this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Do you need a license to buy a receiver to listen in?
No, only the British are dumb enough to require a license for a receiver.
You can go buy whatever radio you want and listen to hams tell each other where they're from and lie about how well they're hearing each other. Which is most of what they do on shortwave. 1. Ham radio is a game to most of them, the game is "exchange callsigns with people from as many places as you can." 2. There is a law (CFR 97.113(5)) that prohibits "Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services." I read that as it's illegal to have a weekly Wednesday at 5 PM EDT chat with your buddy in Tuscon on 20 meters because the cell phone network can also accomplish that. So are scheduled ragchew nets legal?
If you're going to play around with an HF receiver, ignore the hams and listen out for numbers stations, they're way fucking cooler than us licensed radio dorks.
Don't transmit without a license. If we can hear you, we can find you. Radio isn't like the internet, radio travels in straight (ish) lines. You're literally shining a light into the sky, we can tell where it's coming from. Hams won't do anything to you. No, that's what the FCC is for.
You do not need a license to listen to ham radio with a traditional transceiver. You only need a license to transmit.
There are no licensing requirements for equipment purchases.
I have a handheld ham. The baofeng ones with no license. Come to get me FCC
When I use them to communicate, I use FRS frequencies, which are still not legal technically, but no one will even know.
Don't fuck around with the FCC, it stands for Fucking Consequences, Cunt!
Tbh, I can't condone that as a ham myself. And yes, you can be caught. It happens all the time and fines are hefty.
The basic ham license (called "Technician") is very easy and cheap. Just get one.
It happens all the time?
Relative to the prevalence of ham as a hobby
Yes. It is not uncommon.
Also, the license gives one some knowledge about what one is actually doing with the transceiver. Without that it isn't really a hobby anyway. It just becomes an illegal walkie talkie.
Hams are self policing and if you cause issues and aren’t using proper protocols may try to pinpoint your location
I use FRS, there's no way anyone would report me. They are not overpowered. No one listening would assume they are anything but Amazon walkie talkies.
I got them for ship to shore, which is not illegal. Also, it's not illegal to listen. Which from what I hear, is nothing.
No
Nope that's what the web interface is for.
But an rtlsdr is pretty cheap if you want to go that route. I do satellite tracking with satnogs and it's fun.
I think I am technologically ignorant when it comes to radio so... I still have questions.
How does the web interface collect the transmissions? Are all the transmissions made digitally accessible with the interface? Why (other than cost) would I want to use a web interface rather than a traditional receiver?
The person or organization hosting the website has an antenna somewhere attached to a Software Defined Radio, or SDR. I honestly don't know how these work at the silicon level, but radio antenna feed line goes in one side, some JFM happens, and USB and/or PCIe computer data comes out the other end. Instead of tuning into such and such frequency with such and such modulation, it sends the raw RF data to the computer to let it process it digitally, with algorithms and GFLOPS and RAM and shit.
Which means, you get to tell it "process the data as if you're a single-sideband radio listening on 14.070MHz Upper Sideband" and you can listen into amateur radio slow scan television. It's basically like you get to remote control someone else's radio receiver.
No. See the above "A person has an antenna somewhere." You can hear what that antenna hears. This will be limited to line of sight for VHF and up, and even HF will be limited by propagation conditions and the nature of the antenna. The hardware they've hooked to their computer may also have its own limitations. Also, their antenna is imperfect because there is no such thing. This is the world's shittiest Wi-Fi antenna (only partially because it fell over).
Not all radio transmissions can be heard from everywhere. I can't hear anything above 12 meters out of eastern Europe from here, not in the worst solar cycle since humans learned the sun has cycles. I can hear it loud and clear from some Frenchman who put his SDR online.
The web interfaces use SDRs. They can listen to an entire band at one time rather than just a single station.
You will only be able to listen to transmissions that are within range of a web SDR. They work great for HF since that propagates a long ways when the band is open. For VHF and up, you will likely need a local receiver unless there happens to be a web SDR near you that covers the band you want to listen to.
The web SDRs may have better antennas than you do and they are probably in a place with much less RFI than you. You can use them to listen to far away places.
Thanks!