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What's Ham radio like these days? My grandfather was a ham and I have fond memories of him teaching me about radio waves (and early computer programming!) as a kid in his den.

I still remember that he was W4LMU, and searching on it finds this:

https://www.qsl.net/kq4pl/skeys.htm

His gear was huge, still used vacuum tubes (already retro in the 1980s but he was a Ham), and consumed enough power to run a small neighborhood. He'd be delighted with this.

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Ham radio is a hugely diverse hobby these days.

Personally, I had been thinking about getting my license, but finally did it as a extra skill for my SAR team application. As the younger guy with the rope skills, I got into infrastructure work. Towers and antennas and remote cameras and microwave links, etc.

People are into everything from mesh networking to digitally encoded communication methods to hiking to remote mountaintops and seeing how many people you can contact to building prepper type SHTF communication systems to contesting and seeing how many/how far contacts you can make to setting up data collection systems for scientific research to supporting public safety, large events, and emergency communications. And a lot more I'm not coming up with off the top of my head.

My local radio club was in an area with a lot of retired defense and aerospace type engineers but it also had younger folks from tech, media and anything else type backgrounds.

You don't need a license to explore and have fun.

Cheap, firmware hackable HTs are hawt, in particular the Quansheng UV-K5,K6.

Tons of SDR receivers out there to explore, and many extremely exiting transceiver projects out there also. Just so much:

https://github.com/jopohl/urh

http://websdr.org/

http://kiwisdr.com/public/

https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/

Listening is license free but transmitting in the US on any of the interesting bands (ie not just DMR or a walmart walkie where the device is licensed instead of the operator being licensed) requires a license.

General rule of thumb in the US is that either the device or the person has to have a license to transmit and most of the Chinese radios are not licensed. Another easy check is that most of the specs for radio based licenses require that the antenna be permanently attached at least for hand terminals.

One big thing recently is POTA and SOTA where people go to parks and mountain summits to make contacts. The latter requires small radio, putting up your own antennas, and using Morse code.

People talking on the radio is sort of dead. HF is still popular. There is FT8 digital mode that let's make contact with low signal. I've reached Australia, Chile, and Russia from west coast.

There is a lot of hacking, but it doesn't seem to get into mainstream. But there are lots of things to build; I have little radio waiting to be soldered.

> People talking on the radio is sort of dead.

That's a shame. I have vivid memories of one radio or another chattering away in my dad's study when I was a kid. Of course, to the point I guess, he's still around but doesn't really do any of that anymore himself. He now mostly plays with radio astronomy in his dotage.

> People talking on the radio is sort of dead.

I don't have any reference to how it used to be, but there's a fair amount of voice activity on the 2m and 70cm repeaters near me.

Lots of folks remember the 2m/440 activity in the days before unlimited cell phone minutes. Nothing compares to that. I'll say that, in my major west coast metro, the repeaters are pretty dead outside of nets.

> People talking on the radio is sort of dead

In my area, we used to have quite a bit of traffic on one 2m repeater, mostly around morning and afternoon commute times. We had a retired police officer who seemed to spend most of the day chatting. He went away, and most of the chatter went away with him. I would guess all the guys who used to talk while in their cars are still out there, but no one is getting the conversation ball rolling like he used to.

Somewhat disagree, it depends on the club. For example, I've experienced a lot more conversation on the W3OK repeater vs the W4MLB repeaters

Something wild that a local Bay Area group of hams do is Parachute Mobile. It's just what you may guess: they jump out of an airplane with ham rigs strapped to their chest and make contacts from under the canopy.

https://parachutemobile.wordpress.com/

POTA seems to be pretty active -- I managed to make a couple of voice contacts a few weeks ago on a 5W rig, so voice work isn't out of the question.

It's good to go into radio with an idea of what you want to do with it, then find a community of hams who enjoy doing that. People chase distant contacts, they practice emergency communications, they run low-power stations from remote locations, and many more kinds of activities.

Mike - KE8ATC

if you get licensed you may be able to obtain his old callsign as your own

Something really cool I stumbled upon recently - someone near me hosts a trivia show via ham radio once a week, and other folks in the area will listen for their callsign and then answer his questions

Makes me really happy to run across random unexpected things like that

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