Hey all!

(tl;dr !amateur_radio is taking the place of !ragchew)

When lemmy.radio first started (a week ago?), I created a hand full of communities I thought would interest most hams. A few other user created communities have also popped up, which has been great. It’s fun seeing other hams join and share their interests.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve been using lemmy and looking for other amateur radio news outside of our instance is that we aren’t discoverable AT ALL if you search for “amateur radio”. That’s pretty absurd for a server whose whole purpose is to bring amateur radio enthusiasts together.

In order to help our site be a bit more findable, I’ve created Amateur Radio. Any general amateur radio discussion, questions, and news can be posted there.

Rag Chew was started as a sort of catch-all community for radio discussions that didn’t fall into any specific category/community, pretty much what Amateur Radio will be used for. I’m not sure what to do with !ragchew now. We can retire it or leave it open for general NON-amateur radio talk. That also opens the discussion of “Do we want non-amateur radio communities here?”. I’ll leave that up to everyone here. If you have any thoughts on that, leave them in the comments.

Thanks and 73,

Ben

  • NI6V
    3·
    1 year ago

    I like the idea of non-radio chat. I am sure if we all have one hobby in common, others would soon follow.

    • w0odlOPMA
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m mixed on the subject. I think you’re right that I’m sure we have non-radio things in common and it might be fun to share that here.

      There are also hundreds/thousands of other lemmy instances/communities that someone could discuss that non-radio thing with while using their lemmy.radio account.

      I guess I mostly think of lemmy.radio as THE instance to discuss amateur radio.

      • NI6V
        2·
        1 year ago

        I see your point. And agree with it. Could turn it into a meet up coordination for hams at events and local get togethers…

        • w0odlOPMA
          1·
          1 year ago

          I like that. It could also see it just being a misc. community where people just talk about anything, just like rag chewing.

          • ham_bitious
            1·
            1 year ago

            As long as it doesn’t turn into a 75m net. I don’t need to hear about your medical issues 😂