Anyone you can talk to on DMR, DStar or any of the others you can just get online on a computer and do away with your ham radio all together and talk to them on Skype, or any of thousands of other ways on the internet. So what's the point? And this guy in the video talks about, "Well you get to know your radio and how far away you can get away from a repeater, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah". Well same thing with an analog only radio. I'm getting back into ham for the first time in almost 30 years (but I wisely kept renewing my license every ten years, just in case) and I am not interested in any of the newly fangled digital ways to talk. I just bought a brand new Yeasu VX-6R that is fairly sophisticated but is not digital at all. And it's all I can handle and for sure all I need. Name any of your DMR buddies and I'll bet you rags to riches that I could talk to them with no ham radio at all through the internet. Or for God's sake I could call them or text them on my smart phone!! My new VX-6R has a owner's manual that is a little over 100 pages, if it had even one digital mode, it would probably need double that. So who needs a radio that would take a year to master? Not me! Seems like in some ways ham radio has lost its mind. There is a new saying, not an old saying (I just made it up): Us old farts have the most smarts!
internet cables under the atlantic and pacific are very vulnerable.
They can be. I like to have the skill set though to at least have the base knowledge to use different comms platforms.
Anyone you can talk to on DMR, DStar or any of the others you can just get online on a computer and do away with your ham radio all together and talk to them on Skype, or any of thousands of other ways on the internet. So what's the point? And this guy in the video talks about, "Well you get to know your radio and how far away you can get away from a repeater, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah". Well same thing with an analog only radio. I'm getting back into ham for the first time in almost 30 years (but I wisely kept renewing my license every ten years, just in case) and I am not interested in any of the newly fangled digital ways to talk. I just bought a brand new Yeasu VX-6R that is fairly sophisticated but is not digital at all. And it's all I can handle and for sure all I need. Name any of your DMR buddies and I'll bet you rags to riches that I could talk to them with no ham radio at all through the internet. Or for God's sake I could call them or text them on my smart phone!! My new VX-6R has a owner's manual that is a little over 100 pages, if it had even one digital mode, it would probably need double that. So who needs a radio that would take a year to master? Not me! Seems like in some ways ham radio has lost its mind. There is a new saying, not an old saying (I just made it up): Us old farts have the most smarts!