[kinzli]

I'm with Sid, having been a ham for 28 years now, it's one of my most favorite hobbies.

It doesn't have to be expensive. You can build your own radio for almost nothing, or you can spend $10-15K on top-end commercial radios. For antennas, you can use a free piece of wire, or spend upwards of $100k on towers, big antennas, etc. It's all relative, and some of the best signals on the bands are not necessarily the most expensive stations.

The licensing procedure is easy, and you don't even have to learn morse code anymore (even though I'm sad to see that go, morse is where I spend 99.9% of my time on the radio).

If anyone's interested in ham radio, find a local club and go check it out. Hams are some of the nicest, most welcoming folks around and most will happily show you as much radio as you're interested in seeing, myself included.

I just finished building a new radio for myself and love it. It works great, and if anything ever goes wrong with it, I'll know what to do to fix it. Don't have to worry about warranties, sending it off to a manufacturer, etc.

What a great hobby.

 

[kinzli]

One of the things that makes ham radio appealing is that you have a bunch of "bands" to choose from in which to use. 11M (CB) only has that one band, and in a low point in the sunspot cycle (like we're in now, the dead bottom) 11M pretty much sucks for anything other than local communications.

A ham however can use a lot lower frequencies and pretty much at any time, regardless of solar conditions, make contact across the planet (not totally, but more or less).

Then again, I realize that not everyone wants to talk to people a long ways away. I happen to dig it, but I also realize not everyone has that interest. That's cool.