Amateur radio is fun. Cheap to get into, but gets a bit expensive pretty fast.

But, you can talk to people all over the world with nothing but a bit of wire strung up in a tree. No million dollars worth of computers and infrastructure between you, no. Just two people, two radios, two pieces of wire in two trees. It’s crazy that it works at all but it does!

Getting a license costs something like $30-40 bucks I think. Used to be free even just a few years ago, but now they’ve added fees to get it.

You can get into a handheld radio that’ll let you talk to your local group of people for $20-30, that’ll get you say… 50-100 miles with repeaters. More if they are linked.

If you wanna go further, you’ve gotta go to lower frequencies. A low power HF radio can be had as cheap as $80-100 ish. You can technically talk around the world with it, but at only 5 watts, it’ll be tough to do unless conditions are just right. People do it all the time, but it’s a challenge, a skill to learn.

$300-400 ish gets you into a 20 watt HF radio, that’ll do significantly better, and actually that’s the radio I use most the time when I go out hiking with a plan on operating in the woods. For this price you could also get an older tube or hybrid radio that is 100-130 watts, but the learning curve can be a little steep, they are big and heavy, and even if you know what you’re doing, they can be a but less convenient than modern radios. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, one of my first radios was one of this type, I bought it broken and fixed it, I still own it.

$800-1000 gets you all the radio most people ever need. Modern digital HF radio, 100 watts, plenty of bells and whistles, practically operates itself. People can and do talk all around the world on 100 watts all the time. Though at this point I have to admit, even with this amount of power, it can be a challenge to talk to the furthest people unless conditions are just right.

Ok, so more power, right? Well, yes, you can do that. The legal limit in the USA is 1500 watts. But there’s a few things to consider about that.

First, yes, more power will make your signal go further. That’s true. But when you’re trying to reach the furthest people, often times it’s your ability to hear the other person, that’s more important. In the hobby they say you don’t want to be an alligator, all mouth, no ears. It doesn’t matter how well the other guy hears you, if you can’t hear him, then you aren’t communicating.

The answer? A better antenna. That wire in a tree does wonders. Honestly, one of my first and most memorable long distance contacts was from lower Michigan to Japan, with 100 watts and a wire in a tree. Almost 7000 miles. Honestly, it was amazing. But later I would make similar contacts semi-frequently, by using a directional antenna called a yagi.

They cost about $500-1000 for the smaller ones, bigger and better gets into the thousands, not counting the minimum 30 foot tower to put it on. Thankfully mine was gifted to me, it was in bad condition, stored in a crawlspace under a house. But I cleaned and repaired it with 3d printed parts. And I had an old TV tower that I put it on, instead of buying and building one. All free.

The way it works is by taking the radio energy and focusing it all one direction. Kind of like how the lightbulb in a cars headlamp is very bright by itself, but put inside the special housing in the car, it gets focused so you can see further down the road. It’s the same energy, just focused.

My antenna had a gain of 8dB. What that means is that whatever direction I was pointing it, it took the 100 watts from my radio, and essentially focused it into a 600 watt beam of radio waves. (There’s more to it than that, but I’m fudging some of the details here for ease of understanding).

Now the beauty of this is that it works in both ways. So if I’m pointing it at Japan, and the guy over there is only pumping out 100 watts, then from my perspective, it’s almost like he’s using 600 watts. See how that’s better? Now we’re both louder! (Again, details fudged here).

Now if you take an antenna like that, and pump 600 or 1200 watts into it (those are the sizes of the two amplifiers I have), then your effective output in that one direction is more like 3800 or 7500 watts! That kind of power really does make a difference, a lot of the time. So, why not even more!

Well, here’s where we come back to earth a bit. Yes more power is better. But there are diminishing returns. Radio signals are like sound waves, in the sense that the decibel scale is logarithmic. Twice the power does not get you twice the loudness.

This is too hard to explain without you having a frame of reference, but… basically, the improvement in signal you get by going from a 5 watt radio to a hundred watt radio, well, it’s pretty significant, right? It takes something difficult to hear, and makes it much easier.

Well, the increase between those two powers, is over 13 decibels. Now, in order to get that same “Wow, now that’s much better!” Improvement? You’d need another 13 decibels. But to do that, you’d need to go from 100 watts, to, well, an illegal output of 2000 watts. The next 13 decibels would require jumping up to 40,000 watts! Decidedly illegal. And you wouldn’t want to stand next to it haha.

So while amplifiers do help, especially when paired with good antennas. Most people don’t bother using them because they usually cost around and over a thousand dollars, or more, for the 600-1000 watt ones. The 1500 watt ones are even more expensive. And you have to upgrade everything else in your equipment to handle the extra power. And for what? A bit better signal?

Don’t get me wrong, I use them. But, not always 🤷‍♂️ and I have no desire for a legal limit amplifier, not unless I had money to burn.

A good antenna is a much better investment, though doing that right can get very expensive very fast.

Anywho, sorry for the long post, guess I kind of got carried away. I didn’t even cover half the stuff we do. POTA, SOTA, Field Day, email and SMS, GPS tracking, satellites, moon bounce, meteor scatter, the role of the sun and ionosphere. Grey line propagation. Fox hunting (not actual foxes), including TDOA. Digital modes like FT8 and APRS, FreeDV, SSTV. Morse code is alive and thriving. Building and fixing radios, building and designing antennas. All that and so much more.

If you have any interest in technology at all, do yourself a favor and at least look into ham radio. It’s literally a license to play with science stuff. And while a lot of it can be expensive, as I’ve described. A lot of it really isn’t, and most of the fun I have is with stuff I’ve made, not bought.

My hobby right now is making a completely local fitness watch without any screen or distractions. Just logs heart rate, spo2, activity, and sleep using actual Bluetooth standard profiles (HRP, POP, PAMP, etc… Instead of proprietary hacked together custom profiles of most watches). No GPS either because if I want that, I will just bring my phone. Maybe an extension of my job though since I design medical device electronics for work. The only feedback is an LED and good LRA haptics (hopefully). I hope to make it compatible either with whoop replacement straps or standard watch bands.

Bit of a serial hobbyist:

• gardening
• cooking and making new recipes
• weight lifting
• running (need to get back into it)
• implementing a smart home
• growing mushrooms
• baking bread
• making cheese (stopped because Belgium has almost no non-ultrapasteurized milk anymore)
• designing flight sticks for space simulators
• running a home server

Selfhosting via local servers is my fav thing recently. Learning Linux, file management, safe backups, how to host services privately and publically, FOSS and free alternatives to normal everyday software. The list of benefits go on

Mine’s a bit more than a hobby, basically a second career path at this point, but I’m a professional fire and sideshow performer. I love it.

Riichi Mahjong. Got a local club that meets every wednesdays, I finished 2nd in our league standings last season.

Sewing!!

I started sewing because I couldn’t afford / have access to items that I really wanted (clothing, stuffed animals, etc.), so I started making them myself!

Now if I see a picture of a thing that doesn’t exist but is really cool & I would love to own it, I can just make it!

It can be challenging at times, but I love taking ideas from 2D to 3D. (:

I recently took up lock picking as a hobby. It’s fairly cheap (you can get a beginner pick set from Covert Instruments for $25) and it’s fun. It helps me disconnect from screens and I slow down a bit. You can pickup a bunch of used padlocks and practice on those, or you can buy practice locks online for pretty cheap.

I build Bluetooth speakers. Super simple. There are literally 3 parts, a Bluetooth amplifier board, speakers, power. That’s it. Then you can spend time just making the box. Don’t have the skills to do that? No problem, just jam it all into something else. You could put it in virtually anything else, old can of Pringles, pizza box, Muppet, you name it.

Well, it’s on my mind because I’m missing it lately. Haven’t had the stamina to do anything in weeks.

And, tbh, the degree to which I’m able to do it is way below what I used to, and what I wish I could.

But martial arts. I mostly miss the weapons based stuff nowadays, what with getting too old to hit the ground and get back up fast lol. But I miss that stuff too. Up until fucking covid, I had been back training as my body and that of my teacher’s allowed. Then, for while after covid, I was teaching a small group of kids. When that had to stop because of school needs (except my own kid), I switched to mostly solo stuff.

But between my body deteriorating, having extra stuff to do that’s higher priority, I just can’t do it like I want. Most weeks, if I get in a total of an hour fucking around with something, it’s a good week this last year.

Back before Christmas, I had some time where I could use my stamina for that almost exclusively, and it was fun. Just fucking around, doing knife and cane practice a few times a day, maybe twenty minutes at a go. Then I fucked my back up doing something unrelated lol. Mind you, it’s always fucked up, but I pulled a muscle on top of that.

And that’s the sucky part of passing fifty. Even ten years ago, I would be better at this point, and I was disabled then too.

Could be worse though!

Is hi-fi audio and CD collecting a fun hobby? I love it even though everyone I’ve talked to about it couldn’t care less it seems xD

Just started learning how to play the ocarina today! It will take some time until I’ll be any good, but I’m hoping to have fun while learning.

You know the joke, My real hobby is shopping for my newest hobby …

I picked up the guitar again after 24 years. $10 thrift store nylon string classical, set a goal to learn a full song, which is something I never did, and then I’d buy an electric which is something I wanted but never got. I went with Nirvana - About a girl, and honestly think it was a bit too easy so I’m going to bump up the difficulty to also singing at the same time, something that really stumped me all those years ago.

I also make noise art so already have a large selection of guitar pedals and amps ready to be very loud.

Well, I can draw… (progress pictures are HERE!)

You can buy a good handpan on Temu for like 100$. Incredibly easy to learn and very satisfying to play!

Look for Kurd tuning and around 45cm size and avoid tongue ones (one with holes) and you’ll have a blast, especially if you have an edible or some acid.

I’m am artisan maple syrup maker. I build all of the machinery and make maple syrup.