It seems my interest in ham radio was the result of ADHD hyperfixation that ended after a few years. I primarily played with CW and digital on HF, and satellites on VHF+. My interest petered out some time in 2023, and I want to get back in but can’t find something that both captures my interest and doesn’t require more purchases.
It seems to me that you already have all the gear.
You can experiment endlessly with an increasing number of digital modes.
You can test your skills and improve them in comparison with yourself and the rest of the community by doing a contest. There’s at least one on every weekend.
You can participate in or host a daily, weekly and monthly net. I run one for new and returning amateurs every Saturday at midnight UTC for an hour and have done for over 14 years.
You can incorporate the hobby into other activities such as camping, hiking, boating, etc.
You can build stuff from components, or write software and experiment.
Finally there’s a ham challenge with a new thing to learn or do every week for a year.
I’ve been writing a weekly podcast about doing stuff since I was licensed.
There are any number of things to do if you apply a little imagination to the problem.
This is a hobby, so having fun is part of the gig.
This doesn’t help with avoiding new purchases, but perhaps getting involved in Meshtastic might interest you? As a side effect, putting up your own meshtastic node would help bolster your communities decentralized communication ability for natural disasters or political unrest.
I’m trying to get back into HAM after 30 years out of it. Starting with meshtastic let’s me play around without spending a lot on hardware, and before I get my license back.
There are great prebuilt nodes for under $50, and as low as $20 if you build your own from parts.
I went all in with AREDN but couldn’t get people interested.
@early_riser @ProdigalFrog I’m working on it for southcentral PA, I’m lucky that I have a club that has a Part 15 microwave network, and I’m hoping to piggyback onto that so I don’t have to add PtP links. More adventures to follow.
an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.
First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…
Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.
This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.
@early_riser @ProdigalFrog #AREDN was an epic failure in our city when the OMs found out that it required more than self deploying with a half-charged $30 2M HT.
Try listning in on the local repeaters, and if they are active, getting a cheap HT or a mobile rig will let you keep in touch with other hams around you. Keep practising CW (I’m a fairly new ham and all my HF contacts has been on CW). You can use the IZ2UUF app for that. There is another app called Morse Chat which you can use to chat with others using CW and it’s fairly active. If going portable interests you, POTA and SOTA will be another activity you can lookup on. Have fun. 73!
