Love this as a concept.
Any radio amateurs here? What do you actually end up doing with your setups? Do you have conversations with other amateurs or something else?
If it wasn’t completely obvious, I don’t really know much about the ”scene.”
Any radio amateurs here? What do you actually end up doing with your setups? Do you have conversations with other amateurs or something else?
If it wasn’t completely obvious, I don’t really know much about the ”scene.”
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.
BBS is also a pretty common application.