I heard this phrase often when studying for my license, "Your license is a license to learn". It took me a few months to really internalize that.
Getting into the hobby, I was looking to unlock exclusive frequencies that would give me more range than FRS and isolation from FRS traffic.
While it did that, I found that benefit largely went unused. My comms aren't private. What I wanted from the ham bands didn't benefit me in the ways I wanted them to. Heck my identity isn't even private. In addition, anyone I want to communicate with have to be hams as well.
Like you said, outside of an emergency, there are more reliable, private ways to communicate by using the Internet. The use case I was trying to solve for is better suited using VOIP on a phone.
What I found instead in ham radio is the a world of experimentation. I'm building antennas and radios. I'm hooking radios up to computers to communicate across the planet. I'm hooking up my phone to a walkie-talkie to send messages over APRS and Winlink without the Internet. Not because I need to, but because I can and it is fun to figure out how to do these things.
On top of all that, it is just enjoyable to turn on the radio with a cup of coffee and call out and see who can hear you. It is reminiscent of the early days of IRC and ICQ when you just turned it on and someone interested in the same thing as you was just waiting to connect. For the most part hams are just happy to have someone to geek out with and that's reason enough to connect.
I second this. You can get on HF with very little space. If you have 16ft of space, you can easily put up a temporary 10 meter dipole.
I have an HOA, so every time want to get on HF at home I put up the 10m dipole. I stick three 7ft wooden stakes in the ground, tie the dipole to them with paracord, and talk to people all over the world.
That dipole is just 2 pieces of 8 foot wire soldered to a SO-329 connector. It probably cost me $10 at most.
You can get a low powered portable HF digital rig for less than $100. With less than 20W and a homebrewed antenna you could be making contacts all over the world.
Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News. As children of the Internet, radio, at first, seems like a silly, antique hobby when the Internet has connected us together. Maybe it is just me, but there's something really fun and geeky about radio. I've been a maker for decades and I've grown a bit bored of making LED blink. HAM radio has given me a practical reason to get the solder iron out again. I really love building the crappiest equipment out of scraps and see if it'll work.
Parks on the Air is another really fun aspect of the hobby. Almost every weekend since I got my license, I go out to a nearby state or national park. I pack up my FT-991a base station in a cheap harbor freight hard case. I bring a battery, some coax, an EFHW antenna I built. I throw in antenna in a tree and sit in the park and play radio. I find it quite relaxing to get outside and see who I can talk to.
KB9VBR has a nice video what a POTA activation is like. If you're an outdoorsy type or want to be one, POTA is a fun excuse to get outside.
> Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News.
It’s the difference between crossing the ocean in an airliner vs. in a sailboat. The end results are the same, but the methods and skills are wildly different.
They come here because America has made a far worst hellscape of their homeland through extreme resource extraction and coups. Western extractive capitalism strip mines the Global South of all local wealth leaving the local population in extreme poverty.
Your browser history will be full of URLs that only your browser can access. A contributor was kind enough to build a delete function for this to wipe the private key and generate a new one. This would render all those URL's useless. We'll be merging that soon.
A malicious browser extension can steal all sorts of secrets. Is there a unique weakness here in the linked tool? Otherwise, this seems similarly vulnerable to everything else on the web.
Getting into the hobby, I was looking to unlock exclusive frequencies that would give me more range than FRS and isolation from FRS traffic.
While it did that, I found that benefit largely went unused. My comms aren't private. What I wanted from the ham bands didn't benefit me in the ways I wanted them to. Heck my identity isn't even private. In addition, anyone I want to communicate with have to be hams as well.
Like you said, outside of an emergency, there are more reliable, private ways to communicate by using the Internet. The use case I was trying to solve for is better suited using VOIP on a phone.
What I found instead in ham radio is the a world of experimentation. I'm building antennas and radios. I'm hooking radios up to computers to communicate across the planet. I'm hooking up my phone to a walkie-talkie to send messages over APRS and Winlink without the Internet. Not because I need to, but because I can and it is fun to figure out how to do these things.
On top of all that, it is just enjoyable to turn on the radio with a cup of coffee and call out and see who can hear you. It is reminiscent of the early days of IRC and ICQ when you just turned it on and someone interested in the same thing as you was just waiting to connect. For the most part hams are just happy to have someone to geek out with and that's reason enough to connect.