> radio amateur

I don't know if it's a British joke, but recall that "amateur" in "amateur radio" means "a duly authorised person interested in radioelectric practice with a purely personal aim and without pecuniary interest " (International Radiotelegraph Convention of Washington, 1927), i.e. anyone working with radio for the hobby, not for the job salary.

Amateur here is "unpaid". Usually the obsessive nature of engineers, me included, means they tend to take the work home with them. Back when I was working for a defence contractor years and years ago there were a lot of amateur radio operators working on RF systems that had so much fun they went home and did another day's work there. Sometimes this was leveraged for personal gain and sometimes it actually played out and ended up in commercial radio systems. Similar to how a lot of people go home and write code. "Amateur programmers"

I am not a native speaker, but it is my understanding that amateur has 2 definitions: 1) unpaid, 2) incompetent or inept.

The Camras team is maintaining and operating the telescope on their own time. The members have dayjobs like programmers and scientists, or are retired professionals. So I'll go with the first definition.

To experiment in radio on certain frequencies (like the ones needed to talk to satellites, requires a license from your nation's government, as radio frequencies are a shared resource. Certain levels of licensing is for 'amateurs' and other licenses are for more industrial things, like TV and what is commonly referred to as FM or AM radio.

Communication with satellites in the US requires the highest level of amateur licensing called the Extra.

http://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio

"Amateur" here is a term defined by treaty. Radio Amateurs are prohibited by law from receiving compensation for their activities (in the US W1AW's paid operators get an express exception). Furthermore, the comms themselves can't have commercial purposes and often can't involve non-amateurs if the communications displace commercial services.

If the aviation world used similar terms a private pilot would be called an amateur pilot.

Not sure if this was a joke or serious, but 'amateur radio' refers basically to people who are into HAM radio. It doesn't necessarily preclude them from also working with radio professionally.

The word amateur has two different meanings in English.

"1. a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis"

"2. a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity"

Here we refer to the first definition. The English word amateur comes from French "lover of". Someone who does things just because they like it, not because they get paid to do it.

We need to start using the term "amateur" in it's original sense to mean "for the love of". This is why people call themselves amateur astronomers, say, not because they failed astronomy class but because they love their hobby of astronomy.

Doesn't sound very Dutch either ...