Every now and then I’ll come across a comment to the effect of “FT8 isn’t REAL ham radio”. That got me thinking what exactly IS “real” ham radio. After mulling it over I’ve come up with a way to quantify whether a given communication counts as “real” ham radio.

To get the percentage of “real” ham radio-ness of a given act of communication, simply use the formula H=100*R/T, where H is the percent ham-radio-ness, R is the total distance traveled over radio frequencies in the ham bands, and T is the total distance.

So let’s say Alice has an FT8 QSO with Bob, and they live 1500 miles apart. Both are using FT8 software on PCs connected to their respective radios. In this case the distance traversed by RF is 1500 miles and the total distance is also 1500 miles. Divide the two numbers andjmultiply by 100 to get 100%. So Alice’s QSO with Bob is 100% “real” ham radio.

Now let’s change the scenario. Alice and Bob are still 1500 miles apart, but they’re talking over a DMR talkgroup via linked repeaters. Alice is 5 miles away from her local machine, and Bob is 10 miles away from his. The two repeaters are 1485 miles apart, and for the sake of simplicity we’ll say that all four points form a line.

So that’s 5 RF miles from Alice’s HT to her repeater, plus 10 RF miles from Bob’s HT to his repeater, for a total of 15 “real ham radio” miles. The other 1485 miles “don’t count” since they’re over the internet. This means their DMR QSO is 1% “real” ham radio.

I hope this clears things up :P