Blog

📌 Pinned

All Posts

  • 1996: FRS Launches, No License Required

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. By the mid 1990s, the FCC had already created GMRS as a licensed family service, but it still required an application, a fee, and a wait. In 1996, the Family Radio Service arrived to close that gap completely: no license, no fee, no waiting. Just…

  • 2001: D-STAR Published, the First Ham-Specific Digital Voice Mode

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Every digital voice mode I operate today, D-STAR on my FTX-1, DMR on my AnyTone, all traces back to a research project the Japanese government funded in the late 1990s. The result was D-STAR, and it holds a distinction none of the other digital voice…

  • ~2010: DMR Crosses Over From Commercial Radio to Ham Radio

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Unlike D-STAR, DMR wasn’t built for amateur radio at all. It started life as a commercial land mobile radio standard, and hams basically invited themselves to the party once cheap DMR radios started flooding the market. There’s no single clean founding date the way there…

  • 2013: Yaesu System Fusion (YSF) Brings C4FM to Ham Radio

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. By 2013, hams had two digital voice options: Icom’s purpose-built D-STAR, and the commercial DMR standard amateurs had adopted for its cheap hardware. Yaesu decided the market needed a third option, one built entirely in-house, and released System Fusion, commonly known as YSF. Yaesu builds…

  • 2017: FT8 Released and Changed Weak-Signal HF Forever

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Nothing else on this timeline changed how I personally operate HF as much as FT8 did. Released in 2017, it went from a brand new mode to the dominant form of digital HF activity in under two years, and it’s the reason my IC-7300 Mark…

  • Today: Where Amateur Radio Stands Now, HF, Digital, and Everything Between

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. This is the last stop on the timeline, and it’s the only one without a fixed date, because it’s still being written. Amateur radio today is a genuine mashup of every era covered in this series: century-old HF DXing, postwar VHF repeaters, personal radio services…

  • The Evolution of Amateur Radio: A Timeline

    Ham radio didn’t arrive all at once. It grew in fits and starts over more than a century, from illegal spark-gap experiments to a regulated hobby, then split off entire sibling services like GMRS and FRS, and eventually went digital. I put together a timeline of the milestones that shaped the hobby we operate today,…

  • When the Repeater Goes Silent: Your Backup Plan for Grid-Down Comms

    Part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness guide. Repeaters are one of the best parts of this hobby. Stick a repeater on a tower or a mountain and suddenly two handhelds that couldn’t hear each other across town can talk clearly across a whole metro area. Under normal conditions, this is exactly what GMRS and…

Categories

×