• clutchtwopointzero@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level) and passes a test to acquire a license. Some of the equipment can either kill you or cause way too much interference potentially killing others indirectly

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      16 days ago

      Not for nothing but I got my novice and tech license in grade school.

      I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Looking back it was basically brain dumping (and learning code well enough to pass the 5WPM test).

      Ended up getting 13WPM and general and advanced in 7th grade.

      I still have my license, just renewed it a couple months ago. But haven’t keyed up in maybe 15 years. Ain’t nobody got time for that. I just got a little handheld transceiver on temu and haven’t used it at all.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      16 days ago

      killing others indirectly

      Huh. I wonder how you do that. If the wind knocked down a tree and the tree killed someone, would the wind indirectly have killed someone? That’s kind of like the old adage “speed doesn’t kill, it’s the sudden stop”

      • Fondots@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        If you’re fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn’t and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn’t get to the hospital in time.

        You didn’t directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      16 days ago

      Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level)

      No, not really. You just need to memorize a few symbols, remember like two equations, and know metric prefixes. You could learn it in a week or so just doing practice tests.