So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
So very true. Ham radio operators, AIUI, played a critical role with emergency communications in the Western NC area in the aftermath of Helene. I believe there were some instances where local PSAP's / dispatch centers were knocked completely offline and they had local ham radio operators helping to dispatch fire/ems resources.
The great thing about ham radio, it really is an inexpensive hobby to get started. Now, once you get into it, you can spend just about as much money as you want (or have access to). But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
I encourage everyone to give it a shot, and join up with a local AUXCOMM group or whatever you have locally. I have to admit, I'm not as active with our local group as I'd like to be, due to competing demands for my time, but I hope to eventually work things out to where I can get more active.
Ham radio always seemed a bit boring compared to the Internet, computers, and software development.
What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
Check out https://github.com/drowe67/radae. David Rowe has been working on a really neat new digital mode for audio transmission over HF channels, using a pretrained autoencoder. It's currently getting integrated into the freeDV gui in this branch https://github.com/drowe67/freedv-gui/tree/ms-rade-integ