Mayday Belarus, or How Belarussian Amateur Radio Operators Are Arrested for Treason

Posted on 20 January, 2026

Belarus is prosecuting licensed ham radio operators for treason and espionage.
Because they use their equipment to have conversations with people around the world. Siarhei Besarab, callsign EU1AEY, describes what is happening movingly (archive link). Never mind that these are licensed radio operators, meaning there is a government register of everyone who is involved in this technical hobby, and there were technical exams before getting your license, so government cannot be confused as to the reality. The (mandatory) logs, and written confirmations of conversations (called QSL cards), are even used as ‘proof’.

It boggles the mind.

It figures too, because individual agency, and having individual technological capabilities, is subversive seen from an authoritarian perspective. Next to things like ham radio, and e.g. coders, this also applies to (digital) makers. When in Ukraine Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk fell to Russian covert invasion in 2014 something similar happened in the Donetsk FabLab. The guy who founded and ran the FabLab in Donetsk, K (whom I previously met because he contributed to some of the Dutch FabLabs too), saw himself confronted with one of his regular visitors and half a dozen uniformed others, all armed, coming to tell him his work was subversive and his FabLab was hereby shut down. He went home, picked up his family and drove west.

I have a ham radio license (callsign PE1NOR). Since I was 9 years old I was involved in the radio hobby, and I obtained my license when I first went to university. For some years I’ve let it lapse, but have since renewed it. At the time I thought about being registered as having this capability and the potential risk of that exposure. On the other hand, having the license and having the equipment at home, even if I am no longer active in the hobby itself, also means I can assist in cases of higher probability than prosecution in my own country: emergencies. In emergencies the first thing to go down is regular telephone communications. As long as there’s electricity, or charged batteries at least, my radio equipment will work. In the Netherlands a network of ham radio operators have formed the DARES Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and they have agreements with a range of Dutch ‘security regions’ (groupings of municipalities), to supply emergency radio connections for civil protection. That is how you build on the technological capabilities of people.

Abbreviations are widely used in ham radio, because when using Morse code it means you can convey meaning faster.
Besarab signs his posting with three of them:

73, goodbye
QRT, stopping transmission
SK, silent key (meaning a morse key that fell silent, i.e. the operator died)

Ham Radio As Part Of The Dork Web

Posted on 10 October, 2020

by Ton Zijlstra

Frank Meeuwsen’s exploration of the world of newsletters surfaced this interesting conversation with Steve Lord. Steve writes a twice monthly newsletter The Dork Web about tech subcultures. What stood out to me was this statement:

“COVID and climate change impacts will drive the creation of new subcultures. Two areas I know of are radio and self-sufficiency. COVID taught us how brittle our supply chains are. Climate change and de-globalization will exacerbate that. Global demand for online amateur radio exams far outstrips supply. I imagine many readers will have at least tried to bake this year. Some will try to go back to their lives as they were before. Some will keep baking, growing food, staying on the air. These people will build the subcultures of the 2020s.”

Wait, what? “Global demand for online amateur radio exams far outstrips supply“? Steve’s remark on the let’s call them ‘selective pressures’ of pandemic and the climate emergency on tech subculture development sounds likely. But a rise in demand for amateur radio jumped out at me. I am very curious where that observation comes from.

The recent Dork Web issue Propaganda, Pirates and Preachers: The Weird Wide Web Of Shortwave Radio is full of interesting links to follow, and I assume Lord came across the interest in ham radio exams in the course of researching that edition.

I became fascinated with short wave radio in my pre-teens, and involved with ham radio by the end of primary school (my dad saw my short wave listening efforts and introduced me to a colleague of his who had a radio license). The original promise of short wave and ham radio to me, looking back now, was that the technology mediated access to information (short wave), and brought novel connections (ham radio). I was too young then to get an operator’s license, but got my license after I entered university (and was on the board of the still existing university’s ham radio club), now just over 30 years ago.

I also encountered internet at university at the end of the 1980’s, and that eroded my interest in ham radio, as it enabled both access to information and new connections on such a different scale and in such a more effective way, compared to ham radio.

Ultimately, while the technology is fascinating, there is not much actual agency in ham radio. You can connect to other people, but such connections are scattered, unpredictable if not random, and it doesn’t enable you to do things other than explore the fascination of the tech itself (much like metablogging actually I must say), with others.

There are of course edge use cases where ham radio does provide immediate agency, namely in the case of large scale emergencies. Situations where regular communications are sure to break down under demand (mobile phone networks are the first to falter when everyone really wants to make a call…). Having let my radio license lapse with time, I renewed it 3 years ago, and I do have VHF/UHF ‘walkie talkie’ style transceivers handy for just such a scenario. My callsign now is the same as it was 30 years ago: PE1NOR.

More recently IoT developments and e.g. LORAWAN do also use radio in an agency inducing way. I run a LORAWAN gateway, allowing any radio enabled IoT device in the area to connect through it to the internet so the IoT device can reach the database its operator wants the collected data end up in. And I have a sensorkit in the garden that uses that gateway to send temperature and humidity measurements to a city wide citizen science network, the results of which are used in our city’s climate adaptation efforts.

So if, as Steve Lord suggests, “Global demand for online amateur radio exams far outstrips supply” and is feeding into new tech subcultures, I’m curious. Curious to see how it might find new ways of providing agency.

I’ve subscribed to The Dork Web, not as a newsletter, but through its RSS feed. I’m more of an RSS guy than a newsletter reader. Sorry, Frank! 😉

In reply to WebmentionQSL by Peter Rukavina

The reason I came up with letterpress made QSL cards, Peter, was of course that you have one. Also Aaron Parecki is interested. Not only is he deeply involved in Webmention as a standard, he also has a ham radio license (W7APK) like me (PE1NOR). So we have at least an audience of 4 😀

Bonus pic: the QSL cards I sent when I didn’t have my license yet (I got it in ’89) and sent out listening reports to both sides of successful connections (QSO). These were often highly appreciated by the stations involved as sometimes the only proof they had that a conversation with some exotic station had taken place was that someone overheard it and sent a report. [Added: the QSL card below mentions DP0SL, which, while a German callsign was definitely an ‘exotic’ station. DP0SL was the call sign of the D1 German Space Lab mission, hence ‘SL’.)

These QSL cards were bundled nationally and then sent as packages to the ham radio club of the destination country, where they would be disseminated through the various regional ham radio clubs. I should have a stack somewhere of QSL cards I received from all over the world.