I know that every hobby can become outrageously expensive if you really want to, but what would it cost someone to get started with amateur radio?
That gets you a SDR with spectrum scope and waterfall, a portable HT UHF/VHF transceiver, and your Technician license, for ~$80. From there, you can look into getting your General license to transmit on HF, and a cheap HF radio and antenna, for less than $500 total. A higher quality HT like an Icom or Yaesu would be money well spent for VHF/UHF, as the Baofeng is notoriously hard to program and allows you to transmit outside the legal band limits.
(Note: the RTL-SDR works best for VHF and UHF. For an HF SDR, you'll want to check out something like the Airspy HF+ Discovery and perhaps a cheap $30 magnetic loop antenna from eBay, which is what I use.)
Edit: My apologies for the acronyms. SDR is software defined radio, allowing you to receive radio signals on your computer. HT is "handy-talkie" or handheld transceiver. HF/VHF/UHF are defined in the parent post.
* https://hamstudy.org/ is the go-to place to study for your license, and it's free. Use it, love it, thank the devs after you get your license.
* Don't listen to the naysayers (which aren't as loud these days), a Baofeng radio is a perfectly acceptable first radio, and it's impossible to beat the price.
* If your interests tend towards the tinkering with electronics side, you can pick up inexpensive/generic RTL-SDR dongles cheaply (less than $10) and modify them to receive HF. Or use them as-is.
* For zero dollars, you can use someone else's web-connected SDR, such as https://websdr.org/
* Look around at the various digital modes (there are many, with FT8 and WSPR being the most popular at the moment), especially if you're into computers. Many allow a structured way to get familiar with things without worrying about messing up on the etiquette front.
* For an HF rig, the uBitx (https://ubitx.net/ & https://www.hfsignals.com/) is hard to beat, and they just introduced a new version (v6). $199 with a case ($150 without) will get you a full-band, all mode, dual VFO 10 watt radio. That's unbelievable value for an HF rig. Add an amp later on for more power.
* For HF especially focus on making/buying good antennas before you go spend a bunch of money on radios.
Anyone who wants a demo should post their location in this thread... My station can be demo'ed just via a laptop (remotely, such as from a bar or coffee shop) and I'm sure many of us who are hams would be happy to help any interested person from HN get familiar with what it's all about.
Now in the digital era, you can spend $250 on a handheld that can literally reach any spot on the globe. The primary digital platform for amateur radio, D-STAR, allows cross-band communication by connecting to the internet.
A lot of the cost of amateur radio is people trying to get the best equipment possible to transmit and receive via FM modulation over the longest distances with the best possible audio quality. But that's just one aspect. That's what costs a bundle, but there's much more to it than just that.
IMO, what's interesting about radio is that, if you know how to use it, you can get a message from anywhere to anywhere else on the planet… or even low earth orbit. It requires minimal infrastructure and it can work with AA batteries. The community is very friendly and people are happy to help/relay messages.
Honestly, amateur radio, for me, is a lot of what the internet used to be when it was difficult to use. Since amateur radio is still relatively difficult to use it keeps the trolls away.
Yaesu is a pretty solid "cheap" brand. BaoFeng/BTech is a less solid, even cheaper brand (my advice would be to avoid them, despite the fact that that's where I started...)
For 500, maybe you can get a used FT-857D. You'll need a power supply, too. And an antenna.
If you have a local club, talk to the folks there and tell them you're interested in getting started. Someone might have stuff to sell or give to you.
Second this. I'm VP of an active club and for someone with a real interest we can do a lot. Here is a way to find a club, in the US: http://www.arrl.org/find-a-club
That kinda depends on what you consider "interesting". IMO, there's plenty of "interesting" stuff to do on 2m / 70cm, plus anything you can do in receive only mode on other bands. But to me, "interesting" includes things like listening in on air-traffic control using an RTL-SDR, participating in the local ARES group, working the local repeaters in voice mode, and experimenting with decoding various digital modes.
This is not to say that working HF doesn't open up additional doors, because clearly it does. My point is just that there's a lot of fun to be had with just what you can do with a Technician license, a $40 Baefung radio, and a $25 RTL-SDR dongle.
That's basically it. Shit, I was a tech for twenty years, but never did much because I wasn't interested in club stuff or chatting on the local repeater. At some point I got an RTL-SDR, but dealing with noise and frustrating software issues killed my interest in it... Then around the time my license was up for renewal again, I studied for a week and got my extra ticket, and bought a rig that could do HF-70cm and suddenly I was able to try anything that interested me. If you've got a $500 budget, you can do the same... no reason to limit yourself.
If you want to get into satellites, you'll want to a specialized antenna for that, and then it helps to have a computer setup or a fine-tuning dial that can help deal with the Doppler shift and tracking, etc. Then you're easily getting up there in price, probably well past $500.
The other thing I've seen people do is set up extreme long-range setups. They'll get the General license that allows them to use frequencies that bounce around the atmosphere better and build their own antennae, get higher-power transmitters, etc. and their rigs are easily into the thousands of dollars.
$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.
/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.
If you prefer to buy not build your antennas, you can still do that for less than $500 all in, you just might have to look at used antennas.
The downside though, is that they can be very frustrating in some environments (esp with a high noise floor, or with a strong transmitter nearby - the frontend is _very_ easy to overload), and they're generally pretty bad about spurious emissions (though the newer tri-band model seems pretty good in that regard).