".
Ah... this is in reference to your first comment! Gotcha. Note that once a comment is posted, the author can edit their comment. I've edited some of my comments multiple times.
Lloyd - I'll forgive EvoHam.com a lot because it's new and just finding its footing. And yes, that feature of Repeaterbook.com is highly useful and I'll guess EvoHam.com will eventually mention it. There's lots of room in Amateur Radio for alternative approaches to the same utility.
Digital modes can completely change your ham radio activities!
For three years VarAC HF has been my nearly exclusive mode. The station is QRV as long as I am at home. I have activated a few of the alert sounds VarAC offers: received CQ calls, connects, call signs of certain stations being heard. I can hear these sounds all over the house, the YL has not complained yet. OK, I do not jump up from dinner...
The typical complaint about all the beacons and no CQ calls would be off the point if more hams would use the sound system. Of course it makes no sense to send beacons for days and pay the station absolutely no attention.
A VarAC QSO ending within 10 min is short and mostly uninteresting. 30 min is quite common. Beyond an hour happens frequently. The contents of the QSOs often goes way beyond 59/73. It even happens that a station connects, hoping for another "chat over the fence" - only that the "fence" is 1000 km wide :-)
It is quite common that we find some common ground and continue the discussion by email for days or even longer. Without ham radio we would never have met. The question whether these emails are ham radio activity or not is relevant.
Alexander - We're in violent agreement about the utility of VarAC and that mode of operation. I would expect to conduct long ranging conversations with Amateur Radio friends via RF over our common interests, very similar to the way we do it now in email lists over Internet.
My only complaint about VARA HF and VARA FM (and, I think VarAC) is that the authors don't seem to have made any provision for multiple instances operating on different frequencies - for example, HF + VHF / UHF. For me, I'd like to have VARA FM operating simultaneously on HF, 6m, 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm, and seeing all the activity as a single "console". But I'll forgive them that for the otherwise fantastic utility of their respective applications and partition multiple instances of VARA and VarAC if necessary.
GEO Satellites
I think future GEO satellites should have signal regeneration capabilities and provisions for new ideas. There are enough low power SDR systems that could enable new ideas on the satellite. There is no need to define much more than system bandwidth and a few resources like storage space at this time.
Example: It would be difficult to implement time division multiplex (TDM) schemes for uplink. But for downlink, TDM could use bandwidth much more efficiently. See for example one-to-many store & forward systems where the receivers could request their "private" download. One use case: EMCOMM where many stations are not QRV all the time to conserve power.
Alexander - It's one glaring lack of Zero Retries that I haven't yet aggregated all of the various articles I've written in Zero Retries about a subject such as an Amateur Radio GEO. I think that the proposed "5 and dime" GEO for the Western Hemisphere was a great idea - partitioned channels on the uplink (dynamically assigned upon confirmation of being an authorized user, like trunked radio) and a single wide bandwidth bitstream downlink where each user would parse out the relevant parts of the bitstream.
What was different from all other Amateur Radio satellite systems (that I'm aware of) is that it was an entirely digital / data approach... not analog. Yes, there was some risk in that, but it was clearly relevant and usable in this era. I think it would have been a great idea, and I think it should have been pursued as a "groundsat" demonstration, but no group since then has attempted it, which is a shame.
Steve, I think a lot about EMCOMM, grid down, and distributed systems. I also have seen real QO100 traffic on both transponders.
We could create a system where you use a standard procedure to reserve a certain combination of bandwidth and mode for the upload channel.
Depending on the mode your upload comes down on a certain sub stream and time slot. It might be interesting to find a way that the receiving ground station needs not decode a wideband signal, providing quite some system gain.
The management system of the satellite gives you an exclusive upload frequency and bandwidth. Depending on your mode your signal is regenerated and included in the TDM downstream.
An extreme example: With LoRa, i.e. Meshtastic etc., you can use a 2.4 GHz groundplane and feed it a 20 W LoRa signal. It has been proven that this works from a driving car sending APRS data - over the analog transponder of QO-100. With regeneration of the LoRa signal in space you could gain several dB of system gain.
LoRa uses spread-spectrum technology. This would create special problems - lets call it opportunities.
Steve:
In "Young People Aren’t Interested in Amateur Radio"
Your observations are dead on.I ha e neighborhood kids who are interested in amateur radio but they are interested in digital comms, space comms and anything that looks like a cell phone...
I can show them my phone on the AREDN network and they go crazy about it. But I start showing them legacy stuff and they rapidly glaze over and start asking about "real tech" as one put it.
One the satellite thing, I too am surprised, a fully digital satellite would open the door to any bits sent whether voice, video, or user data. A voice (I guess some sort of analog repeater??) what a waste of time. and a good sat slot.
Again keep up the good work.
Chuck - Thanks for the kind words. This issue just seems to be the "inconvenient truth" that most of Amateur Radio isn't willing to confront. Amateur Radio has a lot to offer to NewTechHams, but not the same old, same old stuff that most Amateur Radio Operators, organizations, and manufacturers want to promote.
Preach on brother, In trying to promote AREDN (every Emcomms I run into tells me "we need data not voice") I run into this all the time, I look to a certain extent on the fact that we now have all of these tools that depend on the internet for interconnection, yet many of them could function just fine with an amateur based RF network like AREDN or the 44 net. But when I point out that we have sort of built a city with no sewer or water system, just the buildings, and the background services are like running hoses to the buildings rather than building the infrastructure to carry our data. How long are we going to continue on concepts older than we are?? The dinosaurs will be the death of the service if we do not do something.
Keep up the good fight.
This doesn't invalidate any of your observations about young people, which are well taken, but one interesting thing I'm noticing is it seems CW is more popular now than any time in recent memory.
Several younger people in my club are huge into CW *but!* only when combined with outdoor activities they were already enjoying. If anything this adds to your point though as they're operating almost exclusively portable which is a departure from the typical shack setup.
As for the satellite, I found ORI's summary of the AMSAT-DL workshop most helpful:
https://www.openresearch.institute/2025/10/30/futuregeo-workshop-memo/
My impression is there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but I agree the focus on voice is curious. I think 70+ GHz is doable with some good alignment apps and if that opportunity comes we should take it gladly. I do agree it's not as ideal as 5/10 GHz and is going to require some of that amateur ingenuity to fully exploit. The problem with renting transponder space is it's gonna be full-freight commercial pricing and represents an ongoing cost which is tough on the amateur community vice a one time cost. The moment we don't pay it's gone to another client that will.
Good, meaty article as always Steve!
Justin - Thanks for the kind words about ZR 0230. CW is an efficient mode, and until the advent of AI being able to reliably parse human speech and generate "listenable" machine speech, CW was the only "language" that was fully interoperable between humans and computers. One aspect of CW that used to be a "defense and promotion" was the very narrow bandwidth required for CW. But we now have data modes that are as bandwidth efficient and robust as CW. I get the attraction of CW, but it's an acquired taste, and using it as part of promotion of Amateur Radio has to be "handled delicately" or CW can easily be perceived as an exclusionary aspect of Amateur Radio (as in "CW is for real hams").
I continue to be impressed by the approach to CW that PreppComm (https://www.preppcomm.com) has taken - create Amateur Radio transceivers with CW as a built-in data mode. CW encoding and decoding is automated with a built in display and keyboard. That's entirely logical to me, and I applaud PreppComm for having spotted and exploited that niche in Amateur Radio so well.
I'm not so certain that renting a commercial GEO transponder is going to be prohibitively expensive. Not cheap, but not out of the question. Consider that Starlink has completely eclipsed consumer GEO Internet service, so a lot of that capacity on satellites in GEO is going unused. In my opinion, if you're a customer of a GEO Internet Access company like HughesNet, you're nuts for not having switched over to Starlink. There continue to be applications for GEO Internet access, but they're vanishingly few in the wake of Starlink, and especially the Starlink Mini terminal. And there's the collapsing market for Dish Networks / DIRECTV linear television programming. How much longer will it be commercially viable to push linear television via GEO satellite when the viewing (paying) population is below the cost of maintaining that service? I'm finding satellite receive dishes, including the receiver and the LNA, at curbs for free - the companies don't even want to recover the receivers or LNAs now, and they're so useless that there's no point in trying to sell them on Craigslist or eBay. So I think, perhaps, there might be some deals to be had for renting a GEO transponder for Amateur Radio use. It would take someone with the financial negotiating power of ARDC or perhaps ARRL (that... is fun to imagine) who had financial reserves to quickly complete a negotiation by writing a check... but I think it could be doable.
Yeah promotion of CW has been a bit of a challenge since it's kind of inherently a "solo" activity. It doesn't really lend itself well to being the "front door". We've found it gets young people interested who already have some level of interest in radio and want the lightest possible kit for hiking. Part of this may be related to the fact I live very close to the Appalachian Trail so hiking is a popular pastime!
Anyway, I'm on board for any way we could get a western hemisphere geo bird for the amateur community. What we really need is a wealthy benefactor haha. I do think anything above Ka band would be absolutely fascinating, though challenging as you've said. We do have 47.0-47.2 GHz (6mm band) which is closer to Ka (but still ~7 GHz away from the top). Perhaps that would be a better target, though the band is smaller. We are primary there however. I'm not aware of anyone using anything above Ka band for user terminals though, so we'd have to design our own stuff no matter what. High gain dishes could be quite small as a silver lining...
Superb analysis on why legacy amateur radio fails to attract younger operators. The point about young people being interested in digital comms but glazing over at legacy tech mirrors what I see in embedded systems: developers will enthusiastically adopt modern protocols like LoRa and Meshtastic but show zero interest in aging packet radio standards. The firmware fragmentation issue with M17 and MMDVM is a perfect example of why open source projects need sustainable maintenance models. Community forks can preserve functionality, but they also introduce compatbility complexity that discourages casual adoption.
"Neural Foundry" (interesting newsletter - just subscribed) - Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, the "fork to fossilized" isn't ideal, but the situation with MMDVM didn't leave much of an option. And it's interesting that most of those to whom M17 really mattered, only used their MMDVM >for< M17, so opting for the M17 fork isn't a major issue. And now, M17 is developing their own, more optimized, hotspots, and soon, will evolve past the need for hotspots to fully flexible systems like the LinHT. In my opinion, the portable form factor of the LinHT is just the first of many compatible variants. That compactness of the LinHT's electronics would be an idea fit for a future "MMDVM Hotspot" like unit.
Amateur Radio is relatively new to the "sustainable development" model of open source projects compared to, say, the Linux community / industry. I don't think that will be the case much longer as NewTechHams come into Amateur Radio and start forming up communities to provide long term support for important open source projects.
About the role of Hamvention in New Tech ham radio... I went to Hamvention 2025 looking for innovation in the hobby. What I saw was scattered bits of innovation, and also a higher proportion of young people than in past years, perhaps thanks to Hamvention's new-ish policy of free tickets for students 12-21. Thinking about what I saw relevant to "young people aren't interested":
1. The non-commercial specialty groups with good exhibits drew lots of attention, anything from the Collins Collectors Association to HamSci. True innovation was hard to find and scattered among the exhibits and forums.
2. The "new tech" in the Flex Radio Aurora is that polar modulation allows a high-power transmitter that doesn't need a separate power amplifier, and generates a fraction as much heat. But polar modulation is already a success in the QRP world, as are SDR and open-source technology.
3. Legacy ham radio activities have effective organizations behind them, but the truly innovative parts of ham radio are very scattered, and it's often hard to get the "big picture" about some new technical direction in the hobby. New tech hams could benefit greatly from a magazine similar to Circuit Cellar or Elektor, but directed at ham radio. An umbrella group, a Ham Radio Tinkerers Society (HRTS), could help the cause of ham radio experimentation by reducing the fragmentation among scattered homebrew and experimenters' groups, as well as facilitating access for newcomers to a particular niche or technology.
I think there are other ways to revitalize ham radio than adopting commercial services with an amateur "last mile."
1. At Hamvention, I'd settle for "interesting and engaging" to folks curious about radio technology (but not experienced with Amateur Radio) that would be approachable. Almost everything about Hamvention is pitched at the experienced Amateur Radio Operator who knows the basics and the vendors (including the non-commercials) are trying to woo those experienced Amateur Radio Operator to their product or aspect of Amateur Radio - satellites, low power operation, etc.
2. I guess I'll have to start disclaiming that the FlexRadio Aurora is COOL TO ME.
I realize (and have disclaimed numerous times in Zero Retries) that Polar Modulation the technology isn't exactly new... but if once youxxx >I< understood that I was looking at a 500 watt transmitter / amplifier, including an an antenna tuner, in a compact, cool-running package, that could be powered from a typical 120 volt 15 amp circuit... as I said, that was technical innovation, to me, and it was COOL TO ME.
3. I agree that an umbrella organization that helps to tie all the various specialty modes / products / innovation together with a single reference point... maybe even a new magazine... might work. I say "magazine" to refer to a new media entity that would be mostly a (free for all to access) website and some way to tie the younger folks (short reading) and older folks (longer reading) together, along with semi-technical (73 Magazine style) with deep technical (Ham Radio Magazine style) articles. And of course, videos.
As for
... other ways to revitalize ham radio than adopting commercial services with an amateur "last mile."
Um, sorry to report that "adopting commercial services with an Amateur last mile" is now an accepted part of Amateur Radio, from individual's Internet hotspots, to linking most digital voice repeaters via Internet. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that point.
One of the tenets of attracting and accepting NewTechHams into Amateur Radio is that they have a different perspective than the current majority Amateur Radio population. To them, Internet and powerful handheld devices (and apps that run on them) are just part of life. Trying to explain to them why Amateur Radio should eschew them is like trying to talk the majority current Amateur Radio population out of using grid power when it's universally available.
Your perspective could even be an argument that's refocused on Amateur Radio use of DMR, P25, NextEdge, TETRA, etc. - all are radio systems that were developed solely for commercial use with no provisions for Amateur Radio use and thus have to be adapted - "Amateur last mile".
North America is just too big geographically with thin populations in big parts of the continent to make full coverage across the continent via Amateur Radio practical. (Heck, AT&T with all its resources couldn't make a continent-spanning microwave networking fully practical. They made it work only at great cost, and abandoned microwave linking as soon as fiber optic cables were viable.)
Thus, as just one example, linking geographically separated AREDN networks via Internet tunnel is routine and accepted. I view my proposal of Amateur Radio use of a commercial GEO transponder to be just another Amateur Radio adaptation.
Steve,
distinguish between VarAC, VARA HF, VARA FM, and VARA SAT.
VarAC is a user program with a KISS interface.
The VARA variants are different "TNC" programs using completely different transmission methods. VARA also works with other user programs, for example Winlink Express.
VarAC has a cluster mode where you can connect several VARA instances with a single VarAC data base using multiple VarAC instances. There are VarAC clusters with several VARA.FM instances on VHF/UHF channels, several VARA HF instances on different shortwave bands AND VARA SAT on QO-100.
If you want to send a short message ("vmail") through the cluster you can first request a list of stations that had been recently heard by the cluster or which VarAC station had heard a specific station. Then send the cluster or simple VarAC station a vmail to a specific call.
When the addressed station sends a beacon on any of the cluster's channels, the cluster sends him a broadcast (like UDP on TCP/IP) informing him about the vmail. Then the receiver must connect to the VarAC cluster to poll his vmails.
The cluster could actively connect to the receiver and send the vmail. I do this sometimes when the receiver sends beacons but the operator does not react. (I operate a single VarAC instance, not a cluster.)
Alexander - Thanks for that great explanation. In all my reading of VarAC, I had not heard of VarAC clusters. That's close enough to what I want.
I am in contact with Irad, 4Z1AC, the developer of VarAC. I am for example trying to convince him to add interfaces for vmails and broadcasts. Two possible applications:
* A disaster relief team uses Winword macros or other means to create CSV files that are stored in a network folder. VarAC polls this folder and sends the respective broadcasts or puts vmails (short messages) into its outbox. The inverse way could also be helpful.
* Consider IoT or Meshtastic applications creating such CSV files: A LoRa sensor measures a water level. An simple application creates a CSV and adds the static information of that sensor. VarAC distributes the information by broadcast.
Geez Steve, what is ham radio? I've struggled with the 'elevator speech' for years. At one time I wouldn't bring up the hobby because the conversation and explanation was too awkward. Since I retired I've become really passionate about the hobby. In ten years I've only met two people that were interested; one already had too many hobbies and the other is a work in progress. So, how does one create a spark that leads to a discussion?
Please explore this further!
John - Funny you should use the word "spark". If you're building a campfire from scratch, your "spark" doesn't do much good to light a "fire" unless there's some "tinder". As I've explained, I think for most of us it's a dead end to try to interest the average person into Amateur Radio, especially legacy Amateur Radio (HF, CW, voice operation, etc.). So I don't try that approach - don't try to talk up Amateur Radio to the average person.
My approach is to watch for an opening ("tinder") with potential NewTechHams - techies, EE students, software engineers, Makers, STEM students (or parents or instructors). Then try to apply the "spark" of talking up radio technology that they might have some familiarity / interest in - Meshtastic, long distance Wi-Fi, etc. If the "spark" catches that "tinder" then "fan the flames" to try to ignite the "fire" - relevant, technological aspects of Amateur Radio . Gently explain that Amateur Radio is all about experimenting with radio technology - building your own radios, figuring out your own types of radios with software (GNU Radio), etc.