Comment by eddythompson80
1 day ago
I always found the difference between ham radio operators and computer hacker community interesting.
There is obvious large overlap. Both are nerdy and techy and attract similar base groups. But the ham space is dominated by people who want to be "good citizens" through collective action, while computer hacker is more about cyberpunk "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
Perhaps it's the clearest example of "The medium is the message" concept.
It is very strange that when you come across anything radio related, people seemingly come out of the woodwork to tell you not that you are necessarily, actively doing something against regulation, but that there is always potential to be breaking the law.
Take this Hackaday article from the other day:
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/so-you-want-to-make-your-sdr...
The subject is mostly academic, but in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules. It's weird. I don't know of any other subject that provokes responses about "the rules" like this. I could understand if the article title was "How to Aim Laser Pointers at Airplanes", but attach a long enough wire to an oscillator and people start to get uppity.
On the other side of things, I don't know if you've turned on a shortwave radio recently, but the only thing I hear on mine is switch-mode power supply noise.
Hams take pride in being largely self-policing because this is one of the things that keeps the FCC interested in reserving sections of the spectrum for ham use.
Also, I love hackaday for their articles but the comment section there is among the worst on the Internet. You'll find more enlightening discussions on the wall of a truckstop bathroom stall.
> comment section there is among the worst on the Internet
Some would argue it's right up there with HN ;)
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I got the Technician license mid 2026 as a genuine ignoramus and super newb. I crammed hard for the test (might have been wise to go for General) but operating in the VHF/UHF (repeater) landscape, I lost much of my initial enthusiasm. Not much going in the handheld realm (HF is where it's at), though the discipline, etiquette and kindness is admirable, and clearly, the hobby tends to draw a particular type of person. I might buy a GMRS license too, which requires no test, can be useful, and is far less formal than Ham.
Not in the budget yet for HF gear, though I do have an RTL-SDR Blog (Rx only) I need to figure out.
As a former trucker; the form of enlightenment one acquires between those walls is limited, and mostly, a dissertation on the virtues of breatharianism and kumbhaka.
Like I said, "The medium is the message"
One bad transmitter in your neighborhood can cut you off from the hobby. Someone who's into linux and computers can follow an online tutorial to rig together an SDR. Look at a bunch of numbers or static, shrug and move on to a different project without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors. Then it's on those neighbors to go build a directional antenna and buy portable radio gear and then do their own "in the field investigation" to isolate which house is doing that, then go try to explain to the random person they are polluting a band and hope the person is friendly and cooperative.
In a perfect world the FCC would do that, but getting the FCC to act on small infractions like that is a slow and long process and often goes unanswered. Especially if you're not near a marina or a federal building or an airport. So one hackaday reader can take down ham operation in an entire area because they were just interested in a weekend DIY project.
People throw that "against the law" to limit the damage. But actually getting the FCC to prosecute these issues is a challenge in itself.
I listened to a net on a VHF repeater once- some guy's PTT button got stuck, which ties up the repeater, plus you hear the background sounds from his house. It was quite funny- FCC not needed, instead somebody called him (you heard his phone ring and him saying "What?!" over the repeater).
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> Someone who's into linux and computers can follow an online tutorial to rig together an SDR. Look at a bunch of numbers or static, shrug and move on to a different project without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors.
Why would someone leave an SDR actively transmitting with no purpose?
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You have to really egregiously fuck up as an ordinary consumer/non professional to get the FCC to expend the resources to hunt you down and fine you. One example that comes to mind is a guy who continually operated a cellular jammer from his car on his daily commute on a freeway in Florida.
The FCC's enforcement bureau is not very large or well resourced and is primarily concerned with issuing enforcement actions on licensed broadcasters. You can look at their public documents/listings of "Notes of Appparent Liability" for examples. Everyone who gets fined by the FCC is public recod.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=FCC+enfor...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=FCC+NAL+n...
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>without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors
Why can't those neighbors just broadcast on top of it? I'm sure an LLM could figure out a protocol that could survive.
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I see this in basically every interesting domain now, from construction to software development to 3D printing to starting a business. There’s a huge cohort that’s always ready to jump on other people for doing something interesting, offering “friendly” discouragement at the earliest moment, often while simultaneously defending bad behavior from incumbents or their half of the political class.
I'm wonder if it's an extension of internet reddit culture where you get rewarded with instant updopamines for making some snappy technically-correct point so we all learned to do that.
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A lot of railfans are the same way. I think there's a aspect of on the spectrum style nerds who are really into rule following
Add to that the hall room monitor effect and also the fact that the stakes are rather high for hams (look at what happened to CB radio)
> in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules
I don't know how it is in your country but where I grew up it's well-known that the cops will come knock at your door fast if you transmit at power or frequency bands you shouldn't be transmitting.
"The radio spectrum is a fragile resource". That's the first thing they tell you in the licensing class in my country. So this care is more about keeping a fragile common resource working well, rather then trying to pose as law-abiding.
that may be, and you're right that they're building highways but this is part of a broader power grab on the second amendment.
don't forget that they just banned 'content' by disallowing foreign flir on drones, which is the modern equivalent to a periscope.
they are putting enough satellites in orbit to track everyone all at once roughly.
this is over reach.
this is why i am nervous about 'small government', they're not going to give up ground and will remain 'big data'. it is a tax and a restriction on freedoms of press, of arms, of speech, of movement, of assembly, of association.
where's the redress and representation?
it is a human right to build an emergency transmitter out of barbed wire, not a data center right of way to filter process and categorize.
I think it's mostly fear that bad actors will make government take that little bit of freedom that they are enjoying
Eh, it1.'s not really fear.
The spectrum is fragile. A few people being assholes can mess it up for thousands or millions of people with a few hundred bucks of equipment.
While you or me may not cause a mess, there are millions and millions of people around and eventually you hit the random number generator where people fuck things up.
I don't think it's about enforcing the rules (on Hacker News), as much about sharing information that others may not know.
I suppose it has something to do with RF being a shared medium.
I mean everything kinda is, but with RF it is very evident.
Maybe the world would be better off if we realized that most commons are like that and should be treated with more common sense
Simple, the blast radius of anything radio related is much, much higher. And if you mess around with transmitters so that they interfere with air or maritime bands or with police/firefighter/EMS comms, it might be the one hole in the swiss cheese too much that leads to a fatal disaster.
Unfortunately, it is at the same time very easy to make innocent mistakes that lead to such kinds of emissions. Say, forget (or mess up) the input filter of a PA, and at the same time mess up the output filter... and whoops, now you're blasting harmonics all over the place.
Short story: if you piss off other spectrum holders enough, amateur radio operators will lose the leeway they get with the service including the self policing aspect.
Also, when you break little rules early (like low power transmission out of band) it makes you desensitized to breaking dangerous rules later (like keeping people away from antennas being driven with high power).
[dead]
You could try jaywalking in Germany
I think it might be because ham radio is still barely legal and the community wants to keep the few freedoms they have so they try not to piss off any groups of interest. Whereas pretty much everything hacking-related is already a felony thanks to DMCA and other similar laws, so they don't have much to lose.
> Whereas pretty much everything hacking-related is already a felony thanks to DMCA and other similar laws, so they don't have much to lose.
Hackers were much more rebellious in former days before such laws were past. My opinion the reason why hackers got more "civilized" is that you could earn quite a lot of money by getting (and staying in) a job in big tech.
Hacking was mostly about gaining access before AOL and there was absolutely a "let's give this kid a summer job" attitude floating around after War Games came out.
The chain of resource acquisition and information gathering necessary to arrive at a point where you need to make a long-distance phone call you could never afford was impressive in itself. Calling card fraud by a bright minor for educational purposes against a corporate entity absolutely loathed by every adult at the time just wasn't that big of a deal.
From my perspective the point of being a hacker is individual but follows observable desire paths. A lot of those have been filled in now.
Probably the biggest reason "hackers" got civilized is just a regression to the mean effect. When you have something extremely difficult to get into, there is going to be some strong selection effect that is going to accidentally select for some other correlated traits. As the barriers to entry dropped, more people get in, so the selection gate drops as well and you get something closer to the average human. You can see this in all sorts of niches over time. For instance, while little music niches will often blame their unique culture getting diluted on "selling out" I think it is often the case just that they attracted more people and got regressed to the mean.
If there were no such laws, then what were they rebellious against?
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For ham radio you need an exam. It's not just about the medium.
And are you really surprised the hacker community is less preoccupied with rules? :)
I don't think this is about the medium at all. One is all about rules (due to the license conditions), with the other breaking the rules is the very point.
Don't forget the radio community has this darker side too: the radio pirates. They just don't tend to be licensed because you lose it when you get caught. Though many hams started pirating in their younger years and obtained a licence later.
It's also a generational thing. There's a lot of geriatric sad hams who's only enjoyment in life is playing radio police.
To be fair, HAMs are typically empowered by actual telecommunications agencies with legislative authority to enter premises and what have you to resolve issues, whereas script kiddies just make up their own shit.
In what country? I'm only familiar with rules in the US, and it isn't the case here.
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You've already been corrected about "ham" not being an acronym.
> telecommunications agencies with legislative authority to enter premises
This is real garbled. I don't know what "legislative authority" even is. The entering of premises involves an "enforcement authority", really.
Perhaps you meant that legislators have granted them the authority to do enforcement activities. That isn't "legislative authority".
> To be fair, HAMs are typically empowered by actual telecommunications agencies with legislative authority to enter premises and what have you to resolve issues
Citation, please?
I'd really like to see a documented example of some HAM entering somebody else's premises on, what, a self-appointed search warrant to hunt down a transmitter they deem illegitimate? In the USA that seems like a good way to get shot by a homeowner.
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A lot of that is because airwaves are a finite and shared resource. Me abusing them means that you can’t legitimately use them.
Yes that would never happen to the internet
When it does, it often leads to prosecution, or at least reputational damage. But I can go nuts on my own LAN without affecting yours in any way. It's not possible for me to conduct wild RF experiments in my own house and not affect my neighbors.
It would be hard for me to physically interfere with an airport without having armed guards descend upon me. It would not be hard for me to build a radio that could strongly interfere with airplanes on final approach. The FCC rules that make it illegal and also bring the wrath of the feds down upon you are the sorts of regulations I actually support, along with air and water pollution controls, weight limits on trucks using taxpayer-owned highways, banning of mining in public parks, and other things that keep our shared spaces safe and usable.
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internet is not shared in the same way the airwaves are.
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yep, we can just throw a cloudflare turnstile on everything instead.
NOC / BOFH is a good analogy. These people are highly technical guardians of their commons, who see each others as peers, and pull the plug / Halon drench anyone caught mucking up those commons. Hackers might build a spark gap to send Morse across campus just they might fire up nmap for a laugh to scan their buddy’s dorm connection, or run a fork bomb on the central Unix service. The Network Operstions / Operators / HAMs are the ones that find these hackers and drop one ton(ne) of bricks upon them.
The golden, underlying rule of Amateur Radio is to respect and protect the bands with which we have been trusted.
RF usage is governed by the FCC. Amateur Radio exists at the mercy of the government, and if there is widespread abuse or careless operation by amateur radio operators then that will likely jeopardize the continued existence of amateur radio.
Amateur Radio predates the FCC- so I almost think it should be the reverse, none of this at the mercy of stuff. Of course government is the real coercive force- in Germany the Nazis revoked ham licenses, racially purified radio clubs and made the amateur radio operators work for them.
Ham radio licenses were revoked worldwide during WWII.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what "we" think.
Most people want their phone to work and other assorted things that use wireless signals. If amateur radio people piss off the general public these things will be stripped away rather quickly.
There is absolutely zero freedom of speech on using radio signals.
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The laws governing radio usage also prevent the Nazis from jamming their local NPR stations. A world without restrictions on radio is worse, that's pretty clear to me.
And at the end of the day people still buy baofengs and operate them at 5 watts on FRS and GMRS channels unlicensed all the time, I'm not set of any enforcement.
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there are more kinds of governance than command-and-control only. I concede that some legal relationships are command-and-control. Physics itself and jurisdictions.. not sure but I think Nature bats last
I tend to find myself thinking about the self policing coming from the fact that the radio spectrum is one dimension. We all have to share that space, it's not super plentiful. Plus, ham radio is the one license that doesn't require the hardware itself to be licensed, just the person using it. It's what lets us build our own little radio transmitters in our own band without needing to get it approved first by the fcc.
On what basis do you claim that computer hackers don't generally want to be "good citizens"? I'd counter that HAM is full of people who worship bureaucracy legal compliance, which is almost the philosophical antithesis of the hacker crowd. The hobbyist drone hardware community seems to have a lot of that nonsense as well. (Granted sufficiently over the top recklessness regarding the latter actually has the possibility of killing people so at least the aviation crowd has a fig leaf in that regard.)
Sort of.
When I first came into the tech space, I found myself with quad copters buzzing around my workspace. I had the intention of hacking the signals around me to dissuade folks from flying around my head while sitting at my desk. After walking into a radio shop, looking for a few key items, I chatted for a few minutes with the clerk. He immediately put me into his “you’re a jammer” box and was uninterested in any further conversation. He wasn’t wrong, but it’s ironic given that I was effectively counter-jamming to get work done… and maybe have a little fun hacking at the same time. Point being: some communities have such rigid rules around what a “good citizen” encompasses that they get lost in their own world.
I find myself more on the altruistic side, despite being far closer to a “computer hacker” than a ham.
Where were you working that people fly drones around your head? Holy crap thats rude and a little dangerous. Propellers and eyeballs are a bad match.
To be fair most indoor drones (tiny whoops) have ducts/guards on their props, still incredibly rude though. Personally I'd have "jammed" them with a tennis racket.
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You would be breaking multiple federal laws (FCC and FAA) by jamming a drone. He wasn't interested because knowingly helping you could get his business shut down.
> It is also unlawful to advertise, sell, distribute, import, or otherwise market RF jamming devices to non-federal entities in the United States.
If you were going to be jamming quadcopters, you were likely jamming one of 900mhz, 2.4ghz, or 5ghz at the time.
Had you done that, you likely would have shut down most wifi in the nearby vacinity, including office networks, credit card machines, wifi cameras, implanted bluetooth heart monitors, baby monitors, and many other devices.
It could have been an Actual Problem.
My methodology was not going to be a broad spectrum jamming device. I can see why you might hop onto that notion given my extremely abbreviated description. The signals I would have emitted would have been in line with existing analog signals… in a controlled environment. I’m not an RF guy but I’m also not ham-fisted, if you’ll excuse the pun :)
AFAICT, my larger point still stands.
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Also I doubt computer hackers would want to publicly post their name and address before being licensed to use a compiler
One community operates in a heavily regulated space while the other doesn't.
The thing is, ham and hacker are defined in entirely different ways. Hackers can refer to people doing good, ill, or morally grey things. Think of how the term applies to certain software developers, people who breach networks to steal data, or circumvent security out of technical curiosity. In contrast, a ham is a licensed radio operator. While you certainly have lids, the vast majority have some sense of being a "good citizen" by the simple merit of being licensed. Unlicensed operators fit under other terms, like pirate.
Even the scope of the terms differ. Hackers have to make or break something. Hams may do anything from rag chew to build orbital satellites. If you're more inclined to do legal stuff and aren't inclined to build something, things involving community service are going to be more appealing.
I don't see it that way. HAM is not always about being "good citizens". Just listen to the grey beards and their war stories and you will have no doubts about that.
When it comes to hacker culture it has to face different problems. I think a lot of its bad ral comes from psychological reactance and that people just hate unsolicited advice, even if it's excellent and free.
Just look at the community around https://2600.com vs that of https://gbppr.net the contrast is stark.
Two badly set up websites is what I notice.
2600.com took a whhile to load and gbppr does not have a valid certificate or whatever.
2600.com uses a payment processor that requires emails for crypto donations.
I've been to several DefCon events over the years. Ham radio is essentially ubiquitous there, even with a dedicated frequency for the event for hams (and lots of 'look-the-other-way' use during the weekend).
A lot of computer hacker types get a ham license because it’s relatively easy to do with a bit of studying. Then you have more flexibility around working with radios and also learn how to stay out of trouble. Like there’s a lot of interesting digital signal projects you can do with a raspberry pi and an sdr.
almost, but not quite ... the difference between those is that the stereotypical ham radio enthusiast is obsessed with following regulations and laws to the T. while the stereotypical hacker is all about gray zones, loop holes and questioning rules.
I want to note that "pirate radios" have and do still exist
Bigger in Europe but true
> There is obvious large overlap. Both are nerdy and techy and attract similar base groups. But the ham space is dominated by people who want to be "good citizens" through collective action, while computer hacker is more about cyberpunk "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
I work professionally in point to point licensed microwave radio and there is very little overlap in our community of ISP/telco/network engineering people with analog ham radio enthusiasts. I don't know a single person who submits FCC coordinations and does high capacity PTP microwave who is also a "licensed" ham.
There is a bit of a disdain in serious radio work for things that operate in purely analog methods (we really only care about things that have native gigabit ethernet or better interfaces on them and can carry IP data), and the concept of not being able to use basic crypto either at the radio level or as a data payload is also anathema to professional use.
There are slightly more professional nerds doing things with meshtastic/meshcore and similar as a hobby, because messing about with small esp32 based things and similar (and specifically in the 900 MHz USA/Canada bands) in purely digital modes is closer to what we do for work. And has practical uses for low data rate SCADA/monitoring and text messaging uses.
There is also a perception that many ham radio enthusiasts who try to position themselves as some special and ultimate resource in disaster response scenarios are not really doing much useful. At a small local scale, maybe? But the people who operate county sized professional emergency communication radio networks (with real budgets from government money) serving sheriff/police/fire/ambulance response and similar also do not overlap a lot with ham radio enthusiasts. If you have the budget to build a $400,000 project of a hilltop radio tower site serving mission critical communications in your county and your main interactions are with the local sheriff's office and the local 911 PSAP, your perspective is going to be very different than the people who want to do all-analog in the clear ham radio for "disaster response".
In many modern emergency scenarios people expect to be able to communicate and share data using whatever they have on their phone or laptop as a wifi client, which means implementing portable two way satellite IP data over something like traditional VSAT, starlink, o3b, Oneweb, soon Amazon LEO, etc. It's also standard for serious disaster response vehicles operated by well funded government agencies to have something like a docked handheld Iridium phone.
You heard of Starry internet ? The ISP
The one that failed massively in performance against the local docsis3.1 and xgspon incumbent cableco and telcos in every MDU where the incumbents actually cared? Yeah, I'm very well aware of who they are.
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It honestly feels like ham radio is dying in part because of all the restrictions, like not being allowed to use encryption. Most hams don't seem to want to push back on it though.
If it used encryption every band would be filled all the time with encrypted commercial traffic, that's the problem.
> "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
This is in my back yard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZjInmHsWdM
The thing is hams shenanigans tend to impact other hams and not the general public. Every dive bar, and friend group has one asshole, but typically not two.
>while computer hacker is more about cyberpunk "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
This was always a media caricature. If you go back to some of the cultural cornerstones especially when you're talking about technical work it's not that different, see Eric S. Raymond's What is a Hacker? http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
"If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are"
I blame Mitnick or random script kiddies for this image, when in fact your average hacker is a guy named Bob with an .edu address submitting kernel patches and emacs fixes
Radio is heavily regulated and policed.
If you do something naughty on the internet, there's a reasonable chance you won't get caught.
If you do something naughty on the radio, you will get a large fine if not prison time.
For down voters, transmit on 395MHz range and see what happens.