When You Actually Need a VPN: Lessons From Hyderabad and the Ham Shack

This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up for NordVPN through a link on this page, The Long Frequency may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I’m comfortable using myself.

I wasn’t running a VPN on my trip to India. I should have been, and I am fixing that now. This is the case I’m making to myself and anyone in the overlap between traveler, ham radio operator, and SDR hobbyist, for why a VPN belongs in your kit.

It’s not the case the VPN industry usually makes. I’m not going to tell you the internet is a terrifying place where hackers are constantly trying to steal your bank password. The real reasons to use a VPN are a lot more boring and a lot more practical, and they only become obvious the moment you hit one of them in real life.

The Moment It Clicked for Me: India

I was in Hyderabad this year. At some point I tried to open TikTok on my phone to send something to someone back home and got an error when the app opened. “Our services are not available in your country or region” greeted me as soon as the app opened on my phone. TikTok has been banned in India since 2020.

It’s a small thing. I wasn’t there to scroll TikTok. But it was the first time it really registered for me that the internet isn’t actually one internet. It’s really just a patchwork of national networks with different rules, different blocks, and different things that work depending on which country’s IP address you’re connecting from.

That same trip, I could have run into the same problem with any number of other services. Some banking apps refuse to work from foreign IPs. Some streaming services geo restrict content the moment you cross a border, even on services you pay for at home. Google Voice gets unreliable. Certain news sites don’t load.

A VPN solves all of that with a single setting change. Connect to a US server before you open the app, and as far as the service is concerned, you’re sitting in your living room in Kansas. The app works. The video plays. The bank lets you in.

This is the case for international travelers, full stop. If you’re going somewhere outside the US for more than a few days, a VPN is the single piece of your travel kit that pays for itself the first time you need it.

The Other Side of the Same Problem: SDR and Ham Radio

Here’s where it gets interesting for the rest of my readers. The same tool that fixes the geo-restriction problem for travelers also fixes three specific problems for SDR listeners and ham radio hobbyists.

Accessing remote SDR receivers in other regions

The global network of public KiwiSDR receivers is one of the best things to happen to amateur radio in the last decade. From my desk in Kansas, I can tune into a receiver in Australia, the UK, Japan, or the middle of the South Pacific. It’s still a little wild to me.

But many KiwiSDR operators set IP based slot limits to keep their stations available to local users. Hit a popular European receiver during prime time and you’ll often get bumped or denied. Connect through a VPN endpoint in a different region and the picture changes. New IP, fresh slot available for you.

The same logic applies to WebSDR sites that geofence access, certain HF receivers tied to academic networks, and some satellite reception streams.

Avoiding ISP throttling on long listening sessions

If you’ve ever left a WebSDR open in a browser tab for six hours, you’ve probably noticed your connection getting flakier as the session goes on. Some ISPs throttle sustained audio streams on residential plans because they classify them as “non essential streaming.”

Running your traffic through a VPN encrypts it, which means your ISP or cell provider can’t categorize it. Your KiwiSDR session looks the same to them as your email. Just encrypted traffic of an unknown type and the throttling stops.

This matters even more if you’re running APRS IS gateways, AllStarLink nodes, or EchoLink. Basically anything with a sustained connection to ham radio infrastructure on the public internet.

Privacy when connecting to your home station remotely

If you’ve set up remote access to your shack via a Raspberry Pi running rtl tcp, a remote desktop into your main listening station. Every connection from outside your home network exposes your home IP to whatever service or app you’re using.

A VPN reverses that. Your remote connection rides inside an encrypted tunnel, and from there back to your home. Anyone scanning the connection sees the VPN endpoint, not your address. For most casual operators this is low stakes. For anyone running publicly accessible nodes, it stops being optional.

What to Look For in a VPN for This Use Case

Most VPNs are marketed for streaming Netflix, which is a different traffic pattern than ours. Here’s what actually matters for the traveler plus hobbyist case:

Server count and geography. The whole point, whether you’re getting around a TikTok ban in India or trying to pull up a fresh slot on a Japanese KiwiSDR is having endpoints in the regions you care about. A VPN with 100+ countries beats one with great speeds but only US and UK endpoints.

WireGuard protocol support. OpenVPN works, but WireGuard is significantly faster and more stable for sustained connections. Avoid VPNs that only offer proprietary protocols.

Independently audited no logs policy. “No logs” is marketing copy until it’s been audited by a third party. The major providers get audits from firms like Deloitte or PwC; check whether the claim has actually been verified.

Kill switch. If the VPN connection drops, you want your traffic to drop with it rather than silently fall back to your real IP.

Split tunneling. Route your SDR software through the VPN while letting local network traffic bypass it, or vice versa. Keeps things fast where you don’t need the VPN and tunneled where you do.

The One I’m Going With: NordVPN

After looking at the major options for this combined use case, I’m going with NordVPN. A few reasons why :

The server coverage is the main draw. They have over 6,000 servers across 110+ countries. That’s the metric that matters for both the travel use case (you want a US endpoint from wherever you are) and the SDR use case (you want endpoints in the regions you’re trying to receive from).

NordLynx is their tuned WireGuard implementation, which means the protocol piece is solved.

Their no logs policy has been independently audited by Deloitte multiple times. That’s the verification that matters rather than the marketing claim.

The kill switch and split tunneling both work cleanly on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android which covers basically every device a traveling SDR hobbyist is going to carry.

Try NordVPN here — they typically run a deal that brings the cost down to a few dollars a month on their longer plans, which is roughly the same as one airport coffee. For the next international trip I take, that’s already paid for itself.

A Final Honest Note

VPNs are not magic and they’re not necessary for casual use. If you’re sitting at home on your local network using your local antenna and a free WebSDR you have an account on, you don’t need this. Spend the money on a better antenna first.

But if you travel internationally, if you use remote SDRs, if you connect to your home station from outside your network, or if you’ve ever been annoyed by a service that worked yesterday and doesn’t work today because you crossed a border, then a VPN is the cheapest piece of kit you can add to fix all of those at once.

I should have had one in India. I’ll have one before the next trip.

73,

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This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up for NordVPN through a link on this page, The Long Frequency may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I’m comfortable using myself.