Hacking Ham Radio for Texting

My first exposure to radio communication happened when I was around 5 or 6 years old. My dad was working as an airport electrician. He would bring walkie-talkies home, and my brothers and I would play with them around the yard. That’s as far as my radio experience went, until a friend and I decided to get our amateur radio licenses together. This was only months before the COVID-19 lockdown, so it turned out to be the perfect time to learn to communicate using amateur radio!

However, I found that just talking over ham radio was boring for me. I started thinking about an old police scanner my dad owned and how we would sometimes hear odd sounds that sort of sounded like a dial-up modem. And that is when the lightbulb for HamMessenger turned on. What if I could find an easy way to communicate digitally with my handheld radio?

Read more – IEEE Spectrum: