[kongin]

>I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.

Pretty much sums it up. Locally the people who are in charge of the clubs which ultimately advised the government were in their 50s to 90s (yes that's a 9). The people doing anything more interesting than talking on on those channels are all under 40.

Ham radio is meant for experimentation, not (just) talking to your friends. These people remind me of Bell in the 70s forbidding you from connecting anything that's not a phone to the telephone network.

[gorgoiler]

What about LoRa? Doesn’t that exist precisely to scratch these itches, without impacting traditional HF QRP etc.?

[kongin]

Different bands have different physical properties.

One of the points of amateur radio is experimentation. Right now the old boys clubs that all ham radio organizations have turned into to have decided that packet networking isn't real ham radio and you shouldn't be able to do it on "their" spectrum.

Apart from talking to satellites, packets and encryption are fine there for some reason.

[gorgoiler]

The UK band plans seem pretty progressive, explicitly allocating spectrum for digital modes, though it is admittedly still the poor relation to rag chewing:

https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/html/rsgb_band_plan_2...

(If you’re not familiar with the UK structure, OfCom is the FCC-like government regulator, while RSGB is the de facto ruling body / club-of-clubs run by amateurs for amateurs.)