I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.
For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?
AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.
So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.
For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?
AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.
So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.