One morning I switched on the receiver and heard two property-management staff talking about a parked car.

“Whose car is this? Tell the owner to move it, now!”

A car was blocking the entrance to the housing compound. At the same time, some radio amateurs were in the middle of a contact on the same frequency. One of them kept calling the two staff members, hoping they would move to another channel, but there was never any answer. Their walkie-talkies probably had a CTCSS tone squelch set, so they couldn’t hear anyone else calling.

The ham tried everything to get through to them, while the two kept going on about the car. Listening to both sides talking past each other, neither able to reach the other, I couldn’t stop laughing for a long time.

In the mornings and during the day I often pick up tower cranes on construction sites.

“Up, up, up!”

“Down, down, down!”

“Release, release, release!”

The person on the ground gives the call, the operator up top answers. I’ve heard this on quite a few amateur frequencies, and sometimes it gets in the way of normal contacts. But a crane is working, and you can’t just transmit over them. If a key instruction gets cut off, there could be an accident. The frequencies have collided, and the people doing the work may not even know.

Once I heard an old man calling for help from inside a lift. The lift had stopped. He’d pressed the emergency button and was urging them on: “Hurry up and get me out!”

A few sentences in, the signal was gone. I never found out what happened next.

Listening by the river once, I picked up chanting. Many people repeating Amituofo over and over, the voices layered on top of each other. You could feel the devotion of people chanting together. Later I guessed it might be leakage from some wireless device in a temple, but I never found out where it came from.

In the evenings, people sing in the square with a speaker, livestreaming on their phones. Sometimes I can pick up the singing but not the backing track. So there’s just one person singing unaccompanied. Sometimes it’s really funny, but you can tell he’s completely into it, and listening, I was even a little moved.

Diners eating, drinking and talking in restaurants, safety announcements in supermarkets, songs from barbecue stalls and karaoke bars also turn up in the receiver now and then. Propagation is sometimes like a magnifying glass, suddenly enlarging everyday life that was scattered in different places.

Not all of these sounds are on the same frequency. Some are walkie-talkies being used normally, some may come from wireless microphones or other audio gear, and some I’ve never been able to trace. The city is also full of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless signals. They leave their own marks on the spectrum, but you can’t necessarily hear any sound in them.

I sweep back and forth across frequencies, and every so often I run into these sounds.

On the expressways during the summer holidays, I hear self-drive convoys almost every day. They discuss what to eat tonight, where to go tomorrow, and the lead car keeps reminding the ones behind to turn, to take the flyover.

On summer weekends I also often pick up convoys in the mountains around Jinan. The leader tells the cars behind to slow down, to brake, to watch the bends; some cars fall behind and the front has to wait. Listening, I always think of the whole convoy as a long snake, the lead car as its head, pulling the rest along the winding mountain road little by little.

Then there are the coal trucks from Shanxi that often pass through Dezhou.

Their walkie-talkie frequency clashes with the local repeater. When the convoy gets close, a few voices with heavy Shanxi accents show up on the frequency. A lot of it is hard to make out — probably a few drivers chatting about family matters as they drive.

The ham who maintains the local repeater knows them well by now. Every time he hears them, he calls on the frequency and asks them to make way.

The funny thing is, as soon as he calls, they usually go quiet and don’t answer. A little later you can hear them again in the distance, talking on and off, the voices getting weaker as the convoy moves away.

This keeps happening. Sometimes every two days, sometimes once a week. Now that the weather has turned cold, they come through more and more often — almost every day, or every other day.

Just by keeping watch on one frequency, I can roughly tell whether these coal trucks have been running often lately.

I’ve also come across propagation over much longer distances.

Once, on the rooftop, I picked up an FM broadcast from Japan. In a WeChat group, a friend in Qingdao was receiving it very clearly too, I was hearing it just as clearly in Dezhou, and a friend in Shijiazhuang picked up the same station at the same time.

Three places hundreds of kilometres apart, all hearing a broadcast from Japan at the same time.

That opening made me feel as if a very long line had appeared in the air, running inland from the sea, through Qingdao and Dezhou all the way to Shijiazhuang. There was no way to know exactly what path the waves took, but several places receiving the same voice at once made that invisible channel something you could imagine.

Later I also picked up FM broadcasts from the direction of Korea and Southeast Asia.

In this year of listening, some sounds appeared only once, while others kept passing through. They are scattered across different frequencies — sometimes very close, sometimes unbelievably far.

2026.11.02

Notes on the culture of amateur radio contacts

“Nothing more from me — 73 for now, I’ll leave the frequency to the others.”

Anyone who makes contacts on amateur radio has heard this line a thousand times.

Exchange call signs, locations, signal reports, say a few words about your rig, antenna and power, and it’s more or less time to say goodbye. It’s like that on shortwave, and it’s like that on VHF/UHF. The two stations have barely connected, there’s been no time to talk about anything, and the contact is already over.

What puzzles me most is that phrase, “nothing more from me.” Does a radio contact have to be about something? If you just want to chat with a stranger, does that count as something?

At first I suspected it had to do with operating rules. China’s current Regulations on the Administration of Amateur Radio Stations set out what amateur stations may be used for, along with logbook and call sign requirements, but nothing says a contact must end once signal reports are exchanged. Longer conversations still have to fit the purpose of the amateur service and the relevant rules, of course.

The US Federal Communications Commission’s amateur radio rules also list the advancement of communication skills and the enhancement of international goodwill among the basic purposes of the amateur service.

The American Radio Relay League’s beginner guide, Making Your First Contact, has a whole section on long, casual conversation — the rag chew. It suggests starting with name, location, signal report and equipment, then gradually moving on to other topics, while also explaining when a contact should be kept short: DX, contests, or when other stations are waiting.

The ARRL also has a rather charming tradition called the Rag Chewers’ Club. It was discontinued in 2004 and revived in 2023 as a downloadable commemorative certificate, recognising casual conversations lasting at least thirty minutes.

The HamCQ Handbook, compiled by the Chinese ham community, also introduces the ragchew, translating it literally as “chewing rags,” and says that once the basic information has been exchanged you can go on to talk about other things.

So the question isn’t whether you’re allowed to chat, and it isn’t that this kind of exchange doesn’t exist here at all. Then why, in so many everyday contacts, do both sides still habitually wrap up as soon as reports and equipment have been exchanged?

I want to start by separating two kinds of pleasure in radio.

One comes from the technology: studying antennas, rigs, power and propagation, finding ways to send a signal further. A contact is part of a technical experiment, and also the way to check its results.

The other comes from people talking to people: radio connects two people who had nothing to do with each other, and what they talk about next may be more interesting than the distance of the contact itself.

This reminds me of the two ways of looking at communication described by the communication scholar James W. Carey in Communication as Culture. One is the “transmission view,” concerned with how information is sent across space; the other is the “ritual view,” concerned with how people take part in a shared life through communication, building and maintaining relationships. Carey wasn’t writing about amateur radio, but his framework fits contacts well: for some people, getting a signal thousands of kilometres away is the whole point; others care more about who they meet once the signal arrives.

These two pleasures don’t conflict. DX hunters can enjoy chatting, and talking tech can make friends just as well.

But that raises another question: if you don’t want to talk to strangers, why keep calling?

Thinking it over, there’s no contradiction. Testing the day’s propagation, trying to reach a new region, waiting for an unknown call sign to answer — these are satisfying in themselves. Maybe what really draws people is not the conversation that follows but the moment of connecting. Like bumping into an acquaintance in the street: saying hello doesn’t mean you have to stop and talk for half an hour, and a short greeting can keep a relationship going too.

There’s another possibility: long-formed operating habits.

The historian of science and technology Kristen Haring wrote Ham Radio’s Technical Culture (MIT Press), a study of American radio amateurs from the 1930s to the 1970s. She found that amateur radio was not just a technical hobby but grew its own group culture: through clubs, technical exchange and everyday contacts, people gradually developed a shared language, etiquette and practice. Newcomers learned not only how to operate, but how to become a ham others would recognise.

Her subject is American history, but how group habits form and how later arrivals take them over is relevant to us too.

Someone new to amateur radio usually starts by listening. How others call, how they give reports, how they end a contact — all of it shapes how they will operate. Equipment, antennas, power and propagation are easy topics to expand on; everyone shares the interest and the technical language. If most of the contacts a newcomer hears are like that, they will naturally assume this is what a complete radio exchange looks like. Over time, operating habits that were originally meant to make communication efficient can become the group’s default way of talking.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg proposed the idea of the “third place”: public places outside home and work where people can drop in freely and mix naturally — the neighbourhood café, the tavern, the barbershop. People don’t necessarily go there for any particular purpose; casual talk is itself the main thing those places are for.

Seen through this idea, some long-active simplex frequencies and repeater networks play a similar role. A frequency is of course not a physical place, but it lets a group of strangers slowly get to know one another through long use. A call sign stops being just a code identifying a station and gradually comes to stand for a person’s temperament, experience and life. These relationships usually have no clear beginning. Maybe at first it’s just exchanging signal reports, then there’s more and more to say, and people become acquaintances on the frequency, even meet in real life — and that is how the culture of a frequency slowly takes shape. In 2023 the UNESCO Courier published an article by Oldenburg and Karen Christensen on third places, about how important everyday spaces of public encounter are to social life.

This made me rethink how lively a frequency is. The number of contacts reflects part of radio activity, but whether a frequency keeps drawing people also depends on the relationships among those who use it. Stable long-term exchanges, familiar voices and a welcome for newcomers all affect whether people want to come back. On long-active local simplex and repeater networks, a frequency often grows its own social ecology. How lively it is depends not only on coverage, but on the relationships between people, everyday conversation and habits formed together.

Shortwave is more complicated. Propagation windows, DX activity, contests and regional operating habits all shape what happens on a frequency. Shortwave has its long-standing regular chat groups too, but the culture of conversation may differ from band to band.

Back to that phrase: “I’ll leave the frequency to the others.”

On a busy frequency, stepping aside is the right thing to do, and a public frequency belongs to no one. But if no other station is waiting and both sides are happy to keep talking, there seems no need to rush off. Funnily enough, after everyone has politely made way, the frequency sometimes just falls silent.

The phrase may simply be a habitual sign-off, and you can’t read from it whether the other person wants to keep talking. But it does show a certain way of communicating: in some contacts, ending the conversation has become part of a familiar routine.

And a conversation on a frequency doesn’t have to stay between the two stations who first connected. As long as people follow the rules and respect other stations’ needs, it can open up to more people. More than the length of a contact, it’s this openness I care about.

Radio’s public nature also affects how people talk. Anything you say on a frequency may be heard by strangers. Equipment and propagation are easy topics; personal experience, life and opinions take a bit of trust. And the internet now offers far more convenient private channels. Whether these changes have affected the habits of conversation on traditional radio remains to be seen.

Still, radio keeps a particular kind of encounter. Before switching on, we usually don’t know who we’ll meet. A distant call sign suddenly appears, and two people living in different places, with nothing in common, are connected by a moment of propagation.

In 1923 the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski coined the term “phatic communion.” He noticed that much of everyday talk that seems to have no real content isn’t necessarily about passing on new information; it also helps people build and maintain relationships. Seen this way, exchanging reports, asking about the weather, even simply saying 73 to each other, has social meaning in itself. A short contact doesn’t mean there is no human connection in it.

But can that connection go one step further? I think that is the question that has kept bothering me.

Amateur radio has always held different interests and purposes; technical experiment and everyday chat were never either-or. A DX contact of a few dozen seconds may stand for months of an operator’s effort; an ordinary chat may turn two strangers into friends for years. Both are radio.

As for what operating habits in China are really like, I don’t have enough data to judge how widespread this is, let alone claim that amateurs elsewhere are necessarily chattier. Every band, region and group has its own ways. It’s just that for me, what draws me to radio, beyond the technology itself, is that it offers a chance to meet strangers. In today’s extremely convenient world of communication, this kind of encounter — unarranged, not dependent on any fixed social circle — is still fascinating.

I don’t want every contact to become a long chat, and I don’t think everyone has to be interested in talking to strangers. I only hope radio can make room for more kinds of exchange, rather than every conversation habitually stopping at the same place.

It’s just that sometimes, after calling for ages, you finally hear someone answer from far away, and as soon as reports are exchanged they’re ready to say 73. It’s a bit of a pity. Especially when they say, “nothing more from me.”

Actually, there’s nothing more from me either.

I just wanted to talk a little longer.

73.

Note: This essay is based on my own radio practice and listening, with reference to relevant regulations and research in social and cultural studies. The discussion of operating habits is personal observation only.

References

2026.10.19

A local repeater’s location, antenna, terrain and propagation draw out a real, physical range. Here distance becomes a boundary, and inside that boundary, time slowly builds up relationships between people. Used long enough, the range takes on a structure of its own.

Later, points that had been scattered across different places were gathered onto servers through the internet. The physical centre began to loosen, and a network centre appeared in its place. To me this looks more like the centre moving house than simple decentralisation.

The old centre was visible: its location, its antenna, its coverage — you could more or less sense them. The server’s centre is hidden inside the network, drawing its range anew through nodes, permissions and connections. The centre is still there; it just no longer appears in geographical form.

The network compressed physical distance, but the differences in the real world didn’t disappear with it. Economy, information and culture still each have their own densities. The centres and margins that existed in geography may carry on in another form once they enter the network. As geographical margins fade, will cultural margins become clearer instead? I’ll have to keep watching.

What used to need solving was whether you could get there at all. Distance, terrain and propagation decided whether a connection could happen. The network solved a great many problems of arrival, but more connections haven’t noticeably changed how people take part.

People who already liked to talk find each other more easily on the network; people used to listening, once inside a larger network, mostly go on listening. That tendency hasn’t really changed. What has changed is that people who were spread out have been brought together again.

A local repeater can be very quiet while a big network always has someone talking. That liveliness doesn’t necessarily mean more people have started speaking. It may just be that the talkers who were scattered everywhere have entered the same space. The ones who speak are still the few, the silent still the many. The scale changed; the ratio hardly did.

The change in distance has also loosened some old identities.

Relationships on a local repeater don’t only happen on the radio. People from the same place may know each other, may meet offline. Everyone has a rough idea of where a person stands in long-term relationships, and talking is only one part of that. In a larger network, this background recedes. People far apart may first meet only a voice, a call sign, a single conversation.

Distance separates people, and sometimes it also loosens a person’s old role. The smaller the place, the more easily someone’s identity is fixed by long-term relationships; when the distance grows, identity gets a little room. The person is the same person. It’s just that the old set of relationships that already knew “who you are” is temporarily not in the room.

On a local repeater there is a kind of long-term listening watch. The frequency can stay quiet for a long time and people still stay there. Keeping watch doesn’t require a signal to appear right away; it just keeps the possibility of an answer open. The network compressed that waiting. You can switch nodes and groups at any moment; if no one is talking here, you can quickly move somewhere else. Keeping watch gradually turned into searching.

What holds a place together is not only connection, but whether people are still willing to stay there when no connection is happening.

What used to be scarce was arrival. Later it may be attention. After that, the time it takes to keep a relationship going.

The “local” in a local repeater first came from a physical range, and was then deepened bit by bit by time. A server has no natural geographical boundary like that, but time is still there. If the same network centre lasts ten or twenty years, it too will accumulate people who came, people who left, relationships and memories. Whether it might become a kind of place again, it’s too early to say.

The internet didn’t simply abolish the centre, nor did it simply abolish place. The physical centre turned into a network centre; the old distance was compressed, and new distances began to appear. Radio is just my way in to watching this happen.

[Observation materials]

This text comes from a period of actually using and observing the various ways networks and radio are connected.

I tried out every form I could get access to in China: Yaesu WIRES-X, MMDVM, what people here call the “Ma Gong box”, the Wouxun N76 with the HT phone app, and FMO.

They take different technical routes. Some start from radio and treat the network as an extension of distance; some start from the network and use a radio terminal for the last stretch; and some sit in between.

I don’t intend to discuss the devices themselves, or to judge which comes closer to radio. They are just a set of materials I used for this observation. What I care about is how, once these technologies are in actual use, people come in and gather, how old geographical relationships change, and how new ones grow inside the network. The thoughts above about centres, distance, boundaries and place all come from this concrete experience.

2026.09.18

When a place puts up a repeater, it solves a coverage problem, and it also leaves a group of people with a shared frequency.

The first thing I did after getting my call sign was programme the local repeater into my handheld. Later I got into shortwave and simplex and played with other kinds of radio, but whenever I switch on I still listen to the local repeater. Provincial capitals have them, prefecture-level cities have them, many county towns have them too. A place having its own repeater seems like a natural thing.

Only, a lot of the time, when you switch on there isn’t much sound. The machine is still relaying — so why have the people stopped talking?

I came to amateur radio fairly late and missed the years when many repeaters were at their busiest. Most of what happened before, I heard later from old hams. A repeater that has run for ten or twenty years has seen several generations of people. Call signs that were on every day when I first got licensed may slowly have disappeared: some moved to shortwave, some left the city. A few years later, new call signs pop up on the frequency.

There are always a few familiar call signs. Where the repeater used to be, what equipment it ran, who was always on back then — they know it all. When the machine breaks, someone has to look after it.

People started using repeaters because they were useful, of course: wide coverage, convenient on the move, and a frequency everyone knew.

After 2000, cars came into more people’s lives. Self-drive trips, off-roading, car clubs and modifications slowly took off, and radio came right up alongside them. Convoys needed to keep in touch, and plenty of people got into radio that way; others started with radio, met car people later, and followed them out on road trips, off-road and into the outdoors. It started with a few words on the road, and then came the tinkering with mobile rigs and antennas. Hard to say who brought whom in the end; it all got mixed together.

Naturally, not everything said on a repeater is about radio. Cars, road conditions, where you’ve been, which local restaurant is good, who just got off work, who’s still on the road — and machines, antennas, power and signal too, of course. Most of the time there’s no real business at all, just a few people shooting the breeze. Rigs, antennas, feed lines, SWR, power: you run out of things to say about those sooner or later. Once people know each other, the conversation drifts elsewhere.

Roll calls have always been a habit on repeaters. Normally the frequency is quiet and you have no idea how many people are listening. The machine may be on every day while people hardly speak. Call signs you never run into come out for the roll call. One call sign after another, and among the familiar voices, now and then one you haven’t heard for ages, or a complete stranger. So all these people were listening.

A quiet repeater and an unused repeater are not the same thing. Sometimes a roll call is over in a moment: give your call sign, say a couple of words, know that people are still there. That’s enough.

When I’m listening, I often stop on unfamiliar frequencies too. When I first stop I don’t know where it is. Listen a bit longer and the accent comes through first; after that, place names start turning up in the chat — which county, which town, which road, sometimes names only locals would use. Bit by bit, the location more or less reveals itself.

When I drive somewhere, I like to programme the repeaters along the way into the radio beforehand. Passing through a place, I bring up the local repeater and give my call sign. If someone happens to answer, we talk about where I’m coming from and where I’m heading. Sometimes I meet the locals on the radio before I’ve even reached the town.

Repeaters in different places may use much the same hardware, but what you hear on the frequency is different. Accents, place names, road conditions, local events, where to eat today — they slip naturally into the conversation.

The technology keeps changing too. In recent years some international radio manufacturers have been trying to link traditional repeaters to the internet: keep the old way of communicating and add a road out to a wider area on top of it. I think that’s a good approach — not taking the old thing away and swapping in a new one.

In China things are more complicated. Radio and the internet have long been tangled together. Many people first learn about amateur radio online; studying for the licence, buying rigs, finding information, watching how others do it — none of it happens without the internet. Learn about radio online, get a call sign, start making contacts, tinker with gear, then post it all back online: that loop is common now. So it’s hard for me to treat connecting repeaters to the internet as a purely technical question.

Today some repeaters are still standing, with good coverage, yet very quiet when you switch on. Occasionally someone does a signal test, reports a strength, chats a little about rigs and antennas, and soon it goes quiet again. But at roll call, the call signs come out one after another again. People are still listening; they just don’t necessarily have something to say every day.

I wasn’t around for the repeaters’ busiest years, and I don’t want to pass judgement on the past for anyone. I’m just someone who came in later: after getting my call sign I switched on the local repeater first, then started driving around and listening, one place after another.

More and more I feel that in the words “local repeater”, what matters is not only the repeater, but also the local.

2026.09.03

438.500 MHz

I live in northern Shandong, and the frequency I use most for contacts and listening is 438.500 MHz. Over time I’ve built up my own map of “500” — a map heard, one session at a time, out of the radio.

From where I am, southwest through Liaocheng into Henan, all the way to Zhengzhou; towards the Shandong Peninsula, from Binzhou and Zibo to Qingdao, then Rizhao and Yantai; northwest, from Dezhou to Hengshui, Xingtai, Handan and Shijiazhuang; north and northeast, Cangzhou, Tianjin, Beijing, Tangshan, and on towards the northeast.

Southern Shandong is another story. The terrain around Jinan and the Taishan mountains blocks a lot, and signals get very weak further south. For me that is a natural border on the 500 map.

These places can’t be heard every day. Some turn up often, some only when propagation opens, and some just linger briefly in the noise floor — you catch the call sign and a moment later it’s gone.

UHF simplex propagation depends on many things: height, obstructions, antenna, power, the troposphere and the state of the atmosphere at the time. How far you reach is different every day. Some directions are quiet most of the time, then one day they suddenly open, and several far-apart places appear on 500 at once, only to vanish together a while later.

The map shows where these cities are; the radio tells me again every day which of them I can reach today. That’s why I love 500.

These days almost all connection between people can be handed over to the internet. Thousands of kilometres apart, you take out your phone and talk; distance is rarely a problem for communication anymore. But on 500, distance is still there. If you’re not high enough, you’re not high enough. If propagation isn’t up, the most distant places are just noise.

A voice from hundreds of kilometres away slowly rises out of the noise, stronger, weaker, says a few words and falls back. The distance is right there in the fading, the distortion and the broken-up sound.

Sometimes I can hear a distant station but he can’t hear me. When normal calls get no answer, I stop and keep listening. Maybe it’s height or antennas, maybe just the propagation being lopsided at that moment. I know he’s there; it’s just that my voice hasn’t got through yet.

If you can’t reach me with your call, I’ll call out for you. Calling here doesn’t mean hogging the frequency. A contact that didn’t happen today may still happen at another time, on another opening.

What draws me most to 500 is exactly this kind of chance. Someone drives home from work, only meaning to call a friend nearby, propagation happens to open, and his voice is heard hundreds of kilometres away. He never meant to go that far; the voice went by itself.

On the North China Plain, things like this happen on 500 every day. Some keep watch while driving, some switch on the base station when they get home, some put antennas up on rooftops, some carry gear up the mountains. When propagation rises, distant voices suddenly multiply; when it falls, there are only a few people nearby left, or just noise.

500 has its messy moments too: interference, squatting, talking over each other, arguments. People understand and use a public frequency in different ways. There’s no need to hide any of this; it’s part of 500.

There’s also a lot of home-grown radio know-how on the North China Plain. How to put up an antenna, how to run the feed line, how to find height, how to set the direction — in the end much of it you have to do yourself. Behind a distant signal reaching me there may be someone else who adjusted things on a rooftop again and again.

No one built a unified “438.500 network” here. Across Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Beijing, Tianjin and the surrounding areas, individual hams have put up antennas wherever they are. Rooftops, cars, hilltops, balconies — places that had nothing to do with each other — slowly became connected by sitting on the same frequency.

500 has no fixed borders either. Usually it covers only a few dozen kilometres; when propagation opens, voices from Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Beijing and Tianjin, and further still, come in together; when conditions change, it shrinks back. That is how it hangs over the North China Plain and the Shandong Peninsula, now bigger, now smaller.

And there are things left behind by time. From the nineties and the 2000s to today, radios have gone through several generations and ways of communicating have changed a lot, but on 500 the old rigs are still on the air and new ones keep arriving. An analogue radio used for many years and a digital handheld bought today can still hear each other, as long as they’re back on 438.500 in analogue mode. Some use very cheap radios, some very expensive gear; when a distant signal comes up, those differences don’t matter so much. The frequency doesn’t care what your radio cost.

Many habits have been handed down the same way: if someone calls, you answer; when a weak signal appears, you wait a bit longer; if you didn’t catch it, you ask them to say it again. No one calls this a tradition. People just keep doing it.

Over time, 438.500 MHz has become more than a number. Who turns up often, which direction a voice comes from, what accent, who is always on the road, who usually just listens — all of it slowly stays in the frequency. History hasn’t quite passed. It’s still transmitting.

Amateur radio now has many ways of linking up over the internet, and I have nothing against them. But 500 keeps another kind of connection. There’s no online list here, and no one tells you when distant voices will appear. If propagation is poor you can’t hear them; if no one answers, you keep waiting.

We’re too used to getting an answer right away. 500 still keeps waiting, failure, chance, and a great many calls that come to nothing. So when a voice from hundreds of kilometres away really does rise out of the noise floor, I still find it amazing: someone far away presses PTT, the voice leaves his antenna, crosses space, reaches my antenna, and becomes a person’s voice again in my room. We’re so familiar with this that we often forget how incredible it is.

500 has lasted until today because of these particular people. Someone puts up antennas, someone tunes rigs, someone looks for height, someone listens while driving, and someone just quietly keeps watch. There’s mess here, and arguments, but there’s always someone willing to answer an unfamiliar call sign.

No one owns 500. People are just here, leaving a little room for other people’s voices.

2026.08.19

Ever since I got into radio, one thing has kept me interested: when tools change, people change with them.

From the nineties on, many cities and county towns in China gradually set up their own local amateur radio repeaters. Shandong, where I live, was no exception. A few enthusiasts in a place would find somewhere high — sometimes the tallest building in town, sometimes whatever rooftop they could get onto — put up the antenna, install the equipment, connect the power, and get a repeater running.

It doesn’t look complicated today, but keeping one working for years isn’t easy. When the equipment breaks it needs fixing, when the antenna has a problem someone has to climb up, when coverage is poor it needs adjusting, when the power goes out it has to be sorted again. A repeater isn’t finished once it’s installed; someone has to keep looking after it.

Little by little, a group of people gathers around the machine.

Some talk on it every day, some only listen. A newcomer buys a handheld, someone tells him the frequency, and soon he’s in too. People discuss whose location is good and whose signal is poor, and when they drive somewhere else they try to see if they can still get back into the home repeater.

There’s something very concrete in all this: distance.

The repeater is on that building, and where it reaches has a boundary. Go beyond it and you may not hear anything. To go further you have to move, gain height, adjust the antenna, or find another repeater.

Later, when the internet came into radio, this began to change.

Now a tiny network box, even a Raspberry Pi with a few bits of equipment, can let a handheld enter another communication network over the internet. Problems that used to be solved with antennas, height and propagation can partly just be bypassed.

In terms of use, it’s of course far more convenient. Things that might once have taken ages of fiddling can now be done by connecting to the network.

But I later realised that it wasn’t only distance that changed.

The people who used to keep watch on the repeaters slowly became fewer. Some repeaters are still there, but not as lively as before. A new enthusiast doesn’t necessarily have to start with the local repeater; he can buy a box and enter radio another way.

This reminds me of when film cameras became digital cameras.

Digital cameras solved many practical problems of film, but what they changed wasn’t only how images are made. How many pictures we take, how quickly we look at them, how we keep them, even the state of mind when pressing the shutter — all of that changed too. And with phones, the change was bigger still.

Once a tool changes, the habits that formed around it change along with it.

Lately I feel this more and more clearly, because I’ve noticed that I’ve started playing with many things at once. On the table there might be a receiver, a camera, recording gear and other equipment. Sometimes a whole day goes by, I’ve touched every one of them, yet it feels as if I haven’t really got into any of them.

Pick it up, switch it on, fiddle for a while, satisfy a bit of curiosity, put it back.

Only later did I realise this is already very much like how we use phones today. We’re used to switching constantly. If something doesn’t give quick feedback, our attention easily wanders off somewhere else.

And radio so often gives no feedback.

Some nights I switch on the receiver and scan for ages and there’s nothing. I listen to one frequency for ten-odd minutes and there’s still only the noise floor. Change antenna, change location, come back the next day, and it may be just the same. When propagation is good it’s completely different, and signals that weren’t there a few days ago suddenly appear.

You can’t hurry this kind of thing.

I never used to connect these things. Only recently have I begun to feel that putting up a repeater, waiting for a signal, shooting a roll of film with only thirty-six frames — they all contain something that today’s tools keep trying to remove for us: trouble, limits, waiting, failure.

For now I call these things “friction.”

Of course, more friction isn’t always better. There’s no need to make a simple thing complicated again out of nostalgia. And the internet hasn’t destroyed radio; it has simply created another radio ecology.

What interests me is something else: once a tool solves the old trouble, where do the behaviours that depended on that trouble go?

In the past, to maintain a repeater, people got to know other people; to hear a distant signal, they waited a long time; to understand a machine, they used it again and again. The goal was never the waiting or the trouble, of course, but that time really existed.

Now many things no longer need that time.

Recently, when I’m listening, I deliberately make myself stay on a frequency a little longer. When there’s no signal I don’t leave straight away. Sometimes there’s still only noise, and nothing happens at all.

This isn’t quite how it was when I first started with radio. Back then I always felt it only counted if I found something. Now I’m slowly coming to feel that the time spent not finding anything is also part of the thing itself.

2026.08.14 · Hangzhou

Radio changed distance.

For most of history, distance was a very concrete thing. Two people a thousand kilometres apart meant the body couldn’t get there, the voice couldn’t get there, and their days could hardly happen in the same time. To see someone, your body really had to travel the whole way.

Radio changed that. For the first time, the voice could leave the body on a large scale and travel through invisible space. A person stays where he is, yet his voice crosses cities, oceans and borders and sounds somewhere else.

From radio to satellites, mobile networks, the internet and 5G, I see them as a continuation of the same thing. Technologies and ways of transmission keep changing, but the wish behind them is very old: people want to reach each other.

We invent more and more tools, and the time it takes to reach another person keeps getting shorter. A letter once took months, then days, hours, minutes; today, waiting has almost disappeared from communication. Anyone can use one device to send words, sound, images and their state at this very moment to the whole world. We can find anyone at any time, and be found at any time. In communication, the distance between people has been squeezed very small.

But I keep wondering: what distance have we actually removed?

Physical distance matters less and less, but another kind of distance remains. Someone can be very close to you in communication and very far in a real relationship. You can see their avatar, their words, voice and video, know the message has been delivered, even know they’re typing — but that doesn’t mean you have really reached that person.

Radio has also made me rethink “arrival.” We’ve long been used to taking the arrival of a signal for the arrival of a person, but a signal is not a person.

When a person’s voice enters a communication system, the first step is leaving the body. It is turned into an electrical signal, modulated, encoded, compressed and transmitted, travels through the air, is received and decoded by another machine, and turned back into sound. Communication technology keeps making this process more accurate, faster, further, steadier and clearer.

But in communication between people, a lot isn’t in the information. Face to face, we receive not only words but the body, the eyes, gestures, breathing, the hesitation before speaking, the pause halfway through a sentence, the real distance between two people, and the feeling of being in the same time and the same place. Much of this is hard to encode completely, and hard to transmit completely.

So I wonder: once a person has been turned into a signal, how much of the “person” still reaches the other person?

That doesn’t make me reject technology. Radio has fascinated me for years, and communication may be one of the most marvellous things in modern civilisation. We have built such a vast system to let traces of a person leave the body and travel through invisible space.

Today we already live in an environment that is always sending and always receiving. Besides buildings, roads, cars and people, the city has a layer of invisible space, with countless signals passing by our bodies and devices: someone sending a voice, someone transferring data, machines confirming each other, satellites passing overhead, base stations covering the whole city. Many systems are at work all the time; we just don’t usually feel them.

When I switch on the receiver and move through the spectrum, this is the layer I face.

Sometimes I can hear a human voice. More often it’s things that are hard to make out: carriers, noise, pulses, drift and fading, signals that suddenly appear and suddenly vanish.

Traces of people are everywhere in it. A stretch of signal says a transmitter was once there; a pulse says some system is running; a broken-off voice says someone once spoke. By the time they reach me, the body is gone. What I receive is what is left after crossing distance, equipment, propagation and time.

I rarely go looking only for clear information. More often I stop at the noise, the drift, the distortion, the breaks and the silences. Communication systems try to reduce these as much as possible because they make information incomplete. But after listening long enough, I found that they are exactly what records propagation itself.

A signal never moves through empty space. It has to pass through buildings, weather, terrain, atmosphere, ionosphere and a complex electromagnetic environment, and through real time and distance, being changed all the way before it gets here. So listening has slowly become, for me, a way of observing distance: I listen to what a signal is, and also to what it has been through on the way.

Bringing this observation back to relationships between people, I return to the first question: we keep building tools to remove distance, but is distance really what we want to remove?

Relationships between people already contain waiting, distance and silence. The body is hard to replace completely, because it can’t be compressed and copied like information and sent somewhere else in an instant.

Today our ability to connect is enormous; we can reach almost anyone at almost any time. Precisely because of that, I care more and more about what can’t be transmitted. Voices become signals, expressions become images, emotions become text, relationships become online status, and a person increasingly appears to another person in these transmittable forms. Where do the parts that can’t become signals go?

Through radio, I’m not only looking for sounds on some frequency. What I want to know is what remains of us after transmission, and what we had before we became signals.

2026.08.02 · Leling

Every listening session begins with a background.

Most of the time there are no clear contacts in the headphones, only a background sound that is always there. It isn’t like language, or like melody; it’s more like data. Listen long enough and it starts to feel like geometric figures endlessly repeating and changing, textures of different density spreading out, covering one another, interfering with each other, slowly flowing through the spectrum.

Nearly everything I hear is something people have left behind.

Some of it can still be recognised: an unfinished sentence, a flash of ambient sound, an echo in some distant room. Much more has lost its original meaning. Propagation, leakage, reflection and interference stir it all together until it becomes textures whose sources can no longer be told apart.

I rarely go looking for these sounds on purpose. Most of the time I just stay inside them and watch how they change.

These sounds aren’t isolated, one by one. They mix together into a layer of background that is always present, recording what the city leaves behind as it runs day and night.

Hardly anyone notices this layer. Streets, buildings and lights can be seen directly, yet it floats above the city all the time. Sometimes it’s thick, then it loosens again; different structures overlap and also leave large gaps where there’s almost nothing. It rises and falls slowly with the running of the whole city, like a kind of weather you can only notice if you stay long enough.

The city we usually see is streets, buildings and all kinds of facilities. Above it there is another layer of texture that keeps changing. People move, the city grows, and this layer changes with them.

I’ve begun to think of it as the city’s second terrain.

2026.07.24

I have gradually set my listening hours in step with the cycle of the sun, and I call this routine “electromagnetic hours.”

At different times of day the ionosphere is always changing, and the propagation on each band, and what you can receive, change with it. The spectrum isn’t the same all the time; it has its own time and rhythm.

After listening to this rhythm for a long while, I started to sense some connection between how signals are distributed and solar activity. These changes can’t always be explained with data, but propagation distance, the character of the noise and the number of signals all change, and with enough listening you can feel it from experience.

This made me think of human routines. The electromagnetic environment has its own cycles too, shaped by energy from outside, in different states at different times. The electromagnetic traces people leave and the naturally occurring radiation background each appear and disappear according to their own patterns.

So for me, listening is also spending a long time watching how these rhythms change.

Human routines stopped following the sun long ago. Electric light, the internet and always-online devices mean anything can be done at any time; listening by the sun’s cycle has become something you have to do on purpose. We keep choosing more convenient ways, and keep upgrading convenience. At the end of this road, what is the price we will have to pay?

2026.02.14

Besides the communication signals people send, natural electromagnetic activity is always present, layered day and night with the electromagnetic leakage of man-made devices into a single field of signals. It doesn’t exist in order to be heard; whether anyone receives it has nothing to do with whether it exists, yet it passes through human bodies and the space around us all the time. After long listening I slowly realised that the electromagnetic environment, besides being used for communication, is itself a continuously running infrastructure. People just happen to be able to receive a small part of it.

Faced with these signals, people can basically only receive in one direction. We can’t talk with them; we can only listen, record, and through a few limited bands turn a little of them into sound. So for me, listening is more like being passively exposed to them than actively taking something.

What’s missing isn’t information but our ability to sense it. Many signals are very weak and covered by broadband interference from urban infrastructure and electronic devices. To tell them apart you need more sensitive reception, longer listening, and a relatively quiet place.

So listening gradually became a kind of training of the senses: lowering the surrounding noise, stretching out time, letting attention rest on these tiny changes. After a while you begin to find structures, rhythms and recurring forms in the continuous background.

It also made me rethink the word “environment.” Compared with this electromagnetic activity that has always existed, a human life, and the short time in which people can sense it, are far too brief; the two timescales simply don’t match. Besides the geography and climate we know, the environment also includes a spectrum that is always running and invisible flows of information. Listening to these things over the long term has long gone beyond technical operation for me; it is more like learning to be with signal systems that do not belong to humans.

In practice I keep running into a contradiction. I work through field recording, editing, organising and sonifying the signals I receive. All of this is man-made. It makes things that were hard to perceive audible, but it also changes the material from what it was, and my narrative and aesthetic judgement get into it too.

And most of what I hear is in fact technical traces people themselves have left: remnants of communication, equipment noise, by-products of infrastructure at work. Listening isn’t necessarily a dialogue with some outside presence; very often it is just a long-term record of the current electromagnetic environment. These signals are hard to count simply as language, and hard to count as noise. They are just there, and there is still a lot in them we haven’t understood.

So I think of the person receiving as an interface, or a sensor placed in the electromagnetic environment, rather than as a subject who expresses. Often all we can do is receive, and then try to make out what is happening.

People have always lived among electromagnetic traces, natural and of their own making. What this project does is stay inside this layer of traces, listen for a long time, and translate as little as possible.

2026.01.28 / 02.03

Until the late twentieth century, the radio spectrum was still fairly sparse and transparent. Long-distance signals came through clearly, and natural electromagnetic phenomena — lightning, solar activity, cosmic background noise — were important sources of sound in the wireless space. Back then, the “empty frequency” really existed.

Then electronic technology and urban infrastructure developed, and the electromagnetic environment changed a great deal. Switching power supplies, phone chargers, LED lights, power adapters, routers and all kinds of digital devices keep giving off broadband interference. These weak signals from everyday life pile up layer on layer into a stable man-made noise floor. The electromagnetic space has grown thicker and murkier, harder and harder to hear through.

In many cities, the “quiet bands” in the original sense are disappearing, and a layer of background interference lies over the spectrum all year round. These changes usually can’t be seen or heard, but they are there in the environment we live in.

While doing RF soldering, I also listen on different frequencies. Numbers, voices, geomagnetic disturbances, echoes and images keep surfacing in the spectrum, and automatic announcements, busy tones and residual signals from industrial equipment pile on again and again. The traces of human communication and the energy background of solar radiation are there at the same time; technical, natural and bodily rhythms all happen in this space.

Radio is never empty; it’s always busy. In this space that never stops vibrating, exchange, interference, struggle and misreading go on constantly, and we are just one brief receiving end within it.

With wideband receivers, antennas and mobile listening, I collect and record this invisible electromagnetic activity over the long term, and turn part of it into sound.

I don’t intend to get rid of the noise. The noise is what this era leaves behind, and it is the material of my work. In these sounds there is pollution, information and interference; they are also recording the era we are living through, and over time they will piece together an electromagnetic portrait of contemporary society.

Turning this background — always there, yet rarely noticed — into audible sound is my way of recording the technical environment. I think of it as a kind of electromagnetic archaeology.

2026.01.22 / 02.08