Tag: Discord

A New Discord Server for Young Radio Amateurs

Join the YARC Discord here: https://discord.gg/MpQJadu

Suffice it to say, the Young Amateurs Radio Club experienced a split. From my experience, every ham radio club will experience a split in it’s lifetime. It seems to be the natural order of things.

The original YARC board met with the former YARC president (who owned the server and banned key members of the board) for several weeks of mediation and reconciliation, but ultimately no compromise could be met.

From out of the ashes, a phoenix shall rise.

The original YARC board regathered, lost interest in saving the old server, and created a new server. The old server still exists, but it’s down to a fraction of it’s activity and is being ran by the former YARC president has been deleted by the former YARC president.

The new YARC Discord server is now active, it’s just as busy as before, and it’s members are coming up with new activities to get back into the swing of things before the ‘event.’ It is open, friendly, inclusive, and has no tolerance for bullying and harmful trolling.

I left a parting message on the old server that read as follows:

Hello.

This message will probably get deleted and I will probably get banned in record time, but it doesn’t hurt to try to get a message out. 

This server is a husk of its former glory that’s lost it’s vision, it’s leadership, and it’s heart. You may have noticed a lot of people have gotten banned, kicked, and had their messages deleted due to disparaging this server or linking to the new YARC server. This is because the server owner has been lurking trying to control the exodus of members while forming it into his own brand after the banning and de-perming of the YARC Board members. 

 I couldn’t be happier if it was to blossom into a vibrant young ham community. But at the end of the day, this isn’t YARC. 

But given it’s an inactive server being led by questionable ethics and obscurity, I recommend the new YARC server that is being ran by the OG YARC founders, board and members. Go to https://discord.gg/MpQJadu if you want a healthy, active, inclusive, and lively server ran by fellow young hams who truly have your best interests at heart. 

To avoid confusion of newcomers looking for the YARC server, I deleted several invite links to draw in new members from across the internet. Since the server has changed in many ways, those invite links aren’t valid anymore. I can’t tell which links were created after the change in leadership, and what version of the server went to which invite link, so I removed all but the owner’s personal invite link.

I would still like to serve as liaison between Young Hams and the rest of the amateur radio world (as I’ve always done) and a mediator between our two communities. 

message edited to redact names

73, N0SSC

PS: To KZØP- Jesten and I are forever grateful for the Reese’s pumpkins, but I ran out 🙁 but thankfully it’s Easter so Reeses Eggs have flooded the market 🙂

Introducing the Young Amateurs Radio Club

Today is a great day. Amateur Radio has a new radio club made by the youth, for the youth:

https://yarc.world/

We founded a club for young hams! from amateurradio

That’s David, KD2OAH , who posted this thread on reddit. Unsurprisingly, some hams were iffy and curmedgoney about the idea of a Discord (which is cancer, by the way, see below or here 🙄) when there’s already a reddit IRC. He also initially wanted it to be for Young Hams on Long Island, NY, but seeing that there was  1.) there’s probably not a lot of young hams on Long Island and 2.) probably no discord for young people in ham radio at all and, I asked him, among others, to extend it to the whole ham-o-sphere. That lead to the creation of the Young Hams discord chat. It was way more popular than David thought, currently at 70 active members (and 200 members total), dozens of chat rooms, a few voice chat rooms, a gaming hams spinoff and it’s all almost too hard to keep up with at times, which is a great thing.

There are several youth oriented US radio clubs and organizations [1][2][3][4] but they’ve all been created by older hams as an initiative to attract youth into the hobby1. They have served their purpose well, as now the youth are beginning to form their own clubs.

There is no hard and fast age rule: I’m 26, and some of our members are in their late 30s. Most members are either in high school or college.

If you don’t remember the cold war, are two standard deviations less than the mean age of radio amateurs, or are a strong supporter of youth in the hobby, then you are welcome to join. YARC doesn’t discriminate, but maybe don’t go on rants starting with ‘BACK IN MY DAY….’

And all political discussion can be held in #politics.

Many more cool things to come soon!

🆒
1. Youngsters on the Air (YOTA) is the only other club I know of that was started by and for young hams. It’s centered around IARU Region 1 – Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Asia.↩

A Discord for Young Hams

A friend in /r/amateurradio posted a discord inviting young hams in New York Long Island. A few commenters (including myself) asked why not all young hams? So here you go!

https://discord.gg/MpQJadu

Credit to /u/NewHamWhoDis KD2OAH

What is Discord?

Discord is a free voice and text chatting app well suited for gamers. Anyone can set up any server and have your squad voice chatting within minutes. Before, TeamSpeak and Mumble (and Ventrilo….and more) were the standard, but required paying for servers or setting up your own. Discord takes the work out of that.

It’s also become hugely popular with the rest of the internet – YouTube channels, subreddits, and many special interest groups (like ham radio) have started using it as a replacement to IRC and VoIP chat programs which are hard to use for both the users, moderators, and admins, and lack adequate mobile device support.

Rant on Chat Apps

Sometimes it’s hard to decide what chat program to use. Slack, Facebook Messenger, IRC, Skype, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Zello, Slack…the list is ever growing, but currently here’s my favorites (because this is a blog after all!)

For groups of collegiate and like-aged (20-somethings) friends casually chatting: GroupMe

  Check out the Collegiate Amateur radio Initative GroupMe here!

For one-to-one chatting: Facebook Messenger, SMS, iMessage.

For IRC-like text and voice chatting about a certain topic: Discord

For linux help or nostalgia: IRC

Although there are a lot of very helpful and active communities on IRC, it’s mobile app support is awful since a cloud instance has to be always-on to receive messages when your device isn’t connected, then to push them to your phone when it’s back on, which costs more money than what’s worth to the casual, intermittent user…i.e. me.

For Working on a Project with a remote team: Slack

Mattermost is a good up-and-coming Open Source alternative to Slack.

For all things international: Whatsapp for 1-1 chats, Telegram for groups

YOTA uses Telegram for mass-group texting. I think they’re up to 500 members now.

For pretending your phone is a walkie talkie for a minute than forgetting about it: Zello

For video chatting: Skype.

I pretty much always organize skype chats via Facebook Messenger. Kinda funny.

For video chatting with cool features and/or using a browser only: Google Hangouts

For everything else: Ham radio. Lol.

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