Tag: history

  • ~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,…

  • What Is APRS? History, Digipeaters, and How the Network Really Works

    APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System, and it is one of the oldest pieces of digital ham radio still in daily use. Most operators know it as “the thing that puts a dot on a map,” but that undersells it badly. APRS is a real-time, ham-built data network that has been running continuously since…

  • Packet Radio: The Digital Mode That Started It All

    If you use APRS, Winlink, or AREDN, you’re already relying on packet radio, whether you realize it or not. It’s one of the oldest digital modes in the hobby, and it’s also one of the most quietly influential, since so much of what came after it borrowed from the protocol it introduced. AX.25, the protocol…

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