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An off-grid push-to-talk intercom for the people standing near you. It carries voice and text between phones over an ordinary Wi-Fi network — with no internet, no repeater, no reflector, no digital-voice hotspot and no server. Built for field days, hamfests, club meetings, drills and contest sites: the moments when the people you need are close enough to see, and tying up a frequency to talk to them makes no sense.
Neither. Ham Chatting never transmits on the amateur bands and cannot key a radio. It moves your voice over Wi-Fi exactly as any other app on your phone does, so unlicensed family, helpers and visitors can join a team on equal terms. The rules that govern on-air operating — including the prohibition on encryption — simply do not apply here.
Because everyone on the channel is identified by one: on the roster, in the message log, and when Net Control calls you. It is a name, not a licence claim — if you do not have a callsign, any short name works.
Any Wi-Fi network that all the phones can join. It does not need internet and works perfectly with the internet unplugged. A small USB-powered travel router is the ideal answer: it reaches further than a phone hotspot, takes more people, and the net survives when any one person walks away. Note that an iPhone cannot host a network for other phones — that is an Apple restriction, not something the app can work around.
Nine times out of ten it is AP isolation (sometimes called client isolation), which almost every guest network has switched on. It stops devices on the network from seeing each other. Everything looks correctly configured and nothing works — which is why a travel router you control is worth carrying. Check also that everyone really is on the same network, not just in the same building, and on iPhone that you allowed Local Network access the first time you joined (if you declined, iOS never asks again and you have to re-enable it in Settings → Ham Chatting).
Roughly 30 to 80 metres in the open, and less through walls — the range of the Wi-Fi network you brought, not of a radio. A five-watt handheld does kilometres. Ham Chatting is a site intercom, not a replacement for your HT, and it is better to know that before you rely on it.
That is the Efficient voice setting, which uses the Codec2 vocoder — it rebuilds your voice from a description of it rather than sending the sound, so it costs forty times less data and has a synthetic character no amount of signal can remove. Go to Extra → Voice quality and choose Clear (uncompressed, the default) or Wide (16 kHz, the most natural). The setting changes only what you transmit; you always hear other stations the way they chose to send.
The microphone carries your voice while you hold push-to-talk, and is closed the rest of the time. The camera is used only to scan a channel join code, and only while that scanner is on screen. Nothing from either is recorded or sent anywhere. Refusing the camera costs you nothing — you type the code instead.
No. Ham Chatting runs in the foreground only, on both iPhone and Android, which is why it holds the screen awake while you are on a channel. Put the phone face up on the table, the way you would rest a handheld. If it does sleep, or you take a call, the app rebuilds its connections when you come back — you do not have to leave and rejoin.
CALL is open: anyone on the same Wi-Fi joins it by tapping it, exactly like a simplex calling frequency, and it is deliberately not encrypted. Each of the twelve working channels has a CODE. The first person there sets it — the app offers six characters chosen so they cannot be misheard, or use a word of your own — and shares it by QR or by reading it out. Spaces, dashes and capitals do not matter.
The code is not a label that gets checked: it derives the key that seals the channel with XChaCha20-Poly1305, via Argon2id. So a wrong code is not an error message — the channel is simply silent, because your phone cannot open what the others are sending, and there is no success-or-failure answer to hand somebody who is guessing. Anyone with the code can read everything on that channel; it keeps the next club off your working channel, and the app's manual says plainly that it is not the right tool for anything that genuinely must stay secret.
Extra → Email diagnostics. It opens your mail app with everything already filled in — which network you are on, who the app can see, and what it has tried — and copies the same text to your clipboard in case your mail client trims it. That report answers most questions immediately.