>> Am I wrong? Is there a place for hams in the world where you can more quickly and reliably reach anyone from anywhere across the internet?
Amateur in this context just means non financial interest. It’s a hobby, maybe a bit like the technical (but not really the art-) aspects of film photography in a world of 100 megapixel digital cameras.
For me, it’s just a science based hobby - study of propagation, signals processing techniques - I’m fascinated by reliable signal transmission just below the noise floor. It’s something that just should not be possible, like seeing in pitch black, except this case we’re hearing a signal that’s drowned out by noise. Utterly fascinating (the short version would be that you don’t send one weak but narrowly concentrated signal like wspr in the article, but instead you encode the signal in such a way that you send a wide band pattern. On the receiving side, you look at all the noise and you try to find correlation in power levels across the band with the shared set of patterns that can be transmitted.
Amateur in this context just means non financial interest. It’s a hobby, maybe a bit like the technical (but not really the art-) aspects of film photography in a world of 100 megapixel digital cameras.
For me, it’s just a science based hobby - study of propagation, signals processing techniques - I’m fascinated by reliable signal transmission just below the noise floor. It’s something that just should not be possible, like seeing in pitch black, except this case we’re hearing a signal that’s drowned out by noise. Utterly fascinating (the short version would be that you don’t send one weak but narrowly concentrated signal like wspr in the article, but instead you encode the signal in such a way that you send a wide band pattern. On the receiving side, you look at all the noise and you try to find correlation in power levels across the band with the shared set of patterns that can be transmitted.