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.
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 #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.
@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.