I'm old enough to remember Wave 1 of people selling ham gear to preppers, the 80s 'Survivalist' wave. But then, guys making portable HF rigs seemed way more practical than deploying LTE nodes. The fuck's that going to do for you? It's one of the spammiest, most LOOK AT ME I AM A CELL TOWER modes you could use. Like, by design.
Also I never got the impression that there were actually more than a handful of those guys back then.
I'm old enough to remember Wave 1 of people selling ham gear to preppers, the 80s 'Survivalist' wave. But then, guys making portable HF rigs seemed way more practical than deploying LTE nodes. The fuck's that going to do for you? It's one of the spammiest, most LOOK AT ME I AM A CELL TOWER modes you could use. Like, by design.
Also I never got the impression that there were actually more than a handful of those guys back then.
The age of the internet really does allow for for the whackadoos to find each other and these ideas to spread. They generally arent as bad as the hardcore survivalist militia’y types but good one for reminding me where they came from.
I recall hearing about them back in the day, being similarly old
Nothing wrong with a bit of LARPing. But what becomes a problem is when you're entire goal is just to sell people things they don't need, that you barely "made", with complete disregard for the hobby.
I see literally every day some Instagram grifter army-guy play pretend fag trying to sell a set of Chinesium radios like Radtels in a Pelican case for $4000.
And the worst part is people actually buy this shit. They don't know any better or are just so addicted to mindless consumption. When you don't gatekeep things this is who it attracts.
Imagine if people did this with anything else. Imagine some soy-faced YouTube fucker trying to resell Makita sawzalls to his dumbfuck audience as "YOU will NEED this WHEN SHIT HITS THE FAN (red arrow) (soyface)" at a 200% markup or with some affiliate link. They would get clowned on. Why is a radio any different?
Radios are a tool. Buying a radio doesn't give you the ability to communicate with someone. Knowing how to use it does.
In the age of search engines and YouTube and LLMs, and people still can't be fucked to learn anything. Between the consoomer "prepper" types and the fossilized boomers who reject any form of change and think FT8 is the devil, is it any wonder why this hobby is dying.
The plague of the consoomer and grifter has also made it's way over to other adjacent hobbies like LoRa & mesh networking. See the recent MeshCore drama for an example.
Some grifter faggot named "Andy Kirby" tried to usurp MeshCore - an open source project - by trademarking the name and using LLMs to launder the code as his own to sell commercially as firmware blobs https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split (archive)
And then makes this pity-party lazy excuse of a response
(Imagine being a grown ass man and making this face. Dude needs a bitch slap immediately)
Then, over in Reticulum - another grifter fag called the "Data Slayer" took an open source project from a dev who built the project over a course of TWO FUCKING DECADES living in a van, copied one of the guides, ran it through an LLM and tried to sell a PDF for $79.
(link) (archive)
And if that wasn't enough grifting - take off-the-shelf hardware, open source code, and what is about $40 worth of materials and sell it for $1099 ONE THOUSAND NINETY NINE FUCKING DOLLARS (archive)
These were sold by the creator of them a few years ago for $65 USD. None of this will never benefit the developer, never benefit the project. It goes straight to this dude's bank account.
This is why you gatekeep things. If you don't gatekeep things this is what happens to your hobbies and things you love.
