Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.
I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.
Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?
At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.
So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens.
In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others.
That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types.
I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump.
Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community.
And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF.
I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny.
The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
Like with roads and cars, radio spectrum is a very limited and very shared resource, and there has to be some regulation, or else some Elon Musk-type person would already take it for themselves for a commercial reason.
It's also self-policed, so that means that hams have to find the problematic entities and hope that authorities with legal power act on those reports.
The devices can also be uncertified (self-certified by a ham technically), so you can cause all sorts of havoc for many other entities, like actual emergency services (a case not long ago in US) or worse.
If you are not able, or for some reason or another don't want to get licenced, there are other ways to communicate, like mentioned meshtastic, which doesn't require a licence on ISM bands, or PMR/FRS radios (or gmrs in us, which does require a licence but you don't have to learn the radio basics for the exam).
Again, like with roads and cars, you expect others there to be mentally capable enough to pass that simple exam and follow the basic rules on the air. If not, they can get a bicycle and argue on the bicycle lane with other cyclists. And the ham exam is much cheaper and easier than a driving exam (in most developed countries at least, the driving one costs 1keur++ if you finish optimally, whereas over here, a full intro to ham course (a few weeks, usually on zoom) with a printed book and the actual exam costs <100eur, even less with a pdf instead of a book)
The problem is hams - the people who are habitually are on amateur radio.
I find them to be incredibly anti-digital, holier than thou, loud about hard-conservative positions, misogynist, racist, and more. And when Ive tried to further the art and science of radio comms, hams are some of the first to talk down what I contributed.
They are people who I dont, and dont want to associate myself with.
Ive also known others that made that assumption when I said I was a ham. Lots of people have had those experiences, and also chosen not to associate with them.
I'm sure this doesnt apply to "all Hams". It does apply to a supermajority in the USA, enough to say that I do not want to be a ham any longer. I already refused to communicate with them, nor associate with them.