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Comment by ianburrell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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