The amateur radio hobby is generally dominated by a particular demographic. If you look around at a typical large hamfest, spend any time listening in on a net, or ask anyone for their stories of family members, you'll easily spot it. As a young queer student, my friends and family members are often surprised to hear that I'm involved in the community. So why do I gravitate to it?
Link to this section Projects
As my software knowledge has matured, many of my recent projects have been more focused on building things that I would find useful in my day-to-day life. Amateur radio is a great opportunity for projects like those. Radio hardware is often very open to hacking and experimentation, open-source custom firmware and custom programming tools are extremely common.
Personally, I enjoy connecting the hobby to my interest in software through projects like rolodex, a "contacts app" for storing callsigns and repeater information, or my work with the Northeastern Mars Rover Team involving autonomous mission control over AX.25.
Link to this section Adventure and Practicality
When amateur enthusiasts talk about "off-grid communication," it's often in reference to an emergency scenario in which cellular networks fail. While amateur radio does often prove useful in these scenarios, it's infrequent enough that I don't find it particularly exciting.
Another situation where off-grid communication is desirable is in those few areas which are still unreachable by cell signal. I've personally experienced the usefulness of this at the University Rover Challenge, where the site has little to no cell coverage and the range of cheap FRS radios is often inadequate. I've also tuned my handheld radio to weather frequencies to get forecast information in remote areas of Utah and New Mexico.
Even in situations where communicating over cell phones is possible, radio can still pose advantages. It's much easier to communicate via radio while driving a car, while outside with gloves on, or in other situations where reaching for a phone is inconvenient.
Link to this section Train autism
One of my favorite things to use my handheld radio for is scanning: listening to signals on railroad channels, marine channels, and other government or commercial bands. Listening to how radio is used in the world around me illuminates systems and processes like train dispatch, ship-to-ship communication, and more that are otherwise hidden from view. Discovering these frequencies is an interesting and rewarding challenge in and of itself, and seeing these processes firsthand shows so much about the infrastructure that makes our world run.
Link to this section Friends
Amateur radio is a hobby more or less predicated on talking to people, so it's critical to find a group of people you enjoy talking to. Radio communication takes a few forms:
- planned contacts between two or more stations (e.g. me talking to my friends)
- nets, often hosted on a repeater (for VHF/UHF) or specific frequency (for HF) at a specific time
- contesting, usually on HF, in which stations try to contact as many other stations as possible within a specific timespan (usually a day)
- DXing (where DX is slang for "distance"), also usually on HF, which usually involves making contacts with distant radio status and can involve digital protocols such as FT8
HF equipment is more expensive and generally incompatible with apartment life, which means I'm stuck with a handheld for personal use. That said, I've done some contesting with Northeastern University Wireless Club and my friend Philo is an avid FT8 enjoyer -- it's possible!
Regardless, this leaves me with nets as one of my only options. While I've tuned into a few on repeaters around Boston, I generally am not interested in the conversation that goes on there. (I can only take so much listening to boomers talk about their medical problems.)
Despite how it may seem at first glance, there are a lot of young people in the hobby! Younger radio operators tend to form much more insular groups with their friends or at their university or hackerspace. A good place to spot the younger crowd is often on university-run repeaters -- around Boston, good options include W1KBN or W1XM.
If not for my close friends in the hobby, I would likely have nowhere near the level of involvement that I do now. We often use radios as an interesting and unique way to coordinate adventures together. My friend Ari created her own bandplan of simplex frequencies that we often use to communicate.
Radio can be a daunting hobby to get into due to its social nature. Finding your people is critical to having a good experience -- I had a handheld collecting dust on my desk for about a year before I really started using it. The first step in the hobby for many is becoming licensed, which often means working up the courage to show up to an unfamiliar place and take an exam administered by an unfamiliar group of people. Part of the reason I recently became a Volunteer Examiner is to help reduce this barrier to entry among friends, and to give me a better answer when someone I know asks how to get involved.
As far as hobbies go, amateur radio has a lot to offer, and not fitting the stereotypical demographic shouldn't hold you back from carving your own niche in the world of radio communications.