an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…

Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.

I went all in with AREDN but couldn’t get people interested.

Interesting. My AC fan has a noise pattern that revs up as the AC or heater starts. I can hear it on the radio before I hear the fan itself.

If it exists, a ham will try to bounce radio waves off it, or use it as an antenna.

That’s what I warned everyone about during our weekly net. We’re tiny fish compared to the telecom giants. Everything above 6 meters is in jeopardy.

The name means nothing to today’s youth

Story time: When I was a kid in the late 90s, there was a fad for toy walkie-talkies at my school. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could get my signal, which wasn’t very far given the likely minuscule power.

The teachers decided to capitalize on this trend by inviting a representative of a local ham club to speak at our school. I was absolutely floored when I learned you could talk around the world. Two things kept me from pursuing my license at the time. There was still a code requirement, and nobody for the life of me could tell me what lunch meat had to do with wireless communication.

While I can appreciate the desire to maintain order in the midst of chaos, and I can certainly see why radio is essential for that, I’ll never understand the people who say they’re into ham radio because they don’t want to be censored or intercepted in a time of crisis. Ham radio is insecure by design. Your dox yourself every time you give your call sign.

Oh this screenshot was taken years ago. I got my extra ticket in 2021 (first licensed in 2019). I just keep coming back to it because of how on the nose it is.

I’ve actually been away from the hobby for the most part for about 2 years, and am trying to find ways to get back into it.

I wish I could find the quote, but I believe it was an old issue of QST (1914 I think). The writer spoke in almost religious terms of his experience tuning around looking for other stations, comparing it to disembodied souls floating through the ether searching for others to commune with. I wish I could feel the way he felt, but I’m too habituated to casual intercontinental communication.

The closest thing I can think of is my experience of the early web, where I was able to see the weather conditions at my grandparents’ house thousands of miles away.